EMPATHY IN A FRACTURED WORLD / ODYSSEY / Piano Recitals by CHERRY GE & JEFFERSON DARMAWAN / Review

 

EMPATHY IN A FRACTURED WORLD

CHERRY GE Piano Recital

Bechstein Music World

Saturday (13 December 2025), 1.30 pm

ODYSSEY

JEFFERSON DARMAWAN Piano Recital

Esplanade Recital Studio

Saturday (13 December 2025), 7.30 pm

This review was published in The Straits Times on 16 December 2025 with the title "Pianists Cherry Ge and Jefferson Darmawan offer nuanced musical stories in two recitals".

This has been a bumper year for piano recitals in Singapore, with legendary pianists (Eliso Virsaladze, Kun-Woo Paik and Robert Levin) and competition winners (Eric Lu, Seong-Jin Cho and Vadym Kholodenko) all making appearances here to critical acclaim. Singaporean and locally-based pianists should however not be ignored for their contributions, including two marathon concerts of Maurice Ravel’s piano music and these two recitals held within the same day.

Photo: Eminey Lee

Singaporean pianist Cherry Ge, presently a Masters student at London’s Royal Academy of Music, gave an hour-long lecture recital presented by Bechstein Music World. Opening with Canadian super-virtuoso pianist Marc-Andre Hamelin’s Toccata on l’Homme Arme, she displayed fleet fingering and lightness of touch in the fantasy on a popular Middle Ages song (The Armed Man), after she had sung it in French.

This was followed by Czech composer Leos Janacek’s Sonata I.X.1905, also entitled On The Street, a sobering and touching requiem to a student stabbed to death during a demonstration in Brno. She displayed a keen sense of musical story-telling, from nervous anticipation in the first movement (Presentiment), to an angst-ridden build-up and fatal climax (Death), before a denouement of quiet resignation.

The longest work, at almost half-an-hour, was Robert Schumann’s multi-movement Humoreske (Op.20). This was no light Dvorakian trifle, but a study of contrasting and rapidly shifting emotions, where outright humour played just a small part. Ge alternated lyricism with whimsicality, yearning and outright virtuosity, before closing with no little pomp. Her encore of Frederic Chopin’s melancholic Mazurka in A minor (Op.17 No.4) summed up what her recital was about – empathy.

Photo: Carissa Chan

Just as diverse but almost double the length was the recital by Indonesia-born Jefferson Darmawan, now permanent resident and scientist in A*Star (Agency for Science, Technology and Research). Paying tribute to his homeland, he opened with Part Three of Polish pianist-composer Leopold Godowsky’s Java Suite.

It comprised three stylised pentatonic dances, followed by the perfumed Gardens of Buitenzorg, immersed in impressionist colour before concluding with the bustling and lively Streets of Old Batavia. Described as phonoramas or tonal journeys, these highly descriptive essays could scarcely be better or more sensitively played.

By contrast, Franz Liszt’s Dante Sonata from his Italian book of Years of Pilgrimage, received the most polite reading thought possible, where hellfire and brimstone of the Inferno need no longer be feared. Its unlikely congeniality was far better suited for Chopin’s Barcarolle, where lilting lyricism and filigreed finery found a happy equal.

Photo: Carissa Chan

The recital’s tour de force was the Singapore premiere of Russian composer Nikolai Medtner’s Second Improvisation (Op.47), comprising 15 variations on the sinuous and elusive Song of the Water Nymph. Its half-hour of thorny chromaticism and fantastical imagery was met with a most trenchant response. With every detail carefully and lovingly attended to, its musical narrative unfolded and progressed with a definitive air of inexorability and finality. The Medtner cult – one that is steadily growing in Singapore - could not have a more sympathetic interpreter.

Darmawan completed his exhaustive showing with two generous encores, Maurice Ravel’s impressionist Jeux d’eau (Fountains) commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Frenchman’s birth, and a rare performance of Claude Debussy’s Ballade. Pianophiles here have been well served in these two exceptional recitals.

Post-concert photographs

Cherry Ge meets See Ning Hui.
Both pianists studied in London.

More piano virtuosos meet:
Clarisse Teo, Jefferson Darmawan & Cherry Ge.

PAUL YE Piano Recital / JEFFERSON DARMAWAN Piano Recital / Review

 

PAUL YE Piano Recital 

Victoria Concert Hall 

Monday (22 April 2024)

JEFFERSON DARMAWAN 

Piano Recital 

Esplanade Recital Studio 

Thursday (25 April 2024)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 27 April 2024 with the title "Two pianists, but one pulls off flawless show".

This season has been raining piano recitals, and the tide will not be stemmed for a long summer ahead. Monday evening saw the Singapore debut of Chinese pianist Paul Ye, presented by Kayserburg Pianos. Performing on a Kayserburg concert grand specially flown in from Guangzhou, he opened with Ludwig van Beethoven’s very popular Sonata No.23 in F minor (Op.57), better known as the Appassionata Sonata. 

Ye displayed the requisite bravura to make this indestructible warhorse tick, not least in its furious finale of perpetual motion. He was equally at home in three Chinese pieces, including the famous Ode to the Yellow River (from the infamous Yellow River Concerto), Liu Zhi’s My Motherland (with spectacular guzheng-like sweeps) and best of all, Wang Jianzhong’s A Hundred Birds Paying Homage to the Phoenix with its clever mimicry of birdsong. 

Photo: Kayserburg Piano School

He however had mixed fortunes with a second half of Frederic Chopin hits. Two Waltzes, in B flat major (Op.18) and E flat major (Op.34 No.1), were slickly delivered with delicious rubato applied. The Barcarolle (Op.60) was mostly over-pedalled, smudging many a lyrical line. The familiar Scherzo No.2 (Op.31) went swimmingly but the less-often heard Scherzo No.3 (Op.39) suffered an uncharacteristic lapse, sending him into a nightmarish repetitious loop that seemed interminable. 

Redemption was at hand in Andante Spianato & Grande Polonaise (Op.22), which had a singing quality and rhythmically exciting romp to close. His three encores homed in on popular culture, with music by Hans Zimmer (Interstellar), Klaus Badelt (Pirates of the Caribbean) and Yiruma’s River Flows In You, bringing him the cheers from a large and noisy audience. 

When box-office figures do not dictate, an artist is given more license to practise creative programming. Such was the case of Jakarta-born Jefferson Darmawan, professionally qualified pianist who is also a scientist / research officer at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR). 

His recital on Thursday saw the Singapore premiere of Russian pianist-composer Nikolai Medtner’s Sonata in E minor (Op.25 No.2), also known as the “Night Wind” after a poem by Fyodor Tyutchev. 

This is the longest and most taxing of Medtner’s 14 sonatas, a single movement playing for some uninterrupted 35 minutes. That Darmawan committed all this to memory was admirable enough, but what beggared belief was the extremely demanding execution that came close to being faultless. He had fully grasped the concept of sonata form, working on its two recurring motifs in a manner that was both convincingly logical and inexorable. 

Its technical challenges, too many to name, were negotiated without fuss, and there was never a resort to longeurs. Time just passed swiftly when everything goes so singingly. The obligatory Chopin came in the form of three Etudes from Op.25, which were more than comfortably surmounted. 

The all-French first half of Darmawan’s programme opened with Gabriel Faure’s Nocturne No.6, another rarity where an elusive lyricism emerged from seemingly chromatic pages. More familiar were the five movements from Maurice Ravel’s Miroirs, impressionist masterpiece where he summoned the imagination to vividly conjure evocations of night moths, mournful birds, ocean swells, Spanish dances and myriad bell sounds. 

His encores were just as varied, a canny nod to his homeland in Leopold Godowsky’s clangourous Gamelan from Java Suite, and the graceful central Minuet movement from Ravel’s Sonatine. 

If pressed to choose between which pianist this listener would return to for another recital, the choice is clear: Darmawan wins with both hands down.