A PIANO DIALOGUE OF NEW GENERATION / RUAN YANGYANG Piano Recital / Review

 

A PIANO DIALOGUE 

OF NEW GENERATION

RUAN YANGYANG Piano Recital

Victoria Concert Hall

20 Jun 2025

This review was published in The Straits Times on 23 June 2025 with the title "Bridging classical music, pop culture with easy listening pieces".

Young Chinese pianist Ruan Yangyang, recent graduate from the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and winner of multiple piano competitions, purports to be a “Pianist of a New Generation”. What does that even mean? His piano recital came some way to answer that poser, with an attempt to bridge the gap between serious classical music and popular culture by appealing to younger listeners.

Addressing the audience in both English and Mandarin, his recital comprised separate chapters with titles like “Love, Longing and Dreams”, “Innocence and Remembrance” et cetera. These juxtaposed classics with arrangements of music written for Japanese Anime movies. The recital opened with Frederic Chopin’s Nocturne in B flat minor (Op.9 No.1), displaying a true feel for cantabile, the art of singing.

This went directly to Your Lie In April (2016), partnered by a trio formed by violinist Christina Zhou, cellist Xu Xuena and percussionist Cheong Kah Yiong which performed in all the Anime pieces. This was very pleasant mood music, lovingly played, which incorporated Mozart’s Turkish Rondo midway through.

A participant in the 2021 Chopin International Piano Competition in Warsaw, his credentials were again on display for the Pole’s Nocturne in C minor (Op.48 No.1), which was passionate and full-blooded. Butter-Fly from Digimon Adventure (1999), that followed, continued on that thread by including the big chords from Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C sharp minor (Op.3 No.2).

Ruan’s biggest test came in Chopin’s demanding Ballade No.4 in F minor (Op.52), with pathos aplenty leading up to a thrilling climax, before a memory lapse almost derailed the proceedings. After a spot of premature applause, its coda was nailed on for a perfect close. Joe Hisaishi’s Merry-Go-Round of Life from Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) was a merry little waltz, which had Chopin’s Waltz in C sharp minor (Op.64 No.2) tacked on, but transposed to G minor.

Hisaishi’s Spirited Away (2001) was perhaps the most familiar music for youngsters, with Ruan introducing even younger guests - violinist Rebecca Oh and cellist Annie Dan. They played with confidence and acquitted themselves well, before Ruan polished off Johann Sebastian Bach’s Prelude & Fugue in E flat major (BWV.876) with utmost clarity of articulation.

For Call of Silence from Attack On Titan (2017) to include Chopin’s Funeral March (from Sonata No.2) was an astute choice, and even smarter was to follow its stormy pages with Debussy’s Prelude No.7 or Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest (What The West Wind Saw). Arguably the Frenchman’s most violent music, Ruan delivered idiomatically and with aplomb.

Young pianist Tiffany Huang then joined him in DJ Okawari’s pretty Flower Dance, making stark contrasts with Zhang Zhao’s Pi Huang (1995), which closed the classical segment for good on a virtuosic note.

There was more light music with Big Fish & Begonia, Senbonzakura and two encores. Variations on Molihua was enjoyable, and so was a mini-ensemble of seven young string players joining Ruan and his trio for a final feel-good piece, the Chinese song Xuan Cao Hua (Daylilies).

Ruan Yangyang's Piano Recital was 

presented by Future Music.

Photography by Yong Junyi.

MUSIC & MAKAN: HEART / BRAIN

MUSIC & MAKAN: HEART. BRAIN

A Living Room, off River Valley Road

Sunday (15 October 2017) 

Music & Makan is the brainchild of Beverly Hiong, cellist and musical entrepreneur, bringing together the two things which Singaporeans love best: good music and good food. (Good shopping has not been included but I won't count it out at some point the way the event is evolving.)

First held in Christmas 2012, this has become a regular affair at the home of the Hiongs. The formula is simple: get professional musicians to perform and talk about music, engage a Michelin-starred or top-notched chef to prepare tasty dishes, and bring an audience of hungry people who enjoy being entertained. This year, M&M became a ticketed event and one can actually buy tickets via Peatix to attend.

Last Sunday's M&M was attended by over 40 people, including newcomers to the arcane world of classical music. The performers were no strangers to Singapore's classical music scene, and they performed a varied selection of pieces, while gently dismissing the notion that classical music is boring, stuffy or sniffy. Music is a combination of heart and brain, and the pieces were selected to illustrate beauty and symmetry in music, while showcasing form and structure in the process.

Here is the string quartet formed by:
Chikako Sasaki & Christina Zhou, violins
Leslie Tan, cello & Christoven Tan, viola

Beverly provides a friendly intro and
the quartet plays the Notturno
from Borodin's Second String Quartet.

Violist Christoven plays a movement
from György Ligeti's Viola Sonata,
filled with microtones and overtones.
Leslie does an impression of Rodin's Thinker.

To illustrate the fugal form, the
Contrapunctus No.2 from J.S.Bach's
The Art of Fugue was performed.

The concert closed with the first two movements
from Shostakovich's String Quartet No.8.

A peak at the audience, which got to
sing Row, Row Your Boat
to appreciate the canon form.

Chef Kit Wong's awesome spread
of finger foods and canapes.

The event was not sponsored by M&Ms,
but you get the idea.

Musical celebrities like conductor Jason Lai
and Viva Viola man Jeremy Chiew
also made their presence.

We trust everyone who came
had a lovely time.

It is rumoured that the next Music & Makan will be held at an art gallery. To find out where and when, do check-out the dedicated website: www.musicandmakan.com  

...AND THERE WAS NOTHING / TO Ensemble / Review

...AND THERE WAS NOTHING

TO Ensemble

Singapore International Festival of Music

Play Den, The Arts House

Sunday (16 October 2016)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 18 October 2016 with the title "Unique brand of crossover jazz".

Trust locally-trained and mostly self-taught composer and jazz-cum-crossover pianist Tze Toh to come up with yet another post-apocalyptic and end-of-days scenario to spice up his latest concert. Having gained a certain notoriety from his Land With No Sun series of concerts, his most recent offering ...And There Was Nothing had as its back drop another science fiction-inspired story involving cosmology, eschatology and artificial intelligence.

To the casual concert-goer, all this might come across as mumbo jumbo, but it was merely an elaborate front for an unusual piano quintet that was in effect a 10-movement modern jazz symphony. For this concert, the ensemble was deliberately pared down to involve only five soloists (including Toh on the piano) and with no accompanying ripieno group.

This spareness worked to its advantage, as the sound of each instrument became more transparent. Christina Zhou's violin contrasted with the lower tones of Benjamin Wong's viola, both playing the traditional classical string parts. The main leitmotifs and themes for the work was cast in G minor, which accomodated Lazar Sebastine's Carnatic violin which had a more ornamental role.       

Teo Boon Chye's saxophone was the leading star, and it was he who opened in Earth, the first chapter. His was a dark and dusky tone, one which experimented with atonal lines at the outset but ultimately reverted to more familiar tonalities.

The first four chapters were oppressive in mood, as if portending a bleak fate for the planet and mankind, and it was in Chapter Five: Beginning / Pan Gu when the atmosphere lightened finally. Sebastine turned percussionist, swapping his violin for a drum, over which Teo's sax and Wong's viola soared unimpeded in this most exuberant movement.  

Toh was ever conscious that textures of each instrument were to be clearly differentiated. In Chapter Six, which had seven separate titles, a drone from the viola contrasted with caterwauling from the violin, while the next chapter saw both instruments in a tender duet. Elsewhere, the Western violin and Indian violin, both operating on different scales, duelled for primacy.

The Seventh to Ninth Chapters had no titles, except for question marks. Here the future of life on earth was being pondered; are we doomed or will we be saved? Chapter Eight saw all five soloists thick in action, and the ancient concerto grosso of the baroque period was all but being relived.

By now, most would have been totally confused by the narrative of the work, but the Tenth and final Chapter (no question marks and deliberately left blank) was to prove a watershed. Gloomy and troubling G minor had morphed into a reassuring G major at the end, thus suggesting salvation at hand.         

TO Ensemble's audience was a small but receptive one, and given Toh's zeal in proselytising his unique brand of crossover-jazz-world music, this should change sooner than later.

LAND WITH NO SUN II: DANCE OF THE EARTH / TO Ensemble / Review

LAND WITH NO SUN II:

DANCE OF THE EARTH

TO Ensemble

Esplanade Recital Studio

Saturday (27 February 2015)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 29 February 2016 with the title "When Earth becomes an illusion of paradise".

TO Ensemble is the new name of Tze n Looking Glass Orchestra (TLGO), a cross-over fusion group led by jazz pianist Tze Toh. Despite the name change, this latest concert carried on with the environmental concerns raised in previous instalments of his Land With No Sun cycle .

Just to recap: in the the near future, a post-apocalyptic earth now occupies cities in the sky, and its inhabitants wonder what it was like living in the old planet that had been ravaged by war and pollution. A young girl sees a holograph of a whale and makes a hazardous trip down to what is now terra incognito.   

The Prologue titled Oscurita / Darkness was sung in Italian by soprano Yap Shin Min, simply because creator-composer Tze preferred the romanticism of the language. Its operatic quality recalled the film scores of Nino Rota and Ennio Morricone, and a concertante element was also provided by Christina Zhou's violin.

Moving into Chapter One: Lullaby Of The Machines, a world constricted by conformity, rules and regulations dictated the tone of the music. Tze's piano shifted within limited chordal sequences, minimalist in a Satiesque way, while Wong Wei Lung provided a mechanical rhythmic drumbeat. Etude-like piano passages and Wendy Phua's bass guitar figurations further contributed to this toccata of repetition.  

Augmented by looped film footage, this chapter reminded one of installation art, those abstract scenarios that populate modern art museums the world over. A breakthrough was provided by Teo Boon Chye's tenor saxophone, whose marvelous role of improvising on the spot seemed to turn the music on its head.

Chapter Two: March Of Man thus became a watershed, with humans taking the initiative. Thus Lazar T. Sebastine's carnatic violin in The Surface / Desert was a breath of fresh air, his ragas finally getting the music into a more independent groove. This also heralded woodwinds to engage in a droll dance of their own in Mountains / Thilafushi (with visuals displaying heaps of rubbish), led by Yukari Blest's flute and more saxy improvs from Teo.

In The Submerged City, piano and alto sax sultrily dallied in E minor, which to these ears cleverly merged a Chopinesque nocturne with a Bachian prelude. Yap's wordless melismata simulated children's laughter in The Ruins / City Dawn, while violin accompanied by Miyata Masato's acoustic bass accounted for the melancholy of The Secret Forest.

Chapter Three: Dance Of The Earth saw further collaborations between soloists. In Protector / Vishnu, Sebastine was the protagonist, with the raga giving way to Teo's sax. Both did not play from notated scores, instead making up the music as they went. River was the confluence of both violin traditions, Western and Indian, the result being a mellifluous mix.

If there were an apotheosis, Organic Forest represented by an expanse of green forests and vegetation was a glorification of the G major chord. All the soloists, strings and offstage woodwinds came together for one long love-in, a celebration of what Gaia used to be before mankind's desecration. The Wind, a short music-less scene with Nadia Wheaton's quivering voice-over, later revealed that every good moment and feeling that transpired had been a dream, an illusion of paradise.

The Epilogue: Seed / Whale In The Sky gave the audience pause for hope and thought. We have the world in our hands, so how are we now going to treat it? 

Photography by Yuet Wei.

MASTERWORKS / ADDO Chamber Orchestra / Review

MASTERWORKS

ADDO Chamber Orchestra

School of the Arts Concert Hall

Saturday (30 May 2015)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 1 June 2015 with the title "Brilliant debut by new orchestra".

The birth of a new orchestra is a cause for celebration. The newest kid on the block is the ADDO Chamber Orchestra (ACO) led by young conductor Clarence Tan, which gave its debut concert at the School of the Arts. Coincidentally its first utterance, American modernist Charles Ives' The Unanswered Question, was also performed by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra under Choo Hoey at its inaugural concert in January 1979. 

In semi-darkness, hushed strings heralded Erik Tan's solo trumpet which issued its rhetorical question from the dress circle. A woodwind quartet, placed on the illuminated gallery, pondered on its significance, only to be posed with further questions. This music-as-theatre piece of symbolism, performed with confidence and no little sensitivity, seemed to ask of this ensemble: where do we go from here?

Maybe the most obvious answer was Max Bruch's very popular First Violin Concerto with Christina Zhou as guest soloist. Her entry in the Vorspiel (“foreplay” or prelude) was clarity itself, forthright if not totally commanding, and this spelt out the conduct of the performance. She coaxed a sweet but not over-cloying tone and was lyrically disposed, which came through winningly in the slow movement.

Her technique held up well in the faster outer movements, but came close to crisis in the finale when a tuning peg suddenly loosened. The orchestra played on while she re-tuned her violin in a tutti and joined in quite seamlessly to close the work in a blazing triumph. Her coolness in the face of extreme duress is a testament to true musicianship and fortitude.

Other than some tentative woodwind entries at the work's outset, the orchestra played the supporting role very well, allowing Zhou full rein of her virtuoso abilities. Credit goes to conductor Tan's steady, no-nonsense leadership which would withstand the acid test in the concert's main work, Beethoven's Seventh Symphony.

The slow introduction to the opening movement was taken boldly and steadily, leading to the explosive Allegro which immediately established this young orchestra's ambition and credentials. Its responsiveness to the conductor's cues was spot on, and this continued in the second movement's variations which was well-paced and tidily laid out.

Brash enthusiasm, so characteristic of novice groups, was not the cards. This ensemble of recent music graduates and students was capable of subtlety and nuance too. The last two movements, which led to Wagner's description of the work as the “apotheosis of the dance”, were thrillingly dispatched. Fuelled by adrenaline, the players seemed to have boundless reserve as they tackled and overcame its hurdles head on and at blinding full speed.      

After its breathless conclusion, conductor Tan was gifted with a bottle of bubbly instead of the obligatory bouquet. Back to the unanswered question: where does ACO go from here? The easiest answer: its next concert, with Mozart and Prokofiev, on the cards takes place on 16 August. Another musical treat beckons.

LAND WITH NO SUN: PROMEMOR1A / Tze Toh et al / Review

LAND WITH NO SUN: PROMEMOR1A

Tze Toh, Piano et al

Esplanade Recital Studio

Monday (25 May 2015)

This review was published in The Straits Times (online edition) on 26 May 2015

Land With No Sun is a continuing series of concerts by local composer-pianist Tze Toh and his Looking Glass Orchestra, inspired by his environmental concerns about the world we live in and its bleak future. He envisages a post-apocalyptic dystopia where the earth becomes unliveable and floating cities are built in the sky, which eventually block out the sun's rays. Mankind fights against time to chart memories which are sent back in time as warnings to past generations.

Promemoria was the sequel to Tze's first concert and took the form of a solo piano recital aided by pre-recorded tracks (referred to as sound design) and two violinists, Christina Zhou and Gabriel Lee. For those unfamiliar with his work, Tze is a largely self-taught and extraordinary musician whose idiom straddles comfortable between genres of classical, jazz, world and film music. His eclecticism is not applied in a haphazard or cut-and-paste manner, but through well thought-out and seamless musical scenarios.

Photo by Jeff Wong

Yet the 13 movements or sequences which make up Prememoria were largely improvised, based on themes and motifs which have been pre-determined. The opening Flight of the Homo Sapiens owed its schema to Chopin's Étude in C major (Op.10 No.1), with rippling right hand arpeggios accompanied by left hand octaves as pedal bass. He modulated through different keys and into the minor mode before settling in a C major home.

The Pulse was a slow meditation which began simply on the notes A, G sharp, E and C sharp, a portrait of the void, to which Zhou's violin emerged from the right rear of the hall in counterpoint. The two instruments were beautifully harmonised, with the blues being a recurring feature. Voice-overs by Nadia Wheaton provided the narrative in some of the movements in the absence of visuals, and these were unobstrusive and often atmospheric.

Photo by Teh Ting Ting

In Dance Of The Earth / A Distant Memory, the raucous sound world of O Fortuna from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana was referenced. The beat was vigourous, earthy and ominous, with bass ostinatos raining over embellish riffs from the piano's treble. Fragments / The Message was far more soothing, as Lee's violin from the left rear sounded J.S.Bach-like figurations to which the piano joined in an euphony which the old master would have thought provocative, and possibly approved.

The sequence of left hand notes that distinguished the Aria from Bach's Goldberg Variations appeared in Sunset / Memories but was so well-disguised by Tze's clever use of tritones that one marvels at how music is able to refresh itself so spontaneously through the centuries. The Clock of Heaven and Earth provided moments of tintinnabuli, or bell-like sounds, but instead of channeling the spirituality of Arvo Pärt or Olivier Messiaen, one thought of the scores of Ryuichi Sakamoto.     

Photo by Teh Ting Ting

Both violinists joined Tze on centrestage in Hyper Loop, a fast number which relived the soloistic prowess of Vivaldi and the baroque concerti grosso. The final movement, The Whale In The Sky, returned to the piano solo, now a minimalist pattern played in a repetitious cycle. That seemed to indicate that as time passed, we should continue to hope and dream, even against seemingly futile odds. By this time, Tze had played continuously for over an hour. Land With No Sun continues to eke out a future in 27 February next year. Make that a date to remember. 

Tze Toh with Christina Zhou and Gabriel Lee
at the post-performance talk.