MATHEMUSICAL ENCOUNTERS: OPENING CONCERT / Margaret Leng Tan Piano Recital / Review

MATHEMUSICAL ENCOUNTERS: 

OPENING CONCERT

Margaret Leng Tan, Piano
Yong Siew Toh Conservatory Concert Hall
Monday (19 February 2024)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 21 February 2024 with the title "Margaret Leng Tan bridges visual arts and music in dynamic concert".

The idea that visual images may be translated into musical sounds is not a new one. Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky’s piano suite Pictures At An Exhibition (1874) was a landmark for the piano repertoire. Metamorphoses by the late American composer George Crumb (1929-2022) continued in the same spirit, drawing inspiration from celebrated modern paintings.

Singapore’s high priestess of the avant-garde, Margaret Leng Tan, was a close friend of Crumb. She was the dedicatee of Book I of Metamorphoses, which premiered in 2017. As part of Yong Siew Toh Conservatory’s Mathemusical Encounters conference, Tan gave the first Asian performance of Book II (2018-2020) as a memorial tribute to the composer.
Its ten fantasy-pieces for amplified piano involved techniques beyond playing the 88 black and white keys. Directly strumming, scratching and striking its steel strings, added percussion and vocalisations were all part of the performance. Lest one thought this alienating or esoteric, 54 minutes passed rather swiftly with Tan as a most involving and engaging museum guide.
The music was no more arcane or forbidding as Debussy’s Preludes, and in certain ways, spoke more directly to the listener. It certainly helped that the paintings were projected on a large screen behind the piano. Without fanfare, Tan launched into the first two pieces, based on works by Swiss artist Paul Klee.

Ancient Sound, Abstract On Black centred on hefty chords of fixed intervals, almost corresponding to the painting’s coloured squares and rectangles, accompanied by metallic rasping of the strings. Landscape With Yellow Birds included twittering birdsong with intendent echoes, resonances and repeated notes.


Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World had an apparent serenity but coloured by dissonance and an inner tension. Tan’s arching over the keyboard also mirrored the crouching-crawling posture of the painting’s protagonist. Simon Dinnerstein’s Purple Haze had a pale female nude suspended over some anonymous metropolis. There was a bluesy feel to the right hand’s melody, but the left hand’s ostinato chords implied looming inner-city violence.

Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (Lady In Gold) saw a preponderance of treble notes, the subject’s opulence heightened by chimes and a mallet striking high strings. The polar opposite was Paul Gauguin’s Spirit of the Dead Watching, its dark sense of foreboding suggested by an aboriginal drone, aided by cymbal and a thunder tube’s rumble.

By far the most violent piece was Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, the infamous vision of a Basque town devastated by Nazi bombing during the Spanish Civil War. The pounding martial beats, explosive outbursts and plethoric tinnitus were unmistakable, with Tan’s repeated incantation of “Guernica!” being an indictment against violence. Today, the catchword might easily have been, “Gaza!”

There were two further pieces inspired by Georgia O’Keefe and Marc Chagall, but it was the tenth and final piece, after Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night, that had the most resonance. This was also Crumb’s last composition, one of hallucinatory stillness and ultimate mystery. With Tan’s wordless singing to close, one truly felt a spirit leaving the earth, rising to the vast expanse above.

MUSIC FOR A SUMMER DAY / Nicholas Loh, Shane Thio, Sng Yiang Shan & Eugene Toh / Review

MUSIC FOR A SUMMER EVENING

Nicholas Loh & Shane Thio, Pianos

Sng Yiang Shan & Eugene Toh, Percussion

Lee Foundation Theatre

Thursday (5 January 2016)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 7 January 2017 with the title "Beauty amid chaos".

The piano is a percussion instrument because it makes music when metal wires are struck by hammers. It is in fact the most highly-evolved of all percussion as it can be made to sing or sound like an orchestra. This innovative and very engaging concert of 20^th century music for piano and percussion proved that, and some more.

Its first half presented American avant-garde composer George Crumb's Music For A Summer Evening (1974), also known as Makrokosmos III, a reference to Hungarian composer Bela Bartok's Mikrokosmos for piano. Its five movements showcased the pianos – amplified and with their lids removed – played in every conceivable manner possible alongside a battery of percussion.

Crumb's enduring trademark was getting the pianists to play directly on the piano's strings, either by plucking, scraping, striking or “preparing” with foreign objects, thus not limiting its scope to 88 depressed keys. The effect was at once mystical and ethereal with an array of tinkling, metallic bell sounds, alternating with loud and violent crashes when the score demands for it.

At certain points, pianist Nicholas Loh had to drop a crotale (a small metal cymbal) heavily onto the strings, or slide a stick over the gourd-like guiro while letting its sound reflect against the strings. Percussionists Sng Yiang Shan and Eugene Toh were themselves busy with their “kitchen” department, which included shaking a large metal sheet, rattling a flexatone, sliding bows on cymbals and non-percussive activity like vocalising, playing a recorder and blowing on slide whistles. Everything save the kitchen sink.

All this seems to suggest a work of anarchic disorder and total chaos, but reality was something else. Well-structured and economically choreographed, there were many instances of transcending beauty eloquently expressed, including Messiaen-like birdcalls, and in the final movement Music Of The Starry Night, a Bachian chorale that echoed through to the work's serene and quiet end.

The second half was devoted to Bartok's masterpiece Sonata For Two Pianos & Percussion (1937), considered the “grandfather” of all piano-percussion works. Its three movements seemed comparatively straight forward and even conservative, but more than made up with its sheer density of themes and textures.      

    

It mysterious opening was very well-judged with Toh's timpani slide and low piano octaves from Shane Thio, one of two pianists in its Singapore premiere over 20 years ago. The pace gathered and sonorities piled up in counterpoint for the 1^st movement's virile main theme. Despite the music's percussiveness which led up to the climactic syncopated fugue, there was no shaking off the notion of Bachian influence.

What about the middle movement's “night music”, comprising ostinato figures and incisive interjections? Resembling the scurrying nocturnal world of birds and insects, were these also not heard in earlier music?  Loud applause and cheers greeted the conclusion of the Hungarian folk dance-influenced finale for the performers' fastidious efforts, but credit also goes to the symmetry of excellent programming by bringing Bartok and Crumb together.     

2ND PERFORMER'S VOICE SYMPOSIUM: Lee Pei Ming on George Crumb / The Spiritual Journey of John Sharpley

 

LEE PEI MING ON GEORGE CRUMB

Sunday afternoon was the only day I could attend any of the sessions at the 2nd Performer's Voice Symposium, I did so as some of the talks were given by my musical fraternity friends or about their lives, and also for my own curiosity. Lee Pei Ming, who lectures at the Conservatory, is one of two Singaporeans who perform the music of American composer George Crumb (born 1929). The other one is, of course, Margaret Leng Tan. She had given the Singapore premiere of Crumb's Eine Kleine Mitternachtmusik (A Little Midnight Music) in 2006 at the Singapore International Piano Festival. From my memory, it was a very absorbing performance as she had worked on the work with the composer himself, besides being a virtuosic pianist herself. In this session, she talked about Crumb, the work and some performance aspects.

The first page of A Little Midnight Music.

Although the work did not require a prepared piano, Pei Ming still needed to strum, scratch and strike the insides of the piano for the required sound effects.

The work is a meditation on Thelonious Monk's 'Round Midnight, and included quotes from Debussy, Wagner and Richard Strauss. She demonstrated some of these with the help of Thomas Hecht, who depressed the lower keys for her.

THE SPIRITUAL JOURNEY OF JOHN SHARPLEY

The second talk I attended was given by Texas-born pianist Elyane Lassaude, now based in Australia, who spoke on the life and works of the American-Singaporean composer-pianist cum educator John Sharpley. She and John had known each other since young, and she had keenly followed his illustrious composing career over the years and was touched by the spirituality of his music. John is a renaissance man among musicians, and his music reflects his wide knowledge and experience of philosophy, literature and Asian cultures and religions. Yet he retains a quintessential American aesthete and all-encompassing outlook in his output. A number of pivotal works were cited, excerpts of which were heard. As it was impossible to have covered everything within 45 minutes, perhaps a separate symposium be held to discuss his music in greater detail sometime in the future. 

People who attended included students, teachers, performers, composers and writers.  

To round up the session, Elyane Laussade performed John Sharpley's Singapore Blues, a work reminiscent of Copland and Barber, but with a Malay-flavoured twist towards the end.

Hearty cheers from the composer (extreme left) himself.