ANNA GENIUSHENE Piano Recital / TZE TOH Piano Recital / Review

 

BEGINNINGS & BRILLIANCE

ANNA GENIUSHENE Piano Recital

Victoria Concert Hall

Sunday (14 June 2026)

UMWELTEN

TZE TOH Piano Recital

Esplanade Black Room

Saturday (20 June 2026)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 23 June 2026 with the title "Anna Geniushene plays with youthful virtuosity; Tze Toh is alchemist of musical ideas".

Russian pianist Anna Geniushene, silver medallist at the 2022 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, was presented by Altenburg Arts in a recital which focused on the early works of Fryderyk Chopin and Johannes Brahms.

Photo: Ung Ruey Loon

Chopin was 14 when he composed his Opus 1 Rondo in C minor. Influenced by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Carl Maria von Weber and bel canto opera, the music can sound impossibly florid, but Geniushene brought out lyrical lines with a singing tone. For her, it was not just a showpiece but something more than that.

Photo: Ung Ruey Loon

Her views of Three Mazurkas (Op.50) and Three Waltzes (Op.34) saw generous use of rubato and extremes of dynamics. These contrasts gave the Ballade No.2 in F major (Op.38) an added edge of vehemence, while the rarely-heard Tarantella (Op.43) bounded with rumbling athleticism.

Photo: Ung Ruey Loon

Alfred Cortot’s lovely transcription of Brahms’ Wiegenlied (Lullaby, Op.49 No.4) separated two of the German romantic’s most dramatic piano works. The Scherzo in E flat minor (Op.4) bristled with rough and ready humour, while the First Sonata in C major (Op.1) from the 20-year-old was a tour de force of youthful exuberance and virtuosity.

Photo: Ung Ruey Loon

Its big opening chords referenced Beethoven’s monumental Hammerklavier Sonata, a reflection of young Brahms’ ambitions. The slow movement saw Geniushene evince genuine poetry before the final two movements swept the board with full-blooded passion. The Steinway grand more than withstood the pummelling, and this was where Geniushene directed her first of many bows.

Photo: Jeff Wong

While every note of Geniushene’s recital was scripted to the last detail, homegrown jazz pianist Tze Toh’s recital of orginal works was almost entirely improvised. Umwelten is the German word for environment, from the title of Baltic German biologist Johann von Uexkull’s book A Foray Into The Worlds of Animals and Humans.

Photo: Jeff Wong

This was his inspiration, with compositions likened to simple organisms which react to their environment and grow. In that respect, Anemone started with a modified Alberti bass (as heard in Mozart’s sonatas) over which simple minimalist variations were grafted on.

Photo: Pianomaniac

In Machines That Fly, after Leonardo da Vinci, tempo, volume and momentum were upped, reaching a feverish climax before closing quietly. Time was a work that felt timeless, a sequence of chords giving way to a Michel Legrand-like melody, which was allowed to drift in whatever direction Toh fancied and ending without actually resolving.

Photo: Jeff Wong

The regenerative ability of starfish was explored in A Star Is Reborn, where Carnatic scales heard in Indian ragas were exploited to quite magical effect. Sentio was described as a contemporary take on the ancient passacaglia where the right hand performed embellishments over a constant bass on the left hand. In truth, there was little separating Toh from J.S.Bach or Handel.

Photo: Jeff Wong

Here With Me reveled in Dave Grusin-like chords often heard in gospel music, totally in line with its description as a musical prayer. 12 Dimensions On Strings In Theory was given an impromptu premiere, a journey through twelve major and minor keys, where dodecaphony as practised by Arnold Schoenberg had never sounded so inviting.

75 minutes passed ever so quickly that Toh never got to perform all 12 works he had programmed, but he closed on a happy and upbeat note with Symphony (from Wanderers), where the dictum was to play as freely as possible. Toh is not just a jazz pianist, but an alchemist of musical ideas.

To hear more of the pianist as composer, transcriber and improviser, be sure to catch the six recitals of the 32nd Singapore International Piano Festival from 2 to 5 July at Victoria Concert Hall and The Arts House.

Singapore International Piano Festival | Singapore Symphony Orchestra

A JAZZ PIANO RECITAL NOT TO MISS: UMWELTEN BY TZE TOH on 20 June 2026

 

A JAZZ PIANO RECITAL NOT TO MISS:

UMWELTEN 

BY TZE TOH on 20 June 2026

For the first time, local jazz pianist Tze Toh of TO Ensemble will perform a solo recital. Usually sharing the stage with artists like jazz saxophonist Teo Boon Chye and Carnatic violinist Lazar T.Sebastine, Tse has the floor to his own this time. At Esplanade’s Black Room on Saturday 20 June, his solo recital titled Umwelten is inspired by the life of simple organisms and how they adapt to the environments on our planet.

Streifzuge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen or A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans by Baltic German biologist Johann Jakob von Uexkull (1864-1944) is the book that brought Tze into this deep dive manifested in the compositions of his recital. Motifs that are explored in his pieces are regarded like single-cell organisms, which develop a life of their own, divide by mitosis and become multi-cellular. These motifs are the building blocks of music, like cells which are the basic constitution of any living thing.

In a preview at the recording studio in Bukit Batok, Tze demonstrated how his pieces opened and developed into stand-alone works. These carry titles like Anemone, A Star Is Born, Sentio, Here With Me, Time, Machines That Fly and 12 Dimensions on Strings in Theory. These are varied, interesting and at times, thought provoking. There are themes and variations, passacaglias, and simple prayer-like meditations. Tze’s influences are many, including the works of J.S.Bach, Ryuichi Sakamoto, New Age minimalism, Carnatic and gospel music just to name a few. Curious to explore more?

UMWELTEN

TZE TOH, Solo piano

Esplanade Black Room

Saturday 20 June 2026, 8 pm

Tickets available at:

Umwelten | solo piano concert | Peatix

Watch this video:

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?

24 VARIATIONS ON TZE'S WORLDS OF IMPROVISATION

Tze is an artist with a special set of skills. He was trained in jazz during his musical studies at the LaSalle School of the Arts, Toh Tze Chin broke out of the performance strait jacket to become a composer, one infinitely curious about world music, film making and IT, which has influenced his music making with his inimitable TO Ensemble.

On this occasion (Saturday, 6 December 2025) at the National Library Board's first floor foyer, he gave an interesting and illuminating talk about the art of improvisation and how he approached this quintessential skill of all jazz musicians. With a deep and intimate knowledge of harmonies, scales, instrumental styles and world cultures, he provided multiple examples of how he varied colours, moods and imagery in his music making. 

Time truly flew when one is having fun, and not a few members of his audience stayed on all the way to the end. Children and their parents were also drawn to his accessible and non-didactic style of presentation that was refreshing. Now he makes one want to experiment on the keyboard and long for the next TO Ensemble concert! 

 

Even Martha Argerich appears spellbound.

Many took out their handphones
to record his talk and played examples.

He's really having fun now!

Detailed notes about his talk.
He certainly takes his art seriously.

To find out more about Tze, 

check his website:

TZE TOH