SINGAPORE INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF MUSIC GALA-CONCERT / Review

SINGAPORE INTERNATIONAL

FESTIVAL OF MUSIC GALA-CONCERT

Living Room, The Arts House

Thursday (29 December 2016)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 31 December 2016 with the title "Local-born pianist thrills in comeback".

Music lovers with long memories might remember Singapore-born pianist Koh Poh-Lin who was active here during the 1980s before moving to Vancouver, Canada where she is now based. A student of the late pianist Ong Lip Tat and later the legendary pedagogue Lee Kum Sing, she was a semi-finalist at the 1989 Rolex Asia Piano Competition. Among her contemporaries are Singaporean pianists Shane Thio, Christina Tan, Lena Ching and Victor Khor.

She marked her long-awaited return to the local stage with a performance of Chopin's First Piano Concerto in a chamber version accompanied by a string quartet and double bass. Formed by members of the Singapore International Festival of Music (SIFOM) Orchestra, the string group that partnered Koh was unfortunately ragged and under-rehearsed.

The martial opening tutti was hesitant and out of sorts, with intonation being mostly a hit or miss affair. It seemed like an eternity before Koh's imposing entry of big octaves and chords, which broke the spell of mediocrity. The hall's Shigeru Kawai grand piano was not in best shape, but she made music with a sensitive and limpid touch, and the music's over-arching cantabile came through winningly.

Where the adrenaline level was upped in the 1^st movement's development section, she responded in kind, providing some of the concerto's more thrilling moments. With the strings scrambling to keep up, the collegial qualities that characterised chamber music at its finest was intermittent at best. When the ensemble seemed to gel at times, these were unfortunately not sustained for longer stretches.

The performance's best minutes came in the slow central movement, where its title Romanze was taken at face value. At a more relaxed pace, all six players luxuriated in the music's warm glow and seamless lyricism.

The finale's Rondo might be described as rough and ready, one which would have benefited from more rehearsal time. Other than a short section where a variation of the dance-like theme was missed out or not observed, Koh's pianism was otherwise one of steadfastness, the unifying factor that kept the ensemble together through to the concerto's romping close.

Would a solo recital have been a better choice to make one's comeback in front of a hometown audience? A standing ovation accorded by a full-house might encourage her to do just that in next year's edition of SIFOM, a festival that celebrates local talent.

Amanda Chia plays de Beriot.

SIFOM Artistic Director Darrell Ang
interviews the Hwang sisters, Claris & Crystal.

Crystal Hwang plays Debussy

  

On the same platform this evening were three younger Singaporean musicians. 16-year-old violinist Amanda Chia gave a confident reading of Charles de Beriot's Violin Concerto No.9 accompanied by pianist Iryna Vokhmianina. Sisters Claris and Crystal Hwang put the polish on a Haydn sonata movement and Debussy's First Arabesque respectively. Given time and hard work, they might one day emulate the achievements of Koh Poh-Lin themselves.

Iryna Vokhmianina and the Hwang sisters
are based with Tanglewood Music School.

A Rolex Reunion, after 27 years!
Koh Poh-Lin, with Albert Tiu and Susan Lai
took part in the 1989 Rolex Asia Piano Competition.

PORTRAIT OF A COMPOSER / IKAN GIRL / Singapore International Festival of Music / Review

PORTRAIT OF A COMPOSER / IKAN GIRL

Singapore International Festival of Music

Chamber, The Arts House

Friday (21 October 2016)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 24 October 2016 with the title "Coherent fusion of Malay and Western music".

Malay musicians have long dominated the popular music scene in Singapore, but have recently made in-roads into Western classical music. The best example is young composer Syafiqah 'Adha Sallehin, the first Malay-Muslim graduate from the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, who was the composer-in-residence of the 2^nd Singapore International Festival of Music.

This concert was to have featured five new chamber works including two World Premieres but logistical reasons militated against that. It instead had a truncated first half that opened with two solo piano works performed by Matthew Mak. Elegy was a short and sentimental pop-inspired piece, a student work that could have come from a songbook anywhere in the world.

Syafiqah assured that no one died for it to be conceived. More complex was Surviving Love, which was also tonal but featured some dissonances, and a turbulent central section that portrayed the trials and tribulations of her parents' love. Played with feeling by Mak, all's well that ends well, as to be expected.

The first work with an authentically local idiom was Anjakan Jiwa (Movements Of The Soul) performed by an ensemble with Syafiqah on accordion, violinist Mukhriddin Sayfiddinov, flautist Zaidi-Sabtu Ramli, pianist Nabillah Jallal and percussionist Ramu Thiruyanam. With rhythmic ostinatos established on accordion and percussion, this was an lively dance that lilted like the infectious nuevo tangos of Astor Piazzolla, but with a distinctly Malay flavour. 

The group conducted by Marlon Chen performed the concert's main work Ikan Girl. To prepare the audience, a Prelude was crafted involving its main themes and presented as an attractive stand-alone concert piece.

Ikan Girl, a dance-tableaux in multiple short scenes, was adapted from a tale in the ancient Malay poem Syair Bidasari. Here, a beautiful girl's life and soul is intertwined with that of a magical fish. Producer Mohamad Shaifulbahri's conception was the eternal play of good against evil, danced by eight members of the Bhumi Collective. Amin Farid's choreography combined modern dance with Malay and Indian traditions, where grace and violence found an equal footing.

Nur Azillah Abdul Rahman and Nadia Abdul Malek mirrored each other's movements with seamless fluidity, their carefree smiles finding an implacable antagonist in Rupalavanya Subramaniam's icy Queen. Paralleling a similar plot in the Snow White story, the Queen seeks to destroy the girl but is saved by the fish's dynamism and an unlikely lackey danced by Amin.   

This feel-good quotient would have come to nought if not for Syafiqah's vivid music that closely followed the narrative. Lively and high-pitched birdsong evoked a forest waking, while heavy chords and stern harmonies represented the darker forces at work. A sense of agitation filled the air in the abduction scenes while a violin's bittersweet melody played out a happy resolution.

Like what Stravinsky's Petrushka did for Russian music over a century ago, could Syafiqah's Ikan Girl, an experimental but coherent fusion of Malay and Western classical music, be this equally momentous landmark for local music?   

Producer Mohamad Shaifulbahri,
choreographer Amin Farid and
pianist Nabillah Jalal were London-based
artists, when they first collaborated with
composer Syafiqah 'Adha Sallehin.

NEW MUSIC IN A MYTHIC LANDSCAPE / SIFOM Ensemble / Review

NEW MUSIC IN A MYTHIC LANDSCAPE

SIFOM Ensemble

Singapore International Festival of Music

Chamber, The Arts House

Wednesday (19 October 2016)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 21 October 2016 with the title "Three strikes and New Music is out".

New music has the perpetual problem of attracting audiences, and presenters are usually mindful of engaging patrons with various outreach efforts to win them over. This concert of new Singaporean music however did nothing of the sort as its presentation was lamentable and unacceptably poor.

There were neither composer biographies nor programme notes provided, just a host who happened to be Paris-based conductor Marlon Chen merely reading out titles of performed pieces. Even the names of performers were omitted. Strike One. Two works on the printed programme by John Sharpley and Koh Cheng Jin were discarded with no reasons given. The compensation was a  complimentary drink offered on the house. Strike Two.

Without fanfare, the 65-minute long concert (originally marketed as 90 minutes) began with Chen Zhangyi's Sandcastles. Violinist Arisa Ikeda and pianist April Foo gave an evocative reading with lyrical lines accompanied by rippling keyboard textures, like waves gently lapping on a serene tropical beach.

Bertram Wee's Love Songs for piano trio was sterner than its title suggested. Its 5 movements were atonal and dissonant, with the idea that the course of true love is never easy. Violinist Rida Sayfiddinov, cellist Dzhama Saidkarimov and pianist Thomas Ang covered a full gamut of 20^th century technical devices including harmonics, slides, brusque pizzicatos and heavy chords which cemented his case in no uncertain terms.  

A surreal soundscape was created for Ding Jian Han's Slow Jogging On A Not-So-Silent Night, scored for flute (Jeremy Lim), clarinet (Andrew Constantino), violin, cello and piano (Foo), conducted by Marlon Chen. No actual notes were played in its opening minutes, comprising only the sound of air passing through channels or over strings. This soon cystallised into tones, both short and long-held, which generated a Zen-like calm and mysticism.  

Newly commissioned was Mick Lim's #9 (Sharp Nine), a brief work for pipa (Chua Yew Kok), zhongruan (Loi Eevian), violin, viola (Ho Qian Hui) and cello, which ran a course of plucked notes and pizzicatos. The first work to actually resound with a distinctively Oriental idiom was Ho Chee Kong's Echoes Of Fall for marimba (Kevin Castelo), clarinet, gambus (Loi on ruan) and cello. There were virtuoso roles for each in this enjoyable serenade-like work, which could have come from Central Asia.  

The last and most substantial work was Tan Yuting's Chinatown, a song cycle with texts by Tan Chee Lay featuring talented and expressive soprano Angel Cortez. Its scoring with strings, winds, piano and percussion was lush, and two central fast movements took on the form of rhythmic dances. The subjects involved a culinary paradise and a back-alley barber, but Cortez's Chinese pronunciation was indecipherable, again not helped by the lack of texts or translations. Strike Three and you're out.  

Good music performed by dedicated musicians will always endure, but the cause of new music was not honoured with proper contexts and annotations on this occasion, thus coming off as a wasted opportunity.  

THIEF IN THE NIGHT AND OTHER BIZARRE TALES / THOMAS ANG Piano Recital / Review

THIEF IN THE NIGHT

AND OTHER BIZARRE TALES

THOMAS ANG Piano Recital

Singapore International Festival of Music

Gallery II, The Arts House

Tuesday (18 October 2016)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 20 October 2016 with the title "Mix of obscure and familiar". 

One important aspect of this year's Singapore International Festival of Music is its focus on some of the nation's most talented young musicians. One who has been tipped to be a future super-virtuoso in the mould of the great French-Canadian pianist Marc-Andre Hamelin is Thomas Ang, presently studying in London's Royal Academy of Music.

His piano recital was an eclectic mix of familiar and obscure work, the sort that find their way to the Rarities of Piano Music Festival at Schloss vor Husum in Germany. To sell tickets, popular works had to be programmed, so Ang began with Chopin's Third Ballade and three Études from Op.10.

One is not immediately drawn to his prodigious technique, but rather a directness of expression. He does not gild the lily, allowing instead for music speak for itself. The Ballade was crafted with care and good taste, building up to a passionate climax. The studies were tossed off like putty in his fingers, their brilliance on the Bösendorfer grand coming off as over-glaring in the reverberant hall.

The last of these was the Black Key Etude (Op.10 No.5), which was the subject of two further studies by the afore-mentioned Hamelin and Leopold Godowsky. The psychedelic and acid-infused take of the former was tampered by the more traditional contrapuntal fairground that was the latter. Ang swallowed these challenges whole, and followed up with the staple of all virtuosos worth their salt, Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit.

This triptych of tone poems is considered one of the most fearsome in the entire piano literature. The watery realm of Ondine and the bow-legged scampering of Scarbo were brushed off with splashy colour and manic ferocity but it was the slow movement, Le Gibet (The Gallows) which held the most fascination. Ang's take was slower than usual, but the repetitive tolling B flat octave of a distant church bell was totally hypnotic.

The second half opened with Bach's Prelude & Fugue in F sharp minor (Well-Tempered Clavier Book 2), where Ang demonstrated he was equally adept in standard repertoire. His Bach was particularly clear-headed and transparently illuminated.

Rarities took over with two Singapore premieres, of Russian pianist-composer Samuil Feinberg's song The Dream (in Ang's own transcription) and the Second Sonata. Dissonant and piquant harmonies dominated both works, the latter being a thorny single movement of volatile and elusive emotions, heavily influenced by the mystically-inclined Scriabin.

As a palate cleanser, two short movements from Tchaikovsky's Children's Album revealed a more tender side. Rachmaninov's transcription of Tchaikovsky's Lullaby, filled with smouldering melancholy and surprising harmonic twists, and Ang's transcription of Tchaikovsky's song When The Day Dawns completed the highly satisfying two-hour recital.

That last piece and his encore, an original transcription of a Schubert Lied (Lachen und Weinen), showed Ang to be following the footsteps of another legendary Golden Age pianist, the late great Earl Wild.  

...AND THERE WAS NOTHING / TO Ensemble / Review

...AND THERE WAS NOTHING

TO Ensemble

Singapore International Festival of Music

Play Den, The Arts House

Sunday (16 October 2016)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 18 October 2016 with the title "Unique brand of crossover jazz".

Trust locally-trained and mostly self-taught composer and jazz-cum-crossover pianist Tze Toh to come up with yet another post-apocalyptic and end-of-days scenario to spice up his latest concert. Having gained a certain notoriety from his Land With No Sun series of concerts, his most recent offering ...And There Was Nothing had as its back drop another science fiction-inspired story involving cosmology, eschatology and artificial intelligence.

To the casual concert-goer, all this might come across as mumbo jumbo, but it was merely an elaborate front for an unusual piano quintet that was in effect a 10-movement modern jazz symphony. For this concert, the ensemble was deliberately pared down to involve only five soloists (including Toh on the piano) and with no accompanying ripieno group.

This spareness worked to its advantage, as the sound of each instrument became more transparent. Christina Zhou's violin contrasted with the lower tones of Benjamin Wong's viola, both playing the traditional classical string parts. The main leitmotifs and themes for the work was cast in G minor, which accomodated Lazar Sebastine's Carnatic violin which had a more ornamental role.       

Teo Boon Chye's saxophone was the leading star, and it was he who opened in Earth, the first chapter. His was a dark and dusky tone, one which experimented with atonal lines at the outset but ultimately reverted to more familiar tonalities.

The first four chapters were oppressive in mood, as if portending a bleak fate for the planet and mankind, and it was in Chapter Five: Beginning / Pan Gu when the atmosphere lightened finally. Sebastine turned percussionist, swapping his violin for a drum, over which Teo's sax and Wong's viola soared unimpeded in this most exuberant movement.  

Toh was ever conscious that textures of each instrument were to be clearly differentiated. In Chapter Six, which had seven separate titles, a drone from the viola contrasted with caterwauling from the violin, while the next chapter saw both instruments in a tender duet. Elsewhere, the Western violin and Indian violin, both operating on different scales, duelled for primacy.

The Seventh to Ninth Chapters had no titles, except for question marks. Here the future of life on earth was being pondered; are we doomed or will we be saved? Chapter Eight saw all five soloists thick in action, and the ancient concerto grosso of the baroque period was all but being relived.

By now, most would have been totally confused by the narrative of the work, but the Tenth and final Chapter (no question marks and deliberately left blank) was to prove a watershed. Gloomy and troubling G minor had morphed into a reassuring G major at the end, thus suggesting salvation at hand.         

TO Ensemble's audience was a small but receptive one, and given Toh's zeal in proselytising his unique brand of crossover-jazz-world music, this should change sooner than later.

THE SUNKEN CATHEDRAL AND OTHER STORIES / KSENIIA VOKHMIANINA Piano Recital / Review

THE SUNKEN CATHEDRAL 

AND OTHER STORIES

KSENIIA VOKHMIANINA Piano Recital

Singapore International Festival of Music

Gallery II, The Arts House

Sunday (16 October 2016)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 18 October 2016 with the title "Passion was all that counted".

It is not a coincidence that a number of foreign-born pianists have chosen to make Singapore their home. Thomas Hecht and Tedd Joselson (USA), Albert Tiu (Philippines), Boris Kraljevic (Montenegro) and Yao Xiao Yun (China) have all contributed to our rich musical scene here. The name of young Ukrainian pianist Kseniia Vokhmianina, who studied at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts and now a faculty member of the School of The Arts, should also be added to this list.

Her hour-long recital at the Singapore International Festival of Music was a testament to exceptional teaching and artistry of the highest order. Beginning with the First Book of Preludes by Claude Debussy, she revealed a wide range of colours, shades and nuances from an instrument which the composer described as “a box of hammers and strings”.

Well-judged pedalling was the key to Dancers Of Delphi, which conjured an air of grace and poise. Misty hues in Sails, swirling eddies of Wind On The Plains, a mystical aura that enveloped Sounds And Scents Mingle In The Evening Air, and utter desolation in Footprints In The Snow, all pointed to an acute sense of feeling different moods and styles. Debussy's evocative titles in French had been added to each of these pieces after they had been completed.

A comprehensive technique is sine qua non for the 12 pieces, and there was no shying away from the pummelling force required for What The West Wind Saw or huge sonorous chords that surmounted The Sunken Cathedral. All these were supplied in abundance by Vokhmianina, not to mention the simplicity of Girl With The Flaxen Hair, and rhythmic subtleties in Interrupted Serenade, Dance Of Puck and the jazzy swagger of Minstrels.

Singaporean composer and Cultural Medallion recipient Kelly Tang's Elegy (2015) came in complete contrast from the earlier fare. It is the slow central movement from his Piano Concerto In Three Movements, composed for the SG50 celebrations and first performed by Lang Lang at the National Stadium.

Written in memory of the nation's founding first prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, it was a heartfelt tribute that included some bluesy harmonies a la Keith Jarrett and the curious inclusion of the Fate motif from Rachmaninov's First Symphony. Perhaps the latter was an acknowledgement that from failure (as the symphony's disastrous premiere was) sometimes comes a destiny of hope.

The recital concluded with Alexander Scriabin's single-movement Fifth Sonata, also known as “Poem Of Ecstasy”. Its rumbling opening bars and volcanic eruptions are startling, and Vokhmianina delivered this with true vigour and conviction.

Rarely has a work seen the piano's keys being caressed and yet brutalised within the same page. For a while, she played safe with its orgiastic outpourings when a more unfettered approach would have been preferred. However when push came to shove, she let it rip and a few missed notes were the result. No matter, passion was what counted most and there was no shortage of it.    

With her piano guru Boris Kraljevic.

With Singaporean composer Kelly Tang.