30TH SINGAPORE INTERNATIONAL PIANO FESTIVAL: ASHLEY WASS & MEI YI FOO Piano Recitals / Review

 

ASHLEY WASS Piano Recital 

MEI YI FOO Piano Recital 

30th Singapore 

International Piano Festival 

Victoria Concert Hall 

Saturday & Sunday (8 & 9 June 2024)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 11 June 2024 with the title "Singapore International Piano Festival closes with first-rate recitals".

One of the more absorbing aspects at the Singapore International Piano Festival is that listeners will find common thematic threads linking each of the recitals. The third evening with British pianist Ashley Wass had late Beethoven, variations and fugues, all encountered in previous evenings, conferring cohesion to the series as a whole. 

Beethoven’s Sonata No.30 in E major (Op.109) is perhaps the most Romantic of his final trilogy. Its music lends wider scope of interpretation while leaving behind classical era constraints. Wass made it sound like a work from the mid-19th century although it was actually composed in 1820. 

Contrasts between its opening mellowness and the second movement’s violence could not be more stark, but it was the finale’s chorale theme and variations which truly sung and shone in Wass’ masterly reading. It had nuance, colour and humour, not to mention a kaleidoscopic view of Beethoven’s emotional upheavals. 

Photo: Clive Choo

The choice of two Preludes and Fugues (Op.87) by Dmitri Shostakovich was a curious one but worked very well. No.4 (E minor) and No.24 (D minor) were two of his more monumental numbers, shorn of his usual anarchic levity, but Wass handled the mounting polyphony with great aplomb. 

One will not find a more dead-serious reading of Robert Schumann’s popular Kinderszenen (Scenes From Childhood), treated by Wass as a world-weary gaze into a distant past. No child’s play here, for the familiar Traumerei (Dreaming) rang with melancholy, Child Falling Asleep foresaw looming mortality, while The Poet Speaks became the reading of a last will and testament. 

Wass’ recital closed with a luminous account of Cesar Franck’s Prelude, Chorale and Fugue, almost a summation of earlier themes, dressed up in rich organ-like sonorities. J.S.Bach would have been proud. Two gorgeously harmonised transcriptions by Percy Grainger as encores gave the evening a more cheery end. 

Photo: Clive Choo

The festival’s final recital was helmed by Malaysian pianist Mei Yi Foo in an uncompromisingly modern programme. Its eclectic mix of tonal and atonal 20th and 21st century works may appear forbidding and turn away concertgoers but in the right hands can be made to sound irresistible, which Foo emphatically proved. 

A childhood link with the previous evening’s recital came in Maurice Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite in Jacques Charlot’s transcription. Its innocence and simplicity came through with utter clarity, not least in the gamelan-like sonorities of Laideronette, Empress of the Pagodas and the tenderly gauche waltz in Conversations of Beauty and the Beast. 

Korean composer Unsuk Chin’s Six Etudes found Foo was in super-virtuoso mode, nailing its unforgiving thickets of hypercharged notes with the most natural of ease. These treacherous finger-twisters were mirrored by Italian avant-gardeist Luciano Berio’s Six Encores, which had fewer notes but still fiendishly difficult, especially the flighty Luftklavier and scintillating Feuerklavier. 

How Mei Yi's scores
stacked up for her recital's second half

All these made Bela Bartok’s Out Of Doors, a five-movement suite with folksy rhythms, steely percussiveness and spectral night effects sound positively poetic and inviting. Foo closed her recital with the most physically demanding movement from Olivier Messiaen’s Twenty Looks of the Infant Jesus, The Look of the Spirit of Joy. Its nine minutes may modestly be described as an ultimate joyous orgy of sound. 

After four exhausting evenings of exquisite pianism, the Singapore International Piano Festival remains more vital and relevant than ever. Its inimitable varieties and synergies of artists and programming, educational and inspirational value, make it an invaluable institution that will hopefully endure for a long time to come. 

Encores 

ASHLEY WASS (8 June 2024) 

FAURE-GRAINGER Apres un reve 

TRAD-GRAINGER 

   Irish Tune from County Derry (Danny Boy) 

MEI YI FOO (9 June 2024) 

J.S.BACH Sarabande, Minuet I & II 

   from Partita No.1

CD Reviews (The Straits Times, May 2012)

BAX Winter Legends / Morning Song

ASHLEY WASS, Piano

Bournemouth Symphony / James Judd

Naxos 8.572597 / ****1/2

The British composer Arnold Bax (1883-1953) is best known for his seven symphonies and symphonic poems on Celtic lore and legends. This recording presents three concertante works for piano and orchestra, all premiered by his lover and muse Harriet Cohen. 

At 38 minutes, Winter Legends (1929-30) is a three-movement symphony with a virtuoso piano part employed with orchestral textures in mind. It is a highly evocative score using folk-like themes, both Romantic in spirit yet coloured with broad impressionist sweeps. The ruggedness of Sibelius’s tone poems is recalled albeit with an aromatic Celtic flavour.

Cut from the same fabric is the compact Saga Fragment (1933), an orchestrated movement from an earlier piano quartet. The percussive and hard-hitting 10 minutes was admired by no less than Bartok himself. 

Far more congenial is Morning Song (1947), carrying the subtitle Maytime In Sussex, which wallows unabashedly in the English pastoral tradition. For some years, this was regularly used in on-air commercials by Symphony 92.4 FM. Prize-winning pianist Ashley Wass has become Naxos label’s in-house pianist for English piano music, and the quality of this release confirms his prowess and obvious sympathies. This is ardently recommended listening.    

RED PIANO

YUNDI, Piano

EMI Classics 4394320 (CD and DVD) / ****1/2

The social history of the piano in contemporary China makes a fascinating topic for a doctoral thesis. Li Yundi’s latest album Red Piano, released to coincide with the Chinese republic’s centenary, qualifies to be its Exhibit A. The piano, with its wide range of colours and textures including percussive and orchestral effects, is an ideal vehicle for transcriptions of Chinese music. 

The best known are oldies such as Liu Yang River, Colourful Clouds Chasing The Moon and Five Yunnan Folksongs, in Wang Jianzhong’s highly idiomatic arrangements. Romantic and impressionist writing simulating traditional Chinese instruments are the norm, as is the Bartokian treatment of folk songs and dances. All these come to a heady fruition in Zhang Zhao’s Pi Huang (Beijing Opera), a virtuoso showpiece dedicated to Li Yundi.

Patriotic music, particularly the overtly Socialist kind, still makes popular subjects. Zhang Zhou’s transcriptions of Liu Chi’s My Motherland and Nie Er’s March Of The Volunteers (the Chinese National Anthem), the latter in the style a Chopinesque polonaise, are both over-the-top and floridly jingoistic. 

Then there is the Yellow River Concerto by a Beijing committee of four based on themes from Xian Xinghai’s Yellow River Cantata, composed in 1939 as an anti-Japanese war effort. Despite being derivative (it is the Chinese counterpart to Addinsell’s Warsaw Concerto), the highly effective showpiece sounds spectacular in the hands of Yundi and the National Centre for Performing Arts Orchestra conducted by Chen Zuohuang. 

The accompanying DVD includes a short documentary in Mandarin and two tracks performed on a blood red (really!) Steinway grand. Yundi diehards need not hesitate.