SSO Chamber Concert: Party of Five / Review

PARTY OF FIVE

SSO Chamber Series

NAFA Lee Foundation Theatre 

Sunday (17 April 2011)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 19 April 2011 with the title "Rousing, gripping party of five".

Ever since the closing of Victoria Concert Hall for renovations, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra’s Sunday afternoon chamber series has been staged in different mid-sized performance venues. The latest concert was at the auditorium of the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, a spacious 380-seater with a wide and deep stage. Given the intimacy of chamber music, the distance between players and audience seemed daunting but with the right performers, projection of sound was not an issue. The five musicians on stage for each of the two quintets were seasoned veterans not afraid of making a big sound.

Beethoven’s early Quintet in E flat major for piano and winds (Op.16) saw the performers bunched up together facing each other rather than the audience. The unusual seating arrangement was however no impediment, with the opening unison sounding beefy but well-defined. The combo of oboist Carolyn Sonderegger, clarinettist Li Xin, bassoonist Christoph Wichert and hornist Jamie Hersch were suitably-matched, complimenting Albert Tiu’s fussy piano part.

A virtuoso vehicle for Beethoven’s own keyboard skills, Tiu lapped up the filigree with confidence and immaculacy, shading the song-like second movement beautifully before providing the rhythmic impetus for the jaunty hunting-horn inspired finale. All five romped across the finish line with much aplomb.

For Brahms’ Quintet in F minor for piano and strings (Op.34), the scoring was more closely integrated, as if in a symphonic work. Here the darker musical material and urgency of pacing made for greater dynamic and dramatics. From the outset, the tension created never flagged, with violinists Kwok Hai-Won and Lillian Wang, violist Tan Wee Hsin and cellist Chan Wei Shing holding sway.

Again, pianist Tiu’s mastery in a completely contrasting idiom was the glue holding the 40-minute masterpiece together. Melancholy and reflection in the slow movement gave way to the vehement march of the Scherzo, generating an unstoppable momentum for what must be the German composer’s most single-mindedly violent music. There was some iffy intonation at the beginning of the finale, but there was little time for mulling as the emotional catharsis went underway. All through to the most gripping of endings, the party of five remained a cohesive whole, defining what the joy of chamber music is all about.

TAKE 5 + 1: Korngold & Schumann Piano Quintets / Review

TAKE 5 + 1 

Esplanade Recital Studio 

Sunday (6 December 2009)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 8 December 2009. 

The quest to perform all the piano quintets in the classical repertoire has taken the musicians of Take 5 to well-trodden environs as well as obscure nooks and crannies. No endeavour has been as adventurous as its Singapore premiere of Wolfgang Erich Korngold’s Piano Quintet of 1921. Korngold (below) was the brilliant Viennese composing children prodigy who later found fame and notoriety as a Hollywood film composer.

His half-hour long quintet did not sound like movie music; instead it was the other way round. Korngold‘s blend of bittersweet melodies, aromatic harmonies and heart-wrenching climaxes, like those of Rachmaninov, became the widely imitated stuff of celluloid fodder. His style is however closer to that of Richard Strauss and Fritz Kreisler, mildly flavoured with the decadence of Second Viennese School dissonance. 

Take 5 luxuriated in the sheer opulence of the music, wallowing in the receding embers of once-lush Romanticism. There were dark clouds for sure, but silver linings abounded, not least in the suffocating orgasmic climaxes of the central slow movement, a set of variations on the most popular of Korngold’s own Songs of Farewell (Lieder des Abschieds). 

Each string instrument had its own solos in the limelight, but they rallied around the overworked pianist Lim Yan, whose arpeggio cascades and crashing chords flew from one high to the next, before consummating in an intoxicating finish.

Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E flat major (Op.44) is a well-established classic, but one never tires of its familiar strains, especially with a performance of the caliber of Take 5. From start to end, a palpable sense of purpose coursed through the ensemble (with the sixth player Tan Wee Hsin (left) substituting for Chan Yoong Han on viola), one that kept the reading taut and gripping. 

The fine art was not just in delivering the notes accurately but its togetherness and fine control, which allowed the music to alternate between resolute unisons and singing episodes, portraying sorrow and irony to joy and ecstasy. 

Take 5 has progressed with each outing, and should no longer be seen as a pianist with a string quartet, but five independent virtuosos united in one resonating voice.

Chamber Music Weekend / Review

CHAMBER MUSIC WEEKEND

Incursion Trio, Esplanade Recital Studio
Saturday (15 August 2009)

VCH Chamber Series, Victoria Concert Hall
Sunday (16 August 2009, 5.00 pm)

Yang Shuxiang & Friends, Esplanade Recital Studio
Sunday (16 August 2009, 7.30 pm)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 18 August 2009.

What a busy weekend this has been. With the Singapore Symphony Orchestra on a month-long break, local chamber groups and musicians have come out in full force.

First off was the curiously named Incursion Trio (above). Word has it that the three young Singaporeans – violinist Siew Yi Li, cellist Brandon Voo and pianist Beatrice Lin - gave their first recital together in the Swiss town of Sion, hence its name. More topical was the group’s incursion off the beaten track of repertory works to present local premieres of a teenaged Claude Debussy’s Piano Trio in G minor and Spaniard Joaquin Turina’s Second Piano Trio.

These aren’t the greatest of pieces, but there are enough pleasantries to shake off the derivative nature of the former (think Saint-Saëns and Fauré in a palm court), or the paucity of Hispanic-ness in the latter. Polish, confidence and a lovely overall sound are their qualities, capped with an ability to sustain long sighs in Schubert’s autumnal Notturno.

More established are the three ladies of the Feng Trio, members of the SSO, who presented Brahms’ First Piano Trio in B major (Op.8). Has there been a more gorgeous melody than the one that opens this masterpiece? Their sense of nobility and sumptuous handling were alone worth the price of admission.

Pianist Liu Jia (above) also joined other SSO colleagues in Hummel’s Piano Quintet in E flat minor (Op.87), unusually scored to include the double bass. Stylistically caught between Mozart and Mendelssohn, this trifle was 20-or-so innocuous minutes well spent, with a scintillating piano part to tickle the palate.

Leaving the most spectacular for the last, 20-year-old violinist Yang Shuxiang made a stunning debut with pianist Khor Shang Jin (both above) to a rapturous standing ovation. 

Looking like Adonis sporting a Paganinian mane, Yang’s sheer force of personality and a sonorous vibrato to match was simply breathtaking. There was little to quibble about his effortless take on Vitali’s Chaconne, closely followed by Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No.7 in C minor (Op.30 No.2), which penetrated with an intensity of a laser and bristled with brio.

His ability to blend were further highlighted with duos partnering violinist See Ian Ike and violist Tan Wee Hsin, in Moszkowski’s hyper-Romantic Suite for 2 violins in G minor and Lazar Trachtenberg’s devilishly dissonant Witches Soirée respectively. The diablerie continued with Ravel’s Tzigane, a gypsy rhapsody where free-ranging sense of abandon displayed by both violinist and pianist became an asset.

May wonders in our local chamber music scene never cease, and such weekends of musical manna never end.