PIANOMANIA @ Esplanade Concourse

Abigail Lim performs a Bach Prelude & Fugue.

It was pure coincidence that I stumbled onto Pianomania, a free piano concert held at the Esplanade Concourse on Sunday evening (3 March 2013), Being similarly titled as this blog was also a coincidence, but  the talent on display was something to be proud of. There were three separate concerts, held at a quarter past 5, 6 and 7, and on show were the piano students of well-known local piano pedagogue Benjamin Loh. I stayed on till the end, buoyed on by the fond memories of the 13-hour long SSO Piano Marathon of 1998 - featuring no less than 122 pianists - which I had helped to organise.    

It may be said that the audience was almost as colourful as the performances on stage. On the right, Phang Wei Jun performs Brahms's Rhapsody in G minor Op.79 No.2.

Wu Chin Ying had the requisite technique to pull off Schumann's ABEGG Variations.

There were also younger performers. Carmellia Chang (no relation) played the Toccatina by Dmitri Kabalevsky.

The second group of performers take their bow.

10-year-old Alyssa Kok was a most confident and engaging emcee. She also performed Glinka's Variations on Alyabiev's Nightingale beautifully. 

The youngest performer, Megan Lim (8 years old) played a ragtime piece by Milne called Vendetta. 

Abel Ling gave a masterful account of Tchaikovsky's Dumka.

Jonathan Chua pulled out the stops for Granados's Los Requiebros from Goyescas. How he got the melody out from the left hand so seamlessly was very admirable. 

The evening closed with a no-holds-barred account of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No.12 from Gavin Jared Bala, winner of the Pianomania Award in last year's Performers Festival.

Applause for the marvellous young performers.

SSO Concert: PRESIDENT'S YOUNG PERFORMERS CONCERT / Review

PRESIDENT’S YOUNG PERFORMERS CONCERT

Singapore Symphony Orchestra

Esplanade Concert Hall

Thursday (12 July 2012)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 14 July 2012 with the title "President's concert ends on breathtaking note".

For any young classical musician in Singapore, there can be no greater honour than being invited by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra to perform at the annual President’s Young Performers Concert, the concert season’s traditional opener. Previous performers like violinists Chan Yoong Han and Lee Huei Min, pianists Shane Thio and Lim Yan, conductors Darrell Ang and Tan Kang Ming have gone on to become our musical scene’s leading lights.

This year’s invitees were three young gentlemen who have it in them to go very far. Two 13-year-old pianists Jonathan Chua Yu Jing and Gavin Jared Bala, both students of Raffles Institution and piano pedagogue Benjamin Loh, shared the load of notes in Saint-Saens’s Carnival of the Animals. Through its 14 short movements, their coordination was spot on, displaying well-honed techniques as they blended well with the orchestra.

There was even some room for comic individuality, as they progressively upped the tempo with each repeat of the scales in the movement parodying The Pianists, as impatient pianists are wont to do. In The Swan, their graceful lapping of the waters paved the way for cellist Ng Pei Sian to shine, for which he received the loudest cheers.

The third artist, violinist Yang Shuxiang, a graduate student at Yong Siew Toh Conservatory, gave arguably the finest solo performance in the history of the President’s Concert series. His bright orange shirtsleeves stood out in the sea of black coats and gowns, as the pure and penetrating tone yielded from his 1753 Guadagnini violin carved out a swathe of sheer beauty through Wagnerian textures in Chausson’s Poeme.  

Seldom has there been a performance of such intensity even from established concert veterans, one that grabbed the listener by the lapels from the outset and never let go. With each sway of the body, his narrative of the music’s ridiculously melodramatic story became ever more vivid, and seemed ever more real. Yang is destined to become one of Singapore’s giants of the violin.

The concert directed by SSO’s Young Associate Conductor Darrell Ang opened with Vaughan Williams’s Overture to The Wasps, which buzzed with great urgency from the strings before revealing a heart built upon the ever hummable English folksong. The English thread also closed President Tony Tan’s first concert as SSO patron, with Elgar’s Enigma Variations. 

The mystery theme and first variation were taken at a very deliberate pace, one which allowed the music’s Brahmsian orchestration to gradually unravel. Many details were revealed, often missed in swifter accounts, but all this worked building up arch-like to the glorious climax of the 9^th Variation, better known as Nimrod. The finale was no less arresting, its pomp and circumstance culminating with the entry of the pipe organ. In a word, breathtaking.

4TH SINGAPORE PERFORMERS FESTIVAL 2012

The 4th Singapore Performers' Festival 2012 reached a satisfying conclusion last Sunday evening at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory. This biennial event, organised by the Singapore Music Teachers Association (SMTA), brought together 370 young musicians from 16 different nations to perform classical music in an environment that is friendly and non-competitive in nature. The format is simple: prepare a free choice of repertoire (even a short piece of music will do) and perform it in front of a camera, recording crew and equipment, and a panel of international professional musicians. At the end of the exercise, you get a professionally produced DVD of your performance, a critique from the judges, and the adulation of your family and loved ones. The ones judged to be several cuts better get Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum awards, and some scholarship money to boot. An additional element to this year's festival is the opportunity to rehearse a full-length concerto with the Orchestra of Music Makers.

Sunday evening's event kicked off with performances by finalists for the PF-OMM Concerto Rehearsal Experience Prize, followed by a piano recital and an almost interminable round of prize-giving. Pianomania is proud to be the sponsor of two Pianomania Scholarships which went to pianists who gave the best performances of most interesting and varied repertoire.

The youngest performers of the evening was 8-year-old Pung Rae Yue, who played Haydn's Sonata No.1 in C major  with great confidence and aplomb, followed by a fleet-fingered Malagueña by Albeniz.

The winner of the OMM Concerto Rehearsal Experience Prize was violinist Lieu Kah Yen who offered the first movement of Lalo's Symphonie Espgnole. Now he will get to play the whole concerto under Maestro Chan Tze Law's baton (left).

Other contenders for the concerto experience prize was violinist Nur Shaheen Zainudin (Sarasate Zigeunerweisen) and Mervin Wong (Bowen Phantasie). The former had a outward brilliance, flair and attitude which did not look out of place in Bond, while the latter gave the most mature conception of a string work. Both string players and cellist Yun Xi Lau won a customised hand-crafted bow (worth USD 9000) by Singapore's very own archetier Paul S.J.Goh.

With the competitive element over, these piano duos took the stage looking rather  sheepish and lacklustre, however it all changed when they performed Poulenc's Sonata for 4 Hands (Letizia Tjiupek and Adriana Salim) and movements from Norton's Microjazz (Lim Yu Juan and Tan Sok Ming) with much verve.

Two young Indonesians claim the stage. Sally Yapto was an animated and colourful exponent of Debussy's La Serenade Interrompue while Joshua Kurniadi gave the smoothest possible account of Billy Mayerl's Railroad Rhythm. 

All the winners (there were many, many of them) line up for a group photo.

The first winner of the Pianomania Scholarship was See Ning Hui, who incidentally won the Singapore Steinway Youth Piano Competition the evening before. She will go on and study in London's Royal College of Music later this year. 

The other winner of the Pianomania Scholarship was Gavin Jared Bala, another of the Steinway Competition finalists.

The "Batik Brigade" from Indonesia. Every Performers' Festival brings an important and lively  participation from young talents of our neighbour Indonesia. Being the 4th most populous nation in the world, could Indonesia be a new force for classical music-making?   

More winners with their teachers Angelyn Aw and Winnie Tay.

SINGAPORE STEINWAY YOUTH PIANO COMPETITION / Review

SINGAPORE STEINWAY YOUTH PIANO COMPETITION

Yong Siew Toh Conservatory Concert Hall

Saturday (23 June 2012)

A piano manufacturer that does not promote or celebrate the art, literature and performance of the pianoforte is only fit to sell furniture. Thus Steinway, the world’s undisputed leader in concert hall pianos, has committed itself to discovering and nurturing young talent by holding competitions worldwide. The Singapore national competition sponsored by Bank Julius Baer attracted some 50 contenders, with the best four in three age categories performing in this evening’s final concert. 

The common denominator of all four was a stunning surfeit of instrumental prowess, and musical maturity that far surpassed their tender collective ages. 11-year-old Joachim Lim opened the show with a crisply delivered Haydn sonata movement, only bettered by the naturally flowing way in Glinka’s Variations on The Nightingale, where filigree and whimsy were equal partners. In Piazzolla’s Retrato de Alfredo Gobbi, his urgently-driven tango rhythm was uncannily idiomatic.

The sheer wealth of interpretative possibilities meant that there were two finalists from Category 2, a couple of 13-year-olds who were as different as chalk and cheese. Gavin Jared Bala was the born entertainer, breathing an inner joy in Beethoven’s Sonata in G major (Op.79), then weaving a lustrous silken web around Moszkowski’s Etude in A flat minor (Op.72 No.13). Its extraordinary beauty made astonishing contrasts with Turkish maverick Fazil Say’s Paganini Jazz, an outrageous send-up to all those variations on Paganini’s 24^th Caprice.

If Bala was the life of a party, Zecharus Ong was the deep thinker. His ramrod posture and perfect deportment lent stature and weight to Haydn’s Sonata No.48 in C major, which resounded as if it came from a very young Alfred Brendel. Utter clarity reigned in a Bach Prelude and Fugue, which gave way to the fleet-fingered fantasy of Faure’s Second Impromptu in F minor.   

If See Ning Hui, the eventual winner chosen by an international jury, had an advantage over her rivals, that was by virtue of being three years older and an unshakeable self-belief that translated into polish and poise. Her Mozart movement from Sonata K.311 displayed a firm grasp of symphonic thought, matched by a feather-like touch and delicious rubato for Chopin’s First Impromptu. Under her hands, even Khachaturian’s rather superficial Toccata did not sound like empty motoric rumblings.

The pianists anxiously awaiting the result.

The judges had given the nod to perhaps the most ready and all-rounded pianist to represent Singapore in the Asian Regional Finals in July, the winner of which proceeds to Steinway’s Festival in Hamburg. On the basis of this evening’s showing, See will fly the flag of her nation proudly. 

   

Come 28 July, See Ning Hui will represent Singapore in Steinway Asian Regional Finals.

The pianists with Celine Goh and Alexander Melchers (Steinway Singapore) and David Lim (Bank Julius Baer).