QUANTUM STATE / TO Ensemble / Review

 

QUANTUM STATE

TO Ensemble

Esplanade Recital Studio

Sunday (1 March 2026)

This review was published on 3 March 2026 with the title "TO Ensemble explores what humans are made of in entertaining programme".

Concerts by TO Ensemble have traditionally been founded on futuristic stories. Dystopian worlds, interstellar travel and speculative fiction are par for the course, but its latest offering was more down to earth: science and what we are composed of.

Led by composer and jazz pianist Tze Toh, his quartet on this occasion was formed by Wu Bingling (violin), Lazar T. Sebastine (Carnatic violin) and Teo Boon Chye (alto saxophone), performing an enjoyable 75-minute concert without intermission. Within this configuration, the players and their instruments represented respectively space, humanity, nature and science / technology.

Photo: Sebin Lazar Reena

What are the elements that make us human? The movements that transpired pondered on the building blocks that make up music itself. A simple Prologue of piano tremolos ushered in Carnatic violin and sax, and in the manner of Minimalism built up a pattern of mood music by repetition and constant variations. That was the basis of Memories of Time, which unfolded slowly but never outliving its welcome.

I Am The Air (Io Sono L’Aria) opened with birdsong and trills from solo piano in the upper registers, over which both violins carved out a duet. If one wondered whether this music was composed or improvised, the answer: both. Wu’s Western violin had its part fully written out while Sebastine’s Carnatic violin was almost wholly improvised.

In Longing, the evening got its first big melody, with Teo’s sax doing the honours. This love song was gradually built up from something simple, an efflorescence much like how life on earth evolved from molecules to cells and then living organisms.

Photo: Sebin Lazar Reena

Similarly, Architecture of Human Civilisation opened with Wu’s Bachian violin solo, single line arpeggios, then double stopping, over which Teo began his improvisation. Tze’s piano joined the fray as did Sebastine’s violin, and a mighty edifice was constructed seemingly from scratch. The movement closed as it began, with Wu’s plaintive solo.

How can science describe emotions like love? The harmonic progessions of Autumn relived the music of Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, admittedly one of Tze’s idols, while both violins brought out different responses in an impassioned duet.

LHC (Large Hadron Collider) was the concert’s only fast piece, befitting CERN’s particle accelerator in Switzerland. Here, rapid piano figurations and saxy riffs churned out the musical equivalent of anti-matter in a kinetically charged atmosphere. In a word, breathtaking.

Photo: Sebin Lazar Reena

Memories of Space returned to the premise of the earlier piece, Memories of Time. This time, the building blocks were canons, the repeating bars of music that distinguished J.S.Bach’s Goldberg Variations and the finale of Cesar Franck’s famous violin sonata.

The closing number The Swan had nothing to do with Saint-Saen’s cello masterpiece, but was based on a raga where the Carnatic violin opened. Tze described it as a piece depicting grace and growth, appropriately in the key of G major, which also echoed the Goldbergs. Here, raga met Bach and jazz in a heady awakening of sorts. What will Tze and Co think of next?

STEPHAN'S QUINTET / TO Ensemble / Review

STEPHAN’S QUINTET

TO Ensemble

Esplanade Recital Studio

Friday (2 September 2022)

It has been ages since I attended my last TO Ensemble concert (the pre-Covid era seemed a long time ago), and what a pleasure it was to encounter the group again. As before, its members led by founder-pianist Tze Toh (Toh Tze Chin) continue to delight and surprise. Are they a chamber ensemble, a jazz combo, or a crossover band? In reality, they are all of these, comfortably flitting between these different roles and descriptions, which tend to constrain rather than define. 

Over the years, the group has evolved. Once called TLGO (Tze n Looking Glass Orchestra), it is now TO Ensemble. Once it was the size of a chamber orchestra (sometimes with added voices), the sort that plays concerti grosso, but now it takes the form of a duo, quartet or quintet depending on  programme. Once it accompanied audio-films (short films conceived by Tze, usually with a social message), now it performs near-absolute music with the minimum of extraneous contrivances. What has never changed is the ingenuity and spontaneity that comes with each concert event.

 

The latest show, Stephan’s Quintet, was astronomically inspired, premised upon the stunning visuals seen through the James Webb Space Telescope, and the life-changing findings that will explain the origin of life/existence itself. Mind blowing stuff, and while the music did not intend to encompass all things cosmological, it at least tried to express awe-struck sensations and the wonderment to be had. Its title, referring to the five galaxies viewed from distance, also reflected the five players on stage: founding team Tze (piano/keyboard), Lazar T.Sebastine (Carnatic violin), Dai Da (erhu), Teo Boon Chye (tenor sax), and its newest member Chia Zhe Yin (alto sax).

 

The seven pieces of Tze’s conception were performed with four stunning visuals projected onscreen. Stephan’s Quintet opened with a long piano solo, Debussyan in impressionist hues, as if representing the vast cosmos. Pre-recorded sounds of strings are introduced before Teo’s sax enters followed by Lazar’s violin. What might have sounded incongruous on paper however worked unusually well aurally. A waltz-like rhythm ensued with Chia’s sax adding a further dimension, and a comforting presence.      

 

Chapter Two described Longing, inspired by the vast void that exists between celestial bodies. Lazar’s violin emerged from the emptiness, immersed in a meditation that alternated between G major and minor. Both saxophones came together and their duet continued the reflective reverie. In The Silent Sea, Dai’s erhu stood out, contrasted by Carnatic violin which amongst other things, mimicked the sound of the conch shell.

 

Dance at Star’s Edge was built on the energy of piano ostinatos, from which violin and both saxes extemporised freely. Tze admitted to a nerdy side in Twelve Dimensions, based on his ideas of string theory, which saw a keen dialogue between erhu and sax. In Voyager, recounting the travels of earth’s furthest reaching probe, an upbeat rhythm with gospel and country music style prevailed, this time with sax and violin stealing the show.

 

The final chapter Sky brought all five instrumentalists together, first as mere shards and wisps of sound, seemingly random, heard individually and separately. With the passage of time, they gradually coalesced into one whole, buoyed by a rhythmic driven theme. Like the five galaxies captured in a single image gazillions of miles and millennia away, five players (and worlds) are unified as one, closing in one soothing and comforting nebula in G major. Have we heard the music of the spheres? One just needs to imagine... 

MEMORIES OF 2055 / TO Ensemble / Review

Review: Concert

MEMORIES OF 2055

TO Ensemble
Esplanade Recital Studio

Friday (12 April 2019)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 16 April 2019 with the title "Rapturous sax-playing conjures memories of bygone age".

The year is sometime in a dystopian future. An artificial intelligence consciousness called HAL 2055 presents memories of Earth that transpired before the 2045 cataclysmic event referred to as the Singularity. As end-of-days plots beloved by TO Ensemble go, this one had to be the least convoluted.

Local composer and jazz pianist Tze Toh’s latest conception does away with jaded personalities, decrepit cities, digitally-created audio films and sob stories of past concerts, focusing instead on pure music.

Even his ensemble has been pared down to just five players, a far cry from the more ambitious days of Tze N Looking Glass Orchestra, the ensemble’s former guise. Then, the group had a body of strings, winds, percussion and even Chinese instruments. Now, it is just founding members Toh, Carnatic violinist Lazar T.Sebastine and saxophonist Teo Boon Chye, augmented by soprano Izumi Sado and newcomer violinist Loh Jun Hong of More Than Music fame.

This economy of forces worked well through the concert’s seven movements, titled and untitled. In its opening Awaken / Descend, there was a Debussyan touch when Toh’s piano mused on a series of whole tones, a short prelude before Sebastine’s violin entered with melodies inflected by portamenti (slides). This gave the music an exotic quality going beyond its Indian tuning system.

  

Loh’s Western violin had a more conventional and supporting role but he soon got into the spirit of things. Sado’s wordless melismata was haunting and siren-like, floating effortlessly over rhythmic ostinatos by piano and computer-generated loops. The star of the show had to be Teo’s improvisations on both alto and tenor sax, conjuring reminiscences of a bygone age. This was the rapturous kind of jazz typically inhabiting smoky parlours and joints, rather than spiffy concert halls.

Eschewing the dark-edged and pessimistic tone of TO Ensemble’s previous efforts, the music projected a sense of hope, if anything by recycling nostalgic thoughts. Hence the prominence of memories in the concert’s title. In the movement entitled Memories, a vigorous minimalistic rhythm and frenetic pace dominated, signalling the awakening of myriad senses.

In Child, the Western violin ushered in the Indian violin, forwarding the idea that different children lived separate lives and hence had different memories. For Machine Sunrise, tenor sax and tape provided a dream-like state where the pervasive mood of melancholy ironically drew the loudest applause from the small but clearly-enthralled audience.

Performing for about 55 minutes without an interval, the movements shifted from the darker key of B minor to the sunny G major. With that, the mood also became palpably upbeat. The final two movements played out like a glorious update of the baroque chaconne, an antique dance formed by short variations built over a steady ground bass.

With time to spare, the quintet offered an extended encore – improvised on the spot - clueing the listeners into the finer points of jazz.  

...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.

LAND WITH NO SUN II: DANCE OF THE EARTH / TO Ensemble / Review

LAND WITH NO SUN II:

DANCE OF THE EARTH

TO Ensemble

Esplanade Recital Studio

Saturday (27 February 2015)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 29 February 2016 with the title "When Earth becomes an illusion of paradise".

TO Ensemble is the new name of Tze n Looking Glass Orchestra (TLGO), a cross-over fusion group led by jazz pianist Tze Toh. Despite the name change, this latest concert carried on with the environmental concerns raised in previous instalments of his Land With No Sun cycle .

Just to recap: in the the near future, a post-apocalyptic earth now occupies cities in the sky, and its inhabitants wonder what it was like living in the old planet that had been ravaged by war and pollution. A young girl sees a holograph of a whale and makes a hazardous trip down to what is now terra incognito.   

The Prologue titled Oscurita / Darkness was sung in Italian by soprano Yap Shin Min, simply because creator-composer Tze preferred the romanticism of the language. Its operatic quality recalled the film scores of Nino Rota and Ennio Morricone, and a concertante element was also provided by Christina Zhou's violin.

Moving into Chapter One: Lullaby Of The Machines, a world constricted by conformity, rules and regulations dictated the tone of the music. Tze's piano shifted within limited chordal sequences, minimalist in a Satiesque way, while Wong Wei Lung provided a mechanical rhythmic drumbeat. Etude-like piano passages and Wendy Phua's bass guitar figurations further contributed to this toccata of repetition.  

Augmented by looped film footage, this chapter reminded one of installation art, those abstract scenarios that populate modern art museums the world over. A breakthrough was provided by Teo Boon Chye's tenor saxophone, whose marvelous role of improvising on the spot seemed to turn the music on its head.

Chapter Two: March Of Man thus became a watershed, with humans taking the initiative. Thus Lazar T. Sebastine's carnatic violin in The Surface / Desert was a breath of fresh air, his ragas finally getting the music into a more independent groove. This also heralded woodwinds to engage in a droll dance of their own in Mountains / Thilafushi (with visuals displaying heaps of rubbish), led by Yukari Blest's flute and more saxy improvs from Teo.

In The Submerged City, piano and alto sax sultrily dallied in E minor, which to these ears cleverly merged a Chopinesque nocturne with a Bachian prelude. Yap's wordless melismata simulated children's laughter in The Ruins / City Dawn, while violin accompanied by Miyata Masato's acoustic bass accounted for the melancholy of The Secret Forest.

Chapter Three: Dance Of The Earth saw further collaborations between soloists. In Protector / Vishnu, Sebastine was the protagonist, with the raga giving way to Teo's sax. Both did not play from notated scores, instead making up the music as they went. River was the confluence of both violin traditions, Western and Indian, the result being a mellifluous mix.

If there were an apotheosis, Organic Forest represented by an expanse of green forests and vegetation was a glorification of the G major chord. All the soloists, strings and offstage woodwinds came together for one long love-in, a celebration of what Gaia used to be before mankind's desecration. The Wind, a short music-less scene with Nadia Wheaton's quivering voice-over, later revealed that every good moment and feeling that transpired had been a dream, an illusion of paradise.

The Epilogue: Seed / Whale In The Sky gave the audience pause for hope and thought. We have the world in our hands, so how are we now going to treat it? 

Photography by Yuet Wei.

LAND WITH NO SUN / Tze n Looking Glass Orchestra / Review

LAND WITH NO SUN

Tze n Looking Glass Orchestra

Esplanade Recital Studio

Thursday (29 January 2015)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 31 January 2015 with the title "Requiem for a lost civilisation".

Composers were supposed to write symphonies, sonatas and atonal works that eschewed melodies in order to be taken seriously. Young Singaporean composer Tze Toh has been content to break that stereotypical mould, beginning as a jazz pianist and assimilating disparate influences of modern classical music, world music and popular idioms into his original compositions.

Land With No Sun (Terra Senza Sole) is an original audio-film, which he explained to mean absolute music accompanied by short films and visual images, performed in front of a live audience. Like in Debussy's piano preludes, where the titles were added after the fact, Tze's music takes on a programmatic slant, as if written to tell a story.

The scenario of the 70-minute-long concert is set in a dystopian future, when Earth is ravaged by war, over-population and over-building, with sky-cities and pollution that permanently block out the sun's rays. As extinction looms, collective memories are digitised and sent back in time as cautionary messages. The ten movements, each documenting a different year of degeneration, served as aural and visual snapshots of mankind's folly. Performing were Tze's ensemble of ten musicians, all excellent soloists in their own right.

The Prologue was just film and recorded sound, playing in a loop as the audience entered the hall. The first movement proper, The Moment, saw soprano Felicia Teo singing the opening lines La morta e un canto ricordato del tempo (Death is a Song Time Remembers) accompanied by Tze's piano. Italian was chosen for its operatic qualities instead of the more prosaic English, and the film music style of Ennio Morricone was relived.

Io sono l'aria (I Am The Air) was a ruminative plaint on Christina Zhou's violin, with the protagonist viewing a wilderness of concrete that replaces clouds in the sky. Much more pulsating and jazzy was Metropolis which brought together saxophonist Teo Boon Chye, who was the evening's busiest soloist, with Wong Wei Lung's drums, Luke Chng's cello and Masato Miyata's bass. This kinetically charged number had  the backdrop of a faceless urban landscape viewed from a moving train.

Indian Carnatic violinist Lazar T.Sebastine brought his improvisatory raga skills to Ray / Water, a movement of grace and fluidity portraying a manta ray wandering freely for the last time. Bassoonist Christoph Wichert functioned on more classical lines; placidity in the bleak wintry clime of Snowman was contrasted with violently lurching ostinatos in Factory Dance, an indictment on rapid industrialisation. Violist Tomoko Kakegawa blended prettily with Zhou in Flower, a sad and nostalgic look at Nature, which was symbolically shattered like glass petals on film.

Tze as a composer is resourceful and possessed with an original voice, yet he was unafraid to invoke the skills of Hungarian composer Bela Bartok in Desert, where a quasi-Middle Eastern dance is hammered out with raw and primal vigour. The penultimate movement Time Travel provided a grand gesture for nine instrumentalists working together for the first time. Brimming with energy and vitality, was this a signal of a new hope for man, or merely the mirage of history repeating itself in futile cycles?

The very short finale Oscurita / The Moment II which brought back soprano Teo as The Weeping Goddess, accompanied by just three string players, provided the clue. It served as a requiem for our lost civilisation, an abrupt full-stop which we can only hope to prevent. Despite the small audience, Land With No Sun was accorded a standing ovation, a sure sign that  right and timely messages will not fall on deaf ears.  

ODYSSEYS / Tze n Looking Glass Orchestra / Review

ODYSSEYS

Tze n Looking Glass Orchestra

Esplanade Recital Studio

Sunday (2 March 2014)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 4 March 2014 with the title "Odysseys concert soars".

In this concert from Esplanade’s Spectrum series for contemporary music, there was an unexpected air of its Mosaic series for jazz, fusion and indie music about it. That was because Tze n Looking Glass Orchestra, founded by local jazz pianist and largely self-taught composer Tze Toh (below), is more a fusion band than an avant-garde instrumental ensemble.

Its present guise is in effect a 21^st century globalised manifestation of the concerto grosso ensemble from the baroque era, complete with a central nucleus of soloists, back-up musicians of strings, woodwinds and brass, with Tze helming the basso continuo including bass and electric guitar.

The concertino group is decidedly cross-cultural Asian, including Chinese erhu player Dai Da (right), Indian violinist / raga specialist Lazar T.Sebastine and jazz saxophonist Teo Boon Chye. Although improvisation plays a big part for the soloists, the music composed by Tze crosses-over comfortably between genres, with pop song idioms and film music being a considerable influence as well.

The 70-minute concert was easy-listening from start to end, opening with A Kite in the Sky, a slow and meditative number with erhu and saxophone garnering the spotlight. Next, The Odyssey launched into a pulsating allegro representing flight, with fast repetitive patterns that at points was reminiscent of Michael Nyman and Michael Torke, classical establishment minimalists. While Teo’s solos dominated, Sebastine’s violin could have had a more extended run of his own.

The major centrepiece was Gods & Ragas, a triptych of musical avatars representing the triumvirate of Hindu deities. Brahma (Creator) was the most traditional movement, serenely cast in G major featuring Sebastine’s improvisations and wordless vocalises from soprano Izumi Sado, quietly backed by strings and winds playing harmonics and glissandi.

Vishnu (Protector) was the most jazzy, with a persistent ostinato beat provided by Wendy Phua’s electric bass over which erhu and sax soared to a heady crescendo. In the final Shiva (Destroyer), the piano rumbled from an abyss, from which the concert’s only atonal bits gave way to a sort of requiem where Sebastine’s prestidigitation would make Tartini’s Devil’s Trill seem tame by comparison.         

The concert closed on an ecstatic high with In Time Love Comes, where Sado’s mellifluous lines floated with a celestial quality above the instrumental throng. Tze truly knows where to hit the right buttons when it comes to writing romantically inclined music, with this number being ample proof. Tze n Looking Glass Orchestra flies again on 26 July in the same venue. Be sure not to miss the trip.