MEGAN LOW Violin Recital / Review

 

MEGAN LOW Violin Recital 

with Cherie Khor (Piano) 

Esplanade Recital Studio 

Sunday (5 May 2024)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 7 May 2024 with the title "Award-winning violinist shows eclectic artistry".

The Goh Soon Tioe Centenary Award is an annual monetary prize benefiting young string players at the dawn of their professional careers. Named after Singapore’s pioneering musician, pedagogue, conductor and entrepreneur Goh Soon Tioe (1911-1982), notable past recipients have included violinist Alan Choo and guitarist Kevin Loh, who have become musical pioneers in their own right. 

Violinist Megan Low, the 2023 awardee and final year student at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory, looks to join this illustrious roster. Her 90-minute solo recital partnered by pianist Cherie Khor was an impressive showcase of eclectic artistry and understated virtuosity. 

Opening with Johannes Brahms’ Violin Sonata No.1 in G major (Op.78), any hint of visible stage anxiety or nerves was dispelled by a quiet confidence that shone through. The highly-exposed melodic line came across with purity of tone and excellent intonation. 

Although much of the German composer’s chamber music is dominated by dense piano textures, Low was never cowed and the performance became a true partnership of equals. The sonata’s final movement, based on his darkly intense Regenlied (Rain Song), exuded a nervous tension that never flagged until its subdued end.

Photo: Gilbert Chan

Low’s solo segment dropped the usual suspects of J.S.Bach, Paganini and Ysaye, instead opting for Ukrainian composer Myroslav Skoryk’s Caprice (1964). This thorny 5-minute exercise encompassed all of the former composers’ tricks of the trade, including chromatic passages, multiple-stopping and piquant pizzicatos, before rounding off with a vigorous folk-dance. 

Photo: Gilbert Chan

Accomplished with heady aplomb, this led to another rarity in Fritz Kreisler’s Viennese Rhapsodic Fantasietta, possibly its first public performance in Singapore. Opening with a dizzying cadenza of almost indeterminate tonality, the music eventually settled in a comfortable E flat major. 

Here the romance began, its easy gemütlich (pleasant and cosy) air lovingly voiced by Low, later giving way to that echt-Viennese of movements, the irrepressible waltz. Composed in 1932, its harmonic opulence and carefree mood - brilliantly captured - belied the years of darkness and doom to come. 

The sense of foreboding eschewed in the Kreisler would appear in Henryk Wieniawski’s Faust Fantasy, based on popular themes from Charles Gounod’s eponymous opera. Some consider this work discursive and overlong, but the duo kept the narrative alive with playing that was always on the edge. 

An opening piano solo gave way to the violin’s cadenza that established its virtuoso credentials, before waxing lyrical in a series of arias. The demonic aspect reared its head in Mephistophele’s Song of the Golden Calf (Le veau d’or), where the temperature rose to such heights as to prompt a premature outburst of applause from the audience. 

The definitive close came with the familiar Waltz (Ainsi que la brise legere), where Low obliged with its outrageous sequence of harmonics and scales. It was not all immaculate but the audience got the idea, according the performers with the most vociferous approval possible.

Photo: Gilbert Chan

A FAURE FETE / AN EVENING WITH CHELSEA GUO / Review

 

YOUTH & SERENITY: 

A FAURE FETE

The Music Circle

TMC Studio, Queen’s Road

Saturday (15 July 2023)

 

AN EVENING 

WITH CHELSEA GUO

Chelsea Guo (Piano & Voice)

School of The Arts Concert Hall

Sunday (16 July 2023)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 19 July 2023 with the title "Engaging chamber concert and unusual piano-vocal recital at two weekend shows".

  

Two unusually different musical events took place last weekend, a chamber concert and a piano/vocal recital. The first saw about 50 people, including many children, packed within a cosy studio in The Music Circle’s school premises at Queen’s Road. This was an interactional concert meant to introduce young people (and their parents) to the joy of chamber music performance.

 

On show was a rare airing of late Romantic Frenchman Gabriel Fauré’s autumnal Piano Quintet No.2 in C minor (Op.115) performed by some of Singapore’s finest chamber musicians - pianist Cherie Khor, violinists Tang Tee Tong and Clarissa Lim, violist Christoven Tan and cellist Leslie Tan. Presenter Moegi Amano, a pianist herself, gave a short spiel on impressionism and Faure’s life history.

 

Strictly speaking, Fauré was not classed as an impressionist composer like Debussy or Ravel, but his more traditional music still provided instances where imaginations were allowed to run freely. As youngsters was busily colouring pictures of Eiffel Tower or pasting paper strips, the quintet performed as they would in a serious concert. In the flighty second movement, the audience was suggested to visualise children playing in a park, while the stillness of the slow movement reminded them of a peaceful river scene.

 

Applause between movements was not discouraged and all through this rarefied and sometimes austere music, many moments of beauty were illuminated, with listeners kept attentive and enraptured. Musical outreach has seldom been this engaging or unstuffy, and more schools are encouraged to win more followers to classical music by pursuing such persuasive means.   

 

Photo: Aceolution

The second concert featured one artist in dual roles of pianist and singer. While this is a given in pop music and jazz, it is virtually unheard of in classical music. Enter American-Chinese pianist and soprano Chelsea Guo, an undergraduate at New York’s Juilliard School, whose delightful programme centred on the love triangle of Robert Schumann, his wife Clara, and their friend Johannes Brahms.

 

The recital’s first half was all piano, opening with Robert’s Kinderszenen (Scenes From Childhood), musings on juvenile memories rather than didactic pieces for children. Innocence and simplicity were well brought out, the popular Traumerei (Dreaming) and the closing Der Dichter Spricht (The Poet Speaks) being particularly poignant.

 

Photo: Aceolution

Two contrasting Romances, Clara’s Op.21 No.1 and Robert’s Op.28 No.2, confirmed that she was no less of a serious composer than her husband. Brahms’ youthful Variations on an Original Theme (Op.21 No.1) provided the most technically challenging moments for the fingers but Guo prevailed.

 

 

The second half was all vocal, with Guo multi-tasking by being her own collaborative pianist. In Mir Klingt Ein Lied (In Me Sings A Song) is based on the melody of Chopin’s Tristesse Etude (Op.10 No.3) with the difficult bits left out, a mellifluous prelude to three songs by Clara which revealed far more of Guo’s art as interpreter. Her German was idiomatic, her tone pure but resolute, paving the way for Robert’s song cycle Frauenliebe und Leben (Woman’s Love and Life).

 

The words by Adelbert von Chamisso seem to modern sensibilities anachronistic and misogynist, that a woman is forever in the thrall of her man. It thus worked best just to pay attention to the music, and Guo expressed in its eight songs a wealth of emotion and colour, her voice never overshadowed by the piano’s rich details and textures. 

The recital closed with Robert’s Du Meine Seele (You My Soul), better known as Widmung (Dedication) written for Clara as a wedding gift, in the showy transcription by Franz Liszt. That heartrending romp and the Chinese song Molihua as encore brought down the house.