GEOFFREY SABA Piano Recital @ The Tanglin Club

GEOFFREY SABA Piano Recital

Churchill Room @ Tanglin Club

Saturday (1 September 2018)

The Tanglin Club off Scotts Road was an unusual place to hold a piano recital, but it was good to have some culture at a swanky venue where privileged people go to see and be seen. The hour-long recital was given by the London-based Australian pianist Geoffrey Saba, who is no stranger in these parts. Over the decades, he has performed piano recitals at the National University of Singapore Cultural Centre, besides giving the Singapore premieres of Bartok’s First Piano Concerto (with the SSO) and Peter Sculthorpe’s Piano Concerto (with NUSSO).  

A small of audience of mostly children, their parents and retirees were treated to the music of Claude Debussy (1862-1918), whose death centenary is being observed this year. Saba opened the recital with English pianist Leonard Borwick’s transcription of Prélude a l’après-midi dun faune. This was a mostly literal and bare-bones look at one of classical music’s most exotic and sensuous scores. Although Saba tried to add as much colour, shade and nuance to the music, he was hampered by a rather deadpan Steinway baby grand which was not responsive to his variegated touches. There were a few slips here and there but at least the instrument was in tune.

More satisfying was the First Book of Préludes, which was performed with a penchant for mood, variation and fantasy. From the opening Danseuses de Delphes (Dancers of Delphi) to the final Minstrels, there was an effort to impart a spirit of vivid imagery to the 12 vastly contrasted pieces. Debussy first wrote out the preludes, and then added their evocative titles, hence the notion of the music being impressionist. He actually hated the term, which he felt was derogatory, and preferred to called “symbolist”.

There was a remarkable sequence of music from numbers five to eight, from the lively tarantella rhythms of Les collines d’Anacapri (The Hills of Anacapri), bleakness and desolation in Des pas sur la neige (Footsteps in the Snow), pummelling violence of Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest (What the West Wind Saw) to the gentle ministrations of La fille aux cheveux de lin (Girl with the Flaxen Hair). The vast contrasts were brought out as best as possible from the limited piano, one where the full dynamic range could not be fully realised. Nonetheless, the playing was evocative (particularly La Cathedrale Engloutie or The Engulfed Cathedral), lively and animated in the final dance-like numbers La serenade interrompue (Interrupted Serenade), La Danse de Puck (Dance of Puck), and Minstrels.    

The theme of negroid dances continued into Saba’s sole encore, which was Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s Le Bananier (The Banana Tree), a short and delightful number. With the recital ended, the audience then dispersed for high tea, a Saturday afternoon ritual that is de rigeuer for The Tanglin Club.   

CD Reviews (The Straits Times, April 2016)

FOUR HANDS

LEON FLEISHER &

KATHERINE JACOBSON, Piano 4 Hands

Sony Classical 88875064162 / ****1/2

The venerated American pianist Leon Fleisher, once afflicted with focal dystonia of the right hand, has returned to play piano repertoire for both hands. This album sees him joined by his wife and former-student Katherine Jacobson in a lovely programme for piano duet. Johannes Brahms' Liebeslieder Walzer (Love Song Waltzes), heard here without the voices, is a more extended and mellower follow-up to his Waltzes Op.39.

The Fleishers play with great sensitivity and sympathy for the idiom, and this gemütlich (carefree and relaxed like only the Viennese know how) feeling continues into Franz Schubert's masterpiece Fantasy in F minor, which rises to dramatic height from its initial lilting indolence.

The concert closes with Lucien Garban's transcription for piano duet of Maurice Ravel's La Valse. Confined to a single keyboard, its range seems unusually constricted for most part, but the duo generates a voluminous sound and much excitement towards its climactic end. The encore is a 4-hand arrangement of living American composer William Bolcom's most famous short piece, The Graceful Ghost Rag, rendered with rare finesse and nostalgia.

THE LURE OF THE EAST

GEOFFREY SABA, Piano

Carnegie Concerts CC017 / ****1/2

Here is an excellently-programme recital of piano music inspired by Western composers' fascination with the Orient. Its generous 77 minutes of exotica may be subdivided into three parts. First is traditional musical picture-postcard views represented by Debussy's Estampes (Pagodas evoke the sound of gamelans), Godowsky's Gardens Of Buitenzorg (after the famous botanic gardens in Bogor) and Ravel's Jeux D'Eau with its cascades of pentatonics.

The substantial central section delves deeper with Szymanowski's Sheherazade (from Masques), Messiaen's ferociously complex Canteyodjaya (which in Sanskrit translates into “song of joy”), Australian Peter Sculthorpe's Harbour Dreaming and Indonesian Krisna Setiawan's AgMaTa 1, which relives techniques used in gamelan music and the kecak dance.

The final and lightest third part approximates kitsch, closing with Abram Chasins' Three Chinese Pieces (the best known is Rush Hour In Hong Kong) and Percy Grainger's Beautiful Fresh Flower, a transcription of Molihua. Australia-born British pianist Geoffrey Saba has the requisite technique, sense of colour and shade to do his selections justice, and this is accompanied by well researched programme notes and historical illustrations.

GEOFFREY SABA PLAYS RACHMANINOV & SCRIABIN / Review

GEOFFREY SABA PLAYS

RACHMANINOV & SCRIABIN

University Cultural Centre Theatre

Wednesday (3 October 2012)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 5 October 2012 with the title "Naughty but nice closing with Waltzing Matilda".

This piano recital could have been titled “A Tale of Two Classmates” for Russian composers Sergei Rachmaninov and Alexander Scriabin were close contemporaries, shared the same teachers and graduated from Moscow Conservatory in the same cohort with gold medals. However their music took on distinctly divergent paths.

Rachmaninov remained a Romantic for life while Scriabin’s experiments with straining tonality ushered in 20^th century musical modernism. Australia-born British pianist Geoffrey Saba’s recital was a treatise on their contrasting fates and fortunes.

He began with Rachmaninov’s five Morceaux de Fantaisie Op.3, early works with strong whiffs of salon about them. Rearranging the order of play, the opening Elegie oozed Slavic melancholy, contrasted with playful whimsy of the Serenade and the wistful Melodie. Then came the infamous C sharp minor Prelude, Rachmaninov’s most popular solo number bar none, which Saba built to a robust chordal climax, before closing with the riotously tongue-in-cheek Polichinelle.   

Before latecomers could settle into their seats, he crept into the murky, mysterious pages of Scriabin’s late poem Vers La Flamme (Towards The Flame), a fulminating crescendo that spewed and spluttered into a final conflagration. Horowitz described it in terms of nuclear fission and the atomic bomb, while Saba detonated it with an inexorable finality.

The final Five Preludes Op.74 followed like an afterthought, aphoristic and almost atonal utterings all. Scriabin’s earlier Fourth Sonata in two short movements closed the first half. Saba kept it light fingered for most part, but its ecstatic flight lacked that critical lift-off, with the lapses almost certainly exacerbated by jet-lag.

The entire second half was devoted to Rachmaninov’s longest solo work, his monumental First Sonata in D minor. Its 45 minutes played out like a symphony in three movements, inspired by the Faust legend. If the first movement seemed rambling by half, it was for good reason as Saba built up the protagonist’s struggle in his pact with the Devil like an enormous arch, gripping and unrelenting in its vice-like hold.

The slow movement was all tenderness before the Mephistophelean finale which was launched into with all guns blazing. Rachmaninov’s motto Dies Irae theme appeared as expected, now as a demonic march, hastening its wild ride into Hades. Despite the odd slips and missed notes, this hell-for-leather performance must be hailed for its Herculean effort and sense of inevitability. As of tonight, there will have been only three performances of this rare masterpiece in Singapore.

As an encore, Scriabinesque chords greeted and closed Stephen Hough’s transcription of The Waltzing Matilda, a sly tribute to Saba’s homeland, which brought on knowing smiles of recognition in the audience. Naughty but nice.

This concert was presented as part of the ExxonMobil Campus Concerts series. Photographs courtesy of NUS Centre for the Arts. 

Geoffrey Saba Piano Recital: Beethoven's Last Three Sonatas

GEOFFREY SABA

Piano Recital

University Cultural Centre

29 August 2008

This review first appeared in The Straits Times on 1 September 2008

"When it rains, its pours" so they say. Not a reference to Singapore weather but how musical events seem to cluster together. Right smack in Singapore's first Beethoven piano sonata cycle at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts was yet a further Beethoven recital presented by another education institution (the National University of Singapore’s Centre for the Arts), featuring the last three Sonatas of the great German. The interloper was the Australian-born pianist London-based Geoffrey Saba.

Performed without interval, there was a natural flow to the trilogy that was both logical and spontaneous. Beginning with the Sonata No.30 in E major (Op. 109), poetry issued forth from Saba's hands. His was not an over-analysed, over-calculated reading, often encountered in competitions or student recitals, but one that suggested a lifelong experience and struggle with the inner messages of Beethoven. Knowing when to surge forward and then hold back was part of the game, and the contrasts in the three movements were well brought out. Nostalgia was emoted in the theme and variations finale, notably with the reappearance of the E major theme, which provided some magical moments.

Between each sonata, a selection of Beethoven's letters dating 1821-23 were read, and acted out by Mark Sim, an NUS chemical engineering student. Although not a theatre major, he successfully brought out the composer's angst, which centred not so much on musical matters but the mundane - publisher's whims, proofreading woes and money worries.

While the Sonata No.31 in A flat major (Op. 110) juxtaposed lyricism with legendary temperament, the static calm of the third movement proved the most gripping. The concluding fugue and its inversion displayed clarity but was dogged by lapses towards the end. Nobody's perfect, not even Schnabel. Especially Schnabel. The ultimate Sonata No.32 in C minor (Op.111), with its abrupt and tonally ambiguous opening, received arguably the best performance. Saba was fully in tune with Beethoven's fist-shaking and sabre-rattling rhetoric, and the valedictory final movement - another set of variations - exhibited his full gamut of dynamics. That this epic cycle of 32 sonatas ends quietly, on a harmonious C major chord, speaks volumes. All is well in the world.

Footnote: Geoffrey Saba gave the Singapore premiere of Bartok's Piano Concerto No.1 with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra conducted by Choo Hoey in the late 1980s, and his last recital here in 1989 featured Liszt Sonata in B minor.