MARK CHENG Piano Recital / Review

 

MARK CHENG Piano Recital 

Esplanade Recital Studio 

Saturday (14 September 2024)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 16 September 2024 with the title "Mark Cheng's recital boasts unusual programme but restrained delivery".

Lovers of rarely performed piano music in Singapore would have over recent years noticed that the most varied and exotic of recital programmes are not offered by concert pianists, or people who make a living from professional music making. 

Instead, the most intrepid recitals have come from Clarisse Teo (lawyer by training), Jefferson Darmawan (scientist) and most recently Mark Cheng, who is also an attorney. All three are united by being alumni of the National University of Singapore Piano Ensemble and students of Timothy Ku, locally based pianist known for exploring daring and offbeat repertoire. 

True to form, Cheng’s recital offered no Bach, Beethoven, Chopin or Rachmaninov. Instead he opened with Frenchman Gabriel Fauré’s Ballade in F sharp major (Op.19), a work of lush lyricism but notorious for multitudes of ornamentations which get denser as it progresses. While assiduously maintaining a singing line, his playing was hampered by over-pedalling, causing a smudging of textures and loss of clarity. This need not have been so as his technical command was secure and there were little or no indiscretions to hide. 

One remembers an infamous incident when a famous French pianist (Marie-Francoise Bucquet) performing this work with the Singapore Symphony during the early 1980s coming to grief by grinding to a complete halt. Cheng had no such issues, his phenomenal memory serving him well to the last note. 

Just as tricky were six varied short pieces from Forgotten Melodies (Vergessene Weisen, Op.38) by Nikolai Medtner, known as the “Russian Brahms” for his attention to serious compositional form. These were dances and songs, with recurring themes that unite the pieces. Cheng found a syncopated lilt in Danza Graziosa, delighting in bell-like sonorities in the celebratory Danza Festiva before playfully toying with the canonic form of Danza Rustica. 

After wallowing in the gorgeous melody of Canzona Serenata, there was a donning of fairies’ dancing shoes in the animated Danza Silvestra, a true scherzo in every sense. Given the freedoms afforded, one just wished Cheng could have broken out from a somewhat constricted bandwidth to further express himself. 

After the intermission, the recital was completed by the Four Rhapsodies (Op.11) of Erno Dohnanyi, considered by many as the “Hungarian Brahms”. This very substantial work plays like a four-movement sonata, with dark-hued passion worn on the sleeve in its opening. Finally the smily Cheng would emerge from his protective shell by taking some risks, and he did so while still exhibiting sensitivity and lovingly detailed counterpoint in the brooding second piece. 

The march-like Third Rhapsody in C major was Dohnanyi’s piece de resistance, a favourite encore of esteemed British pianists like Martin Roscoe and Joseph Cooper. Cheng should have just let it rip, however his restraint and politeness stood in its imperious way. 

The last piece used the Dies Irae medieval chant (as in Rachmaninov’s Paganini Rhapsody), and also relived themes from earlier movements. A sort of musical memento mori (a reminder of mortality), Cheng’s fondness of the sustaining pedal finally became wholly appropriate as his fascinating recital drew to a sonorous close.

Pianophiles unite!

MARK CHENG IN RECITAL / THE TROUT / Reviews

MARK CHENG IN RECITAL

Esplanade Recital Studio

Wednesday (3 March 2021)

 

THE TROUT QUINTET

Andrew Litton & SSO Musicians

Victoria Concert Hall

Friday (5 March 2021)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 10 March 2021 with the title "Pianists venture off the beaten path".

More pianists are venturing off the beaten path to perform works outside the core repertoire. Bored of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, why not build a programme around sonatas by Czech composers Jan Dussek and Leos Janacek, or the Russian Nikolai Myaskovsky? That was the mandate of Mark Cheng, lawyer, piano teacher and Singapore Dance Theatre’s Company Pianist, whose recital dwelled on the theme of mortality.

 

Within 90 minutes of simmering melancholy, brooding catharsis and violent death throes, Cheng emoted with a wealth of shades and emotions, even if these ranged from dark grey to jet black. The Sonata No.24 in F sharp minor or Elegie Harmonique by Dussek, a contemporary of Mozart, sounded so modern and decadent that it could have come from late Romantics.

 

Dies Irae, medieval chant of the Day of Judgement, possessed two works; reclusive Frenchman Charles-Valentin Alkan’s Morte and Myaskovsky’s Second Sonata. While done to death in Liszt’s Totentanz and Rachmaninov’s Paganini Rhapsody, this ubiquitous theme still insinuated itself into fraught situations which Cheng handled with utter self-confidence and understated virtuosity.

 

Some familiarity came in Enrique Granados’ Love And Death from Goyescas, inspired by Francisco Goya’s paintings, and Janacek’s Sonata I.X.1905, a powerful work that memorialised a worker’s murder at a demonstration. Cheng’s recital became acutely relevant given two million lives lost to Covid and more needless deaths in Myanmar’s civil unrest. His majesterial encore, the Funeral March from Chopin’s Second Sonata, said it all.          

 

Singapore Symphony Orchestra’s Principal Guest Conductor Andrew Litton took centrestage as pianist alongside the orchestra’s principal string players in an hour-long programme of Viennese chamber music. Gustav Mahler’s very early Piano Quartet, a single-movement teenaged effort, received a rare hearing.

 

It relived idioms of older composers Schumann and Brahms, with the morose subject from Litton’s solo setting the tone. Beneath its veneer of serenity laid a hotbed of neuroses gradually came to bear. After the piano’s outburst of octaves, tension and rage inexorably surfaced before Chan Yoong Han’s violin settled the nerves for a disquieting end. Little wonder this was used in the psycho-thriller Shutter Island starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

 

Dark clouds gave way for the sunshine of Schubert’s Piano Quintet in A major, popularly known as the Trout Quintet. The quartet of Litton, Chan, violist Guan Qi and cellist Ng Pei-Sian were joined by bassist Yang Zhengyi for this perennial favourite. Its five movements radiated a congenial warmth, led by Litton’s ever-busy part. While supporting the strings’ lyrical lines, it also had a fair share of outward virtuosity.

 

Particularly enjoyable was the fourth movement’s Theme and Variations, based on Schubert’s song Die Forelle (The Trout), hence the work’s nickname. Despite being familiar, the music never outlived its charm, boosted by five players who relished the sense of occasion, bringing the concert to a gemutlich (the Viennese adjective for being carefree) and delightful close.