YONG SIEW TOH CONSERVATORY CONCERTO COMPETITION: SINGAPORE'S BEST-KEPT SECRET

 

YONG SIEW TOH CONSERVATORY’S 

CONCERTO COMPETITION: 

SINGAPORE’S BEST-KEPT SECRET 

Saturday (15 March 2025), 6 pm

Everybody knows where the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory is, and how its students and faculty regularly serve up top quality performances, yet one of its best-kept secrets is its annual concerto competition. In an institution that consistently produces the soloists who shine in concerts, this annual event is de rigeuer in finding the top soloists of tomorrow. I had the rare opportunity of attending one of this year’s concerto competition evenings and had a real treat. 

Over two evenings, ten young soloists (representing the best in high strings, low strings, piano, woodwinds and brass, and voice) displayed their prowess in ten repertoire works. And it was free to attend. I had missed the first evening (which included Liszt and Brahms piano concertos, a Prokofiev violin concerto, a Scandinavian brass concerto and Samuel Barber's Knoxville, Summer of 1915) so I was determined not to miss the second. And I was not disappointed. 

The audience was small but enthusiastic and attentive, willing to share in whatever that gets served up. How often does one get to hear a rarity as Wolfgang Erich Korngold’s single movement Cello Concerto? It will never get as popular as his Violin Concerto but soloist Chen Pei-Yi (with Liu Jia on piano) does a very good job, lapping up its lyrical lines with relish while negotiating its knotty counterpoint (who doesn’t fancy yet another fugato?) very capably. Hers was a very confident reading and now let’s hear it with orchestra for real the next time around. 

Another rarity for concertgoers is Carl Nielsen’s Clarinet Concert, a more austere work with a really quirky opening theme, almost an earworm. Chua Jay Roon’s performance was arguably even more impressive as she coped very well with its manifold twists and turns, never missing a beat, and making the cadenzas sound like child’s play. Another good reason was to witness pianist Clarisse Teo virtuosically substitute for the orchestral part, and the twosome handled the thorny bits (there were many in its four movements played as one continuous run) with great aplomb. Looking forward to witness the orchestral version sometime soon. 

Did I mention that every soloist performed their parts wholly from memory? That’s the lot of young professional musicians these days – they must know alltheir music by heart, and with no fumbling around with scores. The rest of the concert was on more familiar ground, beginning with Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations, which received a sumptuous if not revelatory reading from cellist Liu You-Yu with Liu Jia on piano. She has a good feel for its Romantic impulses, and ardour was well captured in many lyrical lines, and when it came to the more virtuosic variations, her technique held up and she delivered with aplomb. A very satisfying reading all around. 

The only vocalist this evening was soprano Zhou Wenyue (with pianist Choi Hye-Sion) in Mozart’s popular motet Exsultate Jubilate. The famous part is the Alleluia at its end but the aria and recitative that came before it was well worth hearing too. Her clear articulation of the words was admirable, even if her runs were not always immaculate. There were no extraneous gestures or hand movements, just her voice and no other distractions, and when it came to the final Alleluia, she was confident and made the best case possible. 

After a short intermission, Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto was the longest work on show. Over-familiarity has tainted this masterpiece, but Syu Cheng-Yi (with pianist Ge Xiaozhe) tried his best to keep it fresh. His technique had held up for most part, with the particularly treacherous first movement cadenza well handled. The most memorable part was in the Canzonetta in G minor, the slow movement’s melancholic mood very well judged, before leading into the Allegro vivacissimo finale where all stops were pulled, providing a riproaring close to the concert. With a few tweaks here and there, and he will be ready to take part in this year’s National Violin Competition. 

It was an enjoyable show all around judged by a panel of three international jurists, and if compelled to pick a performance I would like to hear again with an orchestra, that would be the Nielsen Clarinet Concerto with Chua Jay Roon doing the honours. Came later this year or next, my wish might just come true.

Encore, please!

SHLOMO MINTZ Chamber Recital / Review

SHLOMO MINTZ Chamber Recital
Yong Siew Toh Conservatory Concert Hall
Wednesday (13 November 2019)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 15 November 2019 with the title "Unusual musical choices lead to patchy performance".

Russia-born Israeli violinist Shlomo Mintz is the Ong Teng Cheong Professor in Music for Yong Siew Toh Conservatory in the 2019/20 academic year. Also Distinguished Artist-in-Residence in last year’s Singapore International Violin Competition when he performed all six Eugene Ysaye unaccompanied Sonatas, his showcase this year was a chamber recital with faculty members of the Conservatory.

Unusually, the recital opened with Mintz on the viola, in two works which were not conceived for the instrument. The first was Schubert’s popular Arpeggione Sonata in A minor, originally written for the arpeggione, an obsolete six-stringed bowed instrument with frets. Nowadays, it is always heard played on the cello.  

Neither as deep nor mellow as the cello, the viola would struggle in comparison. Nevertheless Mintz maintained a firm and throaty singing tone throughout its Biedermeier gentility. However the tempos adopted by him and accompanying pianist Ge Xiaozhe in the opening movement were so broad that there seemed little differentiation in dynamics continuing into the actual slow movement.

Leisurely to some, and draggy to others, life seemed to be sucked out of the music. Moving from the early Romantic to the late Romantic, Brahms’ Viola Sonata in E flat major (Op.120 No.2, originally for the clarinet), there gained some semblance of vitality, not least in the central Allegro Appassionato movement. With fire in the belly, much credit went to Ge’s rock-steady partnership which did not stint on keyboard vigour.

Lighter music occupied the recital’s second half, now with Mintz playing the violin. Darius Milhaud’s surrealist ballet Le boeuf sur le toit, crafted as a cinema-fantasy for violin and piano, was a weird choice. The music was inspired by Brazilian dance rhythms, ragtime, cabaret and popular music hall idioms. Also throw in the Frenchman’s experiments with polytonality, meaning the instruments often played in different keys.

This sounded like some disaster, with excruciating off-pitch and approximate playing which became increasingly embarrassing by the minute. Perhaps all that was deliberate, given that the work’s absurdist title, named after an actual 1920s Parisian nightclub, means “ox on the roof”.   

Thankfully there was Astor Piazzolla’s tango suite The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires to save the day. Here Mintz was partnered with members from the Conservatory, namely Qian Zhou and He Shucong (violins), Zhang Manchin (viola), Ng Pei-Sian (cello) and Guennadi Mouzyka (double bass). They performed a string sextet arrangement by Fabian Bertero, which is shorter and less florid than the more often heard Leonid Desyatnikov version.

Here was a collective letting down of hair, with the infectiously rhythmic music being the tonic for the evening’s mixed fare. Mintz also seemed more in his element, wallowing in the high spirits and bittersweet asides. Opening with celebratory Summer and closing with vibrant Spring, the performance was loudly and rapturously received, with fugal Winter being encored to even more cheers.  

NOCTURNES & DANCES / ALEXANDER TROSTIANSKY Violin Recital / Review

NOCTURNES & DANCES

ALEXANDER TROSTIANSKY (Violin)

with GE XIAOZHE (Piano)

Yong Siew Toh Conservatory Concert Hall

Tuesday (2 February 2016)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 4 February 2016 with the title "Violinist shines in series of short pieces".

Every concert-goer knows that some of the best moments of a recital take place at the very end – when encores are performed. So there was much to savour in the recital by Russian violinist Alexander Trostiansky which comprised wholly of encore-like short pieces. His alternating between quiet and slow pieces (the nocturnes) and fast and exciting showpieces (the dances), typically by the same composer, ensured there was much variety on show.

The music of Russian Nikolai Medtner hardly gets performed here, so his tandem of Nocturne (Op.16 No.1) and Dance (from Violin Sonata No.1) was most welcome. The former was no imitation of Chopin, but included fantasy elements which also inhabit his miniatures, the Skazki (Fairy Tales), while the latter was a sentimental sojourn with a scintillating central episode.

Trostiansky possesses an impressive technical facility, with the flexibility to shape the mood and feel of each piece. His string tone is robust and incisive, but never hard, which made listening very much a pleasure.

Three Polish pieces followed, beginning with Chopin's Nocturne (Op.27 No.2) in August Wilhelmj's arrangement. Keeping its long-breathed cantabile melody in perfect intonation was a tall order, thus this was the least satisfying performance of all. Much better was the reading of Wieniawski's Polonaise in D (Op.4) with its blazing fireworks and striding martial rhythm.

The longest work was Szymanowski's Notturno & Tarantella, a built-in microcosm of the concert itself, a sultry and haunting opening leading into a furious and violent dance to the death. Its harrowing pages were negotiated with aplomb, with pianist Ge Xiaozhe's rock-steady accompaniment crucial to its success.  

The next three pairs were nationalist in character, the idioms distinguished by ethnomusicology and geography. The Finn Sibelius' lyrically beautiful Nocturne (Op.51 No.3) and folksy Danse Caracteristique (Op.79 No.3) had the feel of the salon, with none of the granite-like resolve of his symphonies.

Copland's Americana was unmistakable, with Trostiansky applying generous portamenti to the blues of the Nocturne, and irrepressible country fiddling for the Hoe Down from the ballet Rodeo. Equally distinctive were the Khachaturian's offerings, a sinuous Armenian melody in the Nocturne (from Masquerade Suite) and a most unbuttoned Sabre Dance (from the ballet Gayaneh), which received the loudest applause. 

Tchaikovsky closed the evening, with his melancholic Nocturne (Op.19 No.4, originally a piano piece) contrasted with the joie de vivre of the Waltz-Scherzo. Has the depression-ridden Russian composed a more carefree and happy piece? The performance radiated that glow of warmth and sunshine. Persuaded by the ovation, the duo offered an encore to top all the other encores, Wieniawski's Oberek (Op.19 No.1), another vigorous Polish dance for good measure.

SSO CONCERT: NEW GENERATIONS / Review

NEW GENERATIONS

Singapore Symphony Orchestra

Conservatory Concert Hall

Thursday (13 February 2014)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 15 February 2014 with the title "Scoring on musical potential".

The Singapore Symphony Orchestra’s 35^th anniversary season booklet weighs almost a ton, but contains the name of only one Singaporean composer in its subscription concerts. Six minutes of music by Kelly Tang was all the national orchestra could afford to perform, but this imbalance was partly redressed with this free concert in collaboration with the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory.

Eight young composers were invited to submit their scores for an orchestral workshop, and three new scores were given premieres, conducted by SSO Associate Conductor Jason Lai in front of a large and enthusiastic audience. The take home was this: the new music heard was not only rather approachable but also diverse in form and character.

It would seem that serialism and atonality were yesterday’s news. Two Moods by Terrence Wong Fei Yang celebrated established pathways in 20^th century music. Melancholic was based on a folk-like melody, repeated and developed in a manner which might have pleased the Hungarian master Bela Bartok. By contrast, Destructive was an evocation of war, its hard-hitting, rapid-fire, machine gun-like fusillades provided an unlikely accompaniment for melodies from the tuba and low brass.

Gregory Gu Wei’s Limbo was the most abstract work of the three. Its opening bassoon solo reminded one of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, but that moved on to a sense of unease and desolation. A restless and rhythmic motif passed around different sections of the orchestra provided an embryo of a fugue, which did not further develop but instead fitfully closed the work on a noisy high.

Both Singaporeans were students of Zechariah Goh Toh Chai, one-time Young Artist Award recipient and very fine composer in his early forties who has yet to be commissioned by the SSO.

Filipino Joshua Pangilinan, student of Conservatory don Ho Chee Kong, provided yet another of his aurally lush canvasses in Creed. This slow movement gradually unfolded like the nascent radiance of a rising sun, with French horn and woodwind solos emerging through a sea of strings textures before gently closing like an unanswered question. This young man truly understands the meaning of spirituality.

Closing the concert was 2012 winner of the Conservatory’s concerto competition, Chinese pianist Ge Xiaozhe, in the rare honour of being partnered by the SSO in Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto. He has the full measure of the work’s finger-twisting and knuckle-crunching difficulties, responding with a fluent and largely accurate account. With time he could further characterise the music’s alternating percussiveness and lyricism, bringing out its grotesquery and fantastical elements with greater trenchancy. There were a few bars of uncertainty in the finale’s run up, but he recovered well to close with much aplomb. 

Chalk up another success to the nation’s small but growing fraternity of composers and music makers. Now the SSO needs to start believing and take on the gauntlet in commissioning new local works.

Concert photographs by the kind permission of the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory and Singapore Symphony Orchestra.

CONSERVATORY CONCERTO COMPETITION GRAND FINALS / Review

CONCERTO COMPETITION GRAND FINALE

Yong Siew Toh Conservatory Concert Hall

Sunday (18 November 2012)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 20 November 2012 with the title "Close contest with concertos".

There is one free musical event that invariably draws hundreds of music-lovers annually to Singapore’s west coast, and that is the finals of the Conservatory’s concerto competition. After all, how often does one get to hear four full-length concertos performed in the span of a single evening?

The format of this year’s competition was slightly different, as the winners of each instrumental category compete against each other for a coveted opportunity to perform with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra in a forthcoming season. Technique, interpretation and showmanship all come into play, and the four finalists had these by the buckets-load.

The concert opened with Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto from Ge Xiaozhe, whose digital brilliance united the seemingly paradoxical aspects of the music’s percussiveness and lyricism. Accurate and incisive, he was spot-on with the accents and brought out the fantastical and grotesque elements within the score. Dreamy and contemplative at moments, he upped the ante for the finale’s relentless march to finish on thrilling high.

Allied to this enterprise was superb student accompanist Zheng Qingshu who played the orchestra on the second piano with understated virtuosity and much subtlety. Significantly her contribution was on the same high level as the conservatory’s professional accompanists who supported the other soloists.

In Sibelius’s Violin Concerto, Adam Wu coaxed a full and robust tone, which served the work’s rugged granite-like exterior well, yet at times revealing the reassuring warmth of its soft-centre. A searing intensity was the constant thread through its three movements, and later he went for broke in the finale’s savage dance. So what if some of the intonation flew astray? Risk-taking is what makes this masterpiece come alive.

The concert hall canon is heavily weighted in favour of the piano and strings, which meant that the brass concerto offered would be something unfamiliar. Zhang Yiliang, performing the Trombone Concerto by Ferdinand David (the violinist-composer who premiered Mendelssohn’s E minor Violin Concerto), gave a confident and persuasive performance that brought out its heroic and regal character, sandwiching an elegiac funeral march for contrast. His sound was burnished and secure throughout, winning new friends to this unlikely rarity. 

The evening closed with Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto, which ran the full gamut of emotional ups and downs in Wang Zihao’s highly passionate reading. Through him, the cello pleaded, sang, teased and wept. Where mere notes alone could not do justice to the catharsis, his involvement in this cryptic music was total, culminating in the solo cadenza of suffocating hysteria which seemed to capture the ethos of the Soviet composer’s being.

All the performances captivated this listener in different ways, and my vote would have gone to Wang’s Shostakovich by a whisker. That the jury of three professional musicians opted for Ge’s Prokofiev for the SSO gig seemed almost immaterial. The four young soloists could easily grace the world’s concert stages in years to come. 

Conservatory Director Bernard Lanskey announces the results.
The winners get concerto opportunities
with the SSO and Conservatory Orchestra.
Also on stage are the judges conductor
Joshua Kangming Tan, tubist Hidehiro Fujita
and cellist Yu Jing. (from left)