...AND DELIVER US FROM... / NICHOLAS LOH Piano Recital / Review

...AND DELIVER US FROM...

NICHOLAS LOH Piano Recital

Esplanade Recital Studio

Sunday (5 July 2015)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 7 July 2015 with the title "Speaking pianist toots horn".

After returning from his post-graduate musical studies at the New England Conservatory of Music, Singaporean pianist Nicholas Loh has established himself as a fervent exponent of new music. His first solo recital since 2009 (when he performed works by John Sharpley, Frederic Rzewski and Nikolai Kapustin) was to be as cutting edge, and controversial to boot.

There was an underlying theme of protest in his latest offering, which opened with Latvian composer Peteris Vasks' Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Its Mozartian title belied the music's wide dynamic range, with spectral harmonies and Debussyan chords, then progressing to rapid figurations, repeated notes and sonorous bell sounds. Dispelling the idea of night as a haven of solace, this was more of a nightmarish scenario which ended with Loh plucking the lowest strings of the Yamaha grand piano.

The World Premiere of young Singaporean composer Bertram Wee's a little book of lies marked a new chapter in local piano writing. Although the idiom through its five movements was atonal, the violence portrayed was easily recognisable. The work was an indictment against organised religion, dogmatism and extremism, the sort that resulted in the tragedies of 911, Bali bombings and Charlie Hebdo shootings. 

No specific faith was named, as Loh emerged with sawn-off gloves and uncovered socks to perform. Listeners got the message that intolerance comes via slurs, murmurs and innuendos rather than fire and brimstone sermons. The exception was the central movement, the comedy of ignorance, with the keyboard assaulted by forearm clusters, sweeping glissandi and a stamp from the foot to complete the final insult. Wee, who studies at London's Royal College of Music, is a name to watch.

The final work was the American Rzewski's De Profundis, a 35-minute long melodrama that required a “speaking pianist” to recite, sing, pummel himself and toot on a bicycle horn amongst other things. Its text, of which Loh gave a most lucid and nuanced reading, was taken from letters by Oscar Wilde when he was incarcerated in Reading Gaol for the crime of homosexuality. Here was not a self-pitying or crusading rant, but a sobering statement of utter hopelessness, despair and ultimately sorrow, a word that appears on multiple occasions.

Loh is a natural storyteller, both while playing, acting and singing (which was very much in tune too), who left the small but very engaged audience with little doubt about his abilities and sympathies. Intolerance and hate crimes are surely suffocating the world, yet it seems politically incorrect to voice out against them publicly. This recital was one small but important step taken in the right direction.      

CONUN:DRUM / Eugene Toh & Friends / Review

CONUN:DRUM

Eugene Toh & Friends

Esplanade Recital Studio 

Sunday (8 March 2015)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 10 March 2015 with the title "Frenetic rhythms and beats delight audience".

Percussion is the oldest group of musical instruments known to mankind, and has existed in every civilisation and culture through the ages. As its punned title suggests, this concert of percussion music, part of Esplanade's Spectrum series, posed a conundrum to listeners at its outset: can a programme featuring only untuned percussion hold the interest of an audience over 90 minutes?

A overwhelming yes was provided by professional percussionist Eugene Toh, an alumnus of Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts and London's Royal College of Music, and four of his colleagues. As long as one suspended pre-conceived ideas about the absence of melody or harmony, and delve into a different dimension defined by timbre and rhythm, anything is possible. 

Eight very diverse works were presented in this literally striking concert, beginning with Thierry de Mey's Musique de Table (Table Music). Toh together with Bernard Yong and Tan Lee Ying were seated at a table with wooden boards where plates would normally be. Their spiel involved applying a variety of touches to the boards, including slapping, stroking, clapping and rubbing in a delightfully synchronised choreography of six bare hands and the sounds they produced.

American percussionist-composer Casey Cangelosi was represented by two pieces, both with solos by Toh. Glamour involved the strict beat of a metronome, accompanied by the varied rhythms and timbres by striking surfaces of glass, bamboo and metal. It made for a quite exquisite symphony of repeated rhythmic patterns. More contrived was his Bad Touch, which used taped sounds backing Toh's soliloquy with drumstick while seated in complete darkness. The verbatim quote of Bach's First Prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier while Toh operated two hand-held LED lights in the segment called The Constellations seemed gratituous.

Emcee Chin Ailin gave very clear descriptions
of each work as well as providing artists bios.

No such worries for Yousif Sheronick's Duo 77, which had Toh and Rei Lim on frame drums beating out cyclical rhythms based on South Indian patterns. Both were on different meters and tracks yet were able to coordinate their parts with uncommon precision and grossly understated virtuosity.

They were joined by Tan in two movements from Guo Wenjing' s Xi (Drama), which involved three pairs of Chinese cymbals struck in a multitude of manners. How different these small but clangorous objects sounded when brought together vigourously, or gently cupped such that echoes are brought to bear between two surfaces, or struck with mallets. The processes mirrored those of Beijing opera, far more dramatic and theatrical than initially suggested.

An element of fusion distinguished Carnatic musician Trivandrum D. Rajagopal's Nada Laya, which saw the composer playing the mridangam opposite Toh's frame drum. How a relatively straight forward beat of eight counts (with Lim serving as a time-keeper) could be made to sound this complex was the true wonder and mystery of Carnatic music and percussion technique itself.

The first movement from Nebojsa Zivkovic's Trio per Uno for bass drum, tom toms and Chinese gongs provided yet another tour de force for Toh with Yong and Tan, huddled in a corner of the stage in an almost intimate face-off. The rhythms got increasingly frenetic with the introduction of additional textures and beats.

Quite reluctantly, the concert had to end with Shane Shanahan's Saidi Swing, featuring four different instruments in a syncopated North Egyptian rhythm. Variations of that rhythm soon took over in a riot of exuberant sound, which drew the evening's drumming to a heady close. The five performers were then treated to that most welcome of percussive sounds: the adulated applause of an appreciative audience. 

ODYSSEYS / Tze n Looking Glass Orchestra / Review

ODYSSEYS

Tze n Looking Glass Orchestra

Esplanade Recital Studio

Sunday (2 March 2014)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 4 March 2014 with the title "Odysseys concert soars".

In this concert from Esplanade’s Spectrum series for contemporary music, there was an unexpected air of its Mosaic series for jazz, fusion and indie music about it. That was because Tze n Looking Glass Orchestra, founded by local jazz pianist and largely self-taught composer Tze Toh (below), is more a fusion band than an avant-garde instrumental ensemble.

Its present guise is in effect a 21^st century globalised manifestation of the concerto grosso ensemble from the baroque era, complete with a central nucleus of soloists, back-up musicians of strings, woodwinds and brass, with Tze helming the basso continuo including bass and electric guitar.

The concertino group is decidedly cross-cultural Asian, including Chinese erhu player Dai Da (right), Indian violinist / raga specialist Lazar T.Sebastine and jazz saxophonist Teo Boon Chye. Although improvisation plays a big part for the soloists, the music composed by Tze crosses-over comfortably between genres, with pop song idioms and film music being a considerable influence as well.

The 70-minute concert was easy-listening from start to end, opening with A Kite in the Sky, a slow and meditative number with erhu and saxophone garnering the spotlight. Next, The Odyssey launched into a pulsating allegro representing flight, with fast repetitive patterns that at points was reminiscent of Michael Nyman and Michael Torke, classical establishment minimalists. While Teo’s solos dominated, Sebastine’s violin could have had a more extended run of his own.

The major centrepiece was Gods & Ragas, a triptych of musical avatars representing the triumvirate of Hindu deities. Brahma (Creator) was the most traditional movement, serenely cast in G major featuring Sebastine’s improvisations and wordless vocalises from soprano Izumi Sado, quietly backed by strings and winds playing harmonics and glissandi.

Vishnu (Protector) was the most jazzy, with a persistent ostinato beat provided by Wendy Phua’s electric bass over which erhu and sax soared to a heady crescendo. In the final Shiva (Destroyer), the piano rumbled from an abyss, from which the concert’s only atonal bits gave way to a sort of requiem where Sebastine’s prestidigitation would make Tartini’s Devil’s Trill seem tame by comparison.         

The concert closed on an ecstatic high with In Time Love Comes, where Sado’s mellifluous lines floated with a celestial quality above the instrumental throng. Tze truly knows where to hit the right buttons when it comes to writing romantically inclined music, with this number being ample proof. Tze n Looking Glass Orchestra flies again on 26 July in the same venue. Be sure not to miss the trip.

STEVE REICH'S DRUMMING / Roberto Alvarez and Friends / Review

STEVE REICH’S DRUMMING

Roberto Alvarez & Friends

Esplanade Recital Sudio

Friday (13 September 2013)

An edited version of this review was published in The Straits Times on 16 September 2013 with the title "Drumming up interest".

You haven’t quite lived if you have not witnessed a performance of Steve Reich’s Drumming. Not even the famous recording by Steve Reich and Musicians on Deutsche Grammophon quite captures the experience of being there as his 75-minute treatise on minimalism unfolds before your eyes and ears.

Thanks to Esplanade’s Spectrum Series of new music concerts, this performance by nine percussionists and two singers led by SSO flautist and piccolo player Roberto Alvarez (left) became a reality. Before the drumming began, the soft-spoken and unassuming Spaniard spoke briefly about minimalism and its long stretches of repeated notes, and how phases take place when one beat quickens relative to another to produce a desynchronisation, and how the two separate beats meet up again with the passage of time. He demonstrated this with two electronic metronomes. Without letting the cat out the bag, the music began.

The iconic American minimalist Reich formed his ideas of the work following a curtailed trip (due to malaria) to Ghana in 1970, but ultimately Drumming draws its inspiration not just from Africa but also cultures of Asia and Europe. It began simply with one percussionist, the veteran Lim Meng Keh, beating out a rhythm on a bongo drum. He is joined by another who creates another rhythm, and yet another until the all the bongos are occupied. It is a beehive of buzzing activity, that sounds ever more complex, although still based on simple repetitive rhythms, but multiplied manifold. The work is in four parts, performed continuous and without break, but one knows when the new part comes on because the focus now shifts to the marimbas.

While the unpitched bongos sound sort of primitive, the more mellow and pitched marimbas resound like distant carillons of church bells. At one point, all nine percussionists converge on three marimbas. Then come the voices of Lim Yan Ting and Thomas Manhart, which are wordless chirped tones in yet another set of rhythms. These sound otherworldly, gradually arriving and then receding as their microphones are drawn nearer and then gently held away. Finally Roberto Alvarez joins in the fray by whistling and then blowing high-pitched blasts on the piccolo.

The third part involves the glockenspiels, with their tinkling metallic timbres, like miniature celestial gamelans. There is a Christmassy feel, but not all of a sudden as these come like the change of the seasons, gradually but inexorably. Each of these parts last between 15 to 20 minutes on an average, but this is not a work for clock-watchers. Time passes ever some imperceptibly when one is transfixed on what is going on, and I can only add that the audience of 200 or so was very quiet and attentive throughout the entire duration of the performance. There are points where I close my eyes and allow the music to drift by, and when I open them again, a different configuration of performers and instruments come to bear. It is a gradual metamorphosis of tone, timbre and rhythm through time, the essence of minimalism itself, which makes this work interesting. 

We know we are into the fourth and final part when all three groups of percussion instruments are being played simultaneously, and joined by the voices and piccolo. It begins simply enough but builds up into a grand apotheosis of sorts. The ensemble is now in full swing and the sound is plethoric and plangent. All three timbres of percussion are discernible, but together there is an unspoken unity that is almost orchestral in nature. I like to imagine this to be the world orchestra of the 12^th millennium B.C., a meeting of hunter gatherers and their assortment of (mostly percussion) musical instruments. If they are not warring, they are making music together. The music rises to a sharp crescendo, and it ends abruptly in one accord to a storm of applause.

This is likely to be the Singapore Premiere of Drumming, and would have been a proud entrant in any edition of the Singapore Arts Festival. This could not have been possible ten years ago simply because there weren’t so many professional percussionists in Singapore during those days. For the record, the nine excellent percussionists were Lim Meng Keh, Bai Jiaxing, Cheryl Ong, Daniel Ho, Eugene Toh, Marvin Seah, Ramu Thiruyanam, Sng Yiang Shan and Tan Lee Ying.

We are now living in an embarrassment of riches, which explains the diversity of new works that can be presented in concert and performed at a high level. The audience is still small but can be seen growing at a steady pace. Education and careful nurturing is the key and no organisation does it better than Esplanade. Long may that continue.   

PASSPORT / Trio Concert by DAN GELOK, CHAN YOONG HAN & SHANE THIO / Review

PASSPORT

Dan Gelok, Chan Yoong Han & Shane Thio

Esplanade Recital Studio

Sunday (7 July 2013)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 9 July 2013 with the title "Passport to new music".

The medium of saxophone, violin and piano as a trio is a relatively new one, but it is a combination that works well. As it does not radically depart from the more established clarinet-violin-piano trio format successfully experimented by Brahms and Bartok, the sounds that came out from this concert were more pleasing than one might have initially expected.

Dan Gelok, Chan Yoong Han & Shane Thio (from L)
Although Yoong Han is great with French fries, he's far better on the violin.

The Singaporean-American angle of the programme was also an interesting one. American saxophonist Dan Gelok and Singaporean violinist Chan Yoong Han are related by marriage (they are brothers-in-law), and all three Singaporean and locally-based composers represented had spent time in the States. However the musical idioms explored were almost wholly American.

Russell Peterson’s Trio (2007) that opened the concert was the most conventional work, its three tonal and accessible movements utilised elements of popular music, jazz, blues and even a hint of klezmer. The primal ostinato dance rhythms of the opening movement made fascinating contrasts with the hymn-like slow movement and minimalist perpetual motion of the finale. In short, this was a friendly primer to the all-embracing medium that is American music.

Two Singaporean works that received World Premieres were aggressively atonal. Kawai Shiu’stwenty six eighty seven (2010) for solo saxophone, was a tribute to the American modernist composer Morton Feldman (1926-1987) of the New York School, whose birth and death years are reflected in its title. Its virtuosic soliloquy, full of animated, abrupt and sometimes violent shifts in dynamics, was settled by a few long-held notes which typified the American’s philosophy of msical economy – the fewer notes the better.

Emily Koh’s bridging: isolation (2013) treated saxophone and violin like fraternal twins, each with its own voice that could be heard separately or together. In the latter, they bonded with synergy at times yet brought out moments of conflict, with Shane Thio’s piano being an impartial observer. 

Zechariah Goh Toh Chai’s Suite (2006/2010) for saxophone and piano was a return to the realm of tonality with three contrasted movements that seemed to echo the Peterson work. As a Singaporean who studied in Kansas, Alone And Distant, the second movement palpably reflected a melancholy of being away from home. The outer movements saw the insides of the piano being played while the keys of the saxophone treated like percussion. 

The final work, Evan Chambers’s Come Down Heavy! (1994) is typical Americana in the way how pioneer Charles Ives adapted old sung melodies, bringing them up to date in a coherent and distinctive manner. Gelok’s saxophone lustily sang out the work song John Henry in Steel Driving Man, while Chan used a second violin (tuned differently) to play I Gave My Love A Cherry in the inimitable manner of Celtic fiddling. The raucous finale Drill Ye Tarriers saw another song turned from a swinging reel into a vertiginous tarantella.

Sending off the 70-minute-long concert with hearty applause, the small audience showed that the message of new music had fallen on fertile ground. 

MUSIC FROM THE HEART / Robert Casteels and Friends / Review

MUSIC FROM THE HEART

Robert Casteels and Friends

Esplanade Recital Studio

Sunday (15 July 2012)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 17 July 2012 with the title "Getting to the heart of the matter".

If there were one locally-based composer who is equally comfortable with traditional forms and use of new multi-media, that would be the Belgium-born Robert Casteels. Concerts of his music invariably involve voices, instruments and electronics, with each characterised by a single unifying theme.

Violinists Siew Yi Li and Chen Zhangyi in The Orator.

The evening's music was about relationships and a rather wider definition of love. It began with The Orator, a duet for violins prefaced by chants recorded from a Workers Party rally at the 2011 General Elections. One violinist played scales while the other had shorter and more sustained phrases, and later they switched roles. The work suggests the courting between a politician and his electorate audience, and how one needs and feeds off the other, and vice versa.

A similar arrangement existed for Chiaroscuro, a duet for two guitars where the concept of light, darkness and varying shades in between were explored. The texture of the music was light, often transparent and again both guitarists facing off exchanged their parts.

Gladwin Pantastico and Manuel Cabrera II on two guitars.

The most hauntingly beautiful music was heard in Mirror Of Sound, where flute players from three cultures communed in front of a piano which had its metal strings struck and scraped by pianist Albert Lin. While the Western flute, Indian flute and dizi (played by Roberto Alvarez, Raghavendran Rajasekaran and Chan Yongxue respectively) have different timbres, their sonorities reflected across a piano’s sound board became almost identical. All men are brothers, Casteels opines.

Pianist Albert Lin and three flautists in Mirror of Sound. 

His solo piano work Sui Yuan, played by Lin, was described as a falling drop of water and its ripple effect but in reverse. The music combined influences from John Cage’s art of randomness and Gyorgy Ligeti’s kinetic rhythms. This was followed by City Scape, four minutes of electronic sound, played on an empty stage accompanying projected images of Singapore’s urban landscape as viewed from some prism or kaleidoscope.      

The longest piece in the 75 minute concert was Music From The Heart, a cycle of eight song settings performed in their original language, and in most cases by a native speaker. All were duets with varied accompaniments, and the subject was love of different sorts. A slightly corny element was the recording of human heartbeats that led into each song, with cardiologists from National University Hospital duly acknowledged. 

A Happy End to Songs From The Heart.

Filipino tenor Edwin Cruz sang a song in Tagalog about a mother’s love accompanied by compatriot Manuel Cabrera II on guitar. Soprano Jeong Ae Ree breathed Winter Love in Korean, with her husband cellist Chan Wei Shing by her side. Masahiro Mita then waxed lyrical about the joys of sake to Bai Jiaxing’s counterpoint on percussion. And so all eight singers and eight instrumentalists were finally united in the finale called Happy End, conducted by the composer himself.

The music was not outwardly elated or joyous, but heed the words and reflect on the inner meanings, and one eventually gets to the heart of the matter.