10TH ANNIVERSARY CONCERT / More Than Music & Friends / Review

10TH ANNIVERSARY CONCERT

More Than Music & Friends

Esplanade Recital Studio

Sunday (19 March 2023)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 23 March 2023

 

About ten years ago, a violin and piano duo called More Than Music was formed by two young alumni of the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory, with their first concert presented by Kris Foundation. It was the intention of violinist Loh Jun Hong and pianist Abigail Sin to present classical music as accessible and unstuffy, yet without needing to dumb down.

 

Their unqualified success led to concerts involving more members of the musical community, including violinists, violists, cellists, and the odd guitarist and trumpeter. During the height of the Covid pandemic in 2020, they invited fellow musicians to present all ten of Beethoven’s violin sonatas in a series of digital concerts. 

More Than Music’s tenth anniversary concert featured some more musical partners, but it was Loh and Sin who opened with Brahms’ Scherzo in C minor. Part of the four-movement F-A-E Sonata crafted by three composers for the violinist Joseph Joachim, its recurrent motif of three short stabs and one long note was reminiscent of Beethoven’s famous Fate theme.

 

Its sheer insistence, placated by a swooning lyrical melody, provided cuts and thrusts of this short impactful movement. Both players were in one mind throughout, bonded by a chemistry developed over the past decade, making for an impressive opening.  

 

Ironically, that would be the duo’s last outing for the evening, with Sin joined by fellow Conservatory colleague Albert Tiu in Rachmaninov’s Second Suite for two pianos (Op.17). Its inclusion also marked the 150^th birth and 80^th death anniversaries of the popular Russian composer. The first movement’s Alla Marcia, with quick successions of chords could have made for heavy weather, but their response was both crisp and devastatingly accurate.

 

Split-second razor reflexes ruled in the mercurial Waltz, dispatched with almost nonchalant ease, while the Romance simply oozed sensuality from every pore. The finale’s swirling Tarantella could have been even more scintillating had they gone absolutely for broke. Cooler heads prevailed, but the outcome was still a satisfying one.

 

As the pianists retired, Loh was joined by violinist Yang Shuxiang, violists Zhang Manchin and Wang Dandan, and cellists Ng Pei-Sian and Jamshid Saydikarimov (the latter four all Singapore Symphony musicians) for Tchaikovsky’s String Sextet in D minor (Op.70), also known as Souvenir De Florence.

 

This has to be the usually-morose Russian composer’s most cheerful and uplifting work, the music filled with Mediterranean sunshine and high spirits. From the outset, all six players bathed the hall with a warm sonorous glow, with each and every part distinctly discerned. Passion was in full flow for the fast outer movements, balanced by playing of true finesse in the slower second movement.

 

Here, pizzicato strings laid the way for a love-in between Loh’s violin and Ng’s cello, their parts so closely intertwined as to delight the inner voyeur of every music-lover. Most of all, it was the unbridled joy of music-making exhibited between friends which was the essence and lifeblood of chamber music. May we have many more years of More Than Music.  

 

An impressive wall of posters
from past concerts 2013-2023.

BRUCH VIOLIN CONCERTO AND MAHLER SYMPHONY 5 / GIVE AND TAKE (BACK AND FORTH) / Singapore Symphony Orchestra / T'ang Quartet / Review

BRUCH VIOLIN CONCERTO

AND MAHLER 5

Singapore Symphony Orchestra

Esplanade Concert Hall

Thursday (2 March 2023)

 

GIVE AND TAKE (BACK AND FORTH)

T’ang Quartet

Yong Siew Toh Conservatory Concert Hall

Friday (3 March 2023)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 6 March 2023 with the title "Chloe Chua emotes like an old soul, T'ang Quartet's partnerships bear fruit".

 

It is hard to believe that violinist Chloe Chua is still only sixteen. She seems to have been around a long time, chalking up impressive concerto performances since winning first prize at the Yehudi Menuhin Competition for Young Violinists in 2018. The Singapore Symphony Orchestra has also  promoted her, inviting her to be Artist-in-Residence for 2022/23 and embarking on a series of recorded albums.

 

Her performances so far have involved concertos from the baroque and classical periods, so Max Bruch’s First Violin Concerto in G minor, an acme of German Romanticism, was a first. From her opening entry, very exposed and the work’s barometer, she came across as an old soul. Purity and richness of tone, immaculate intonation and utter confidence stood her out as someone no longer to be labelled a child prodigy.

 

Artists blossom and mature, bringing new and personal ideas, not just those taught in the studio. Technique has never been an issue, and it was her ability to emote openly and without fear which brought a new dimension to this performance. The lyrical slow movement rose to passionate heights of ecstasy.

 

This was achieved with neither histrionics nor superficial effects, but sheer innate musicality. Her fiery passion in the finale merely confirmed earlier thoughts, with loud audience acclamation and adulation being just desserts.

     

Watch Chloe Chua's performance of the Bruch concerto with SSO here:

The last time SSO performed a Mahler symphony was during pre-pandemic 2019, almost an age ago, so Covid-era cobwebs had to be dusted off for the Austrian’s Fifth Symphony. Led by Dutch-Maltese guest conductor Lawrence Renes, the orchestra honed an exciting reading, full of fervour despite a few rough edges. Guest French horn principal Esa Tapani was excellent in the central Scherzo, which delighted in lilting waltz rhythms. The famous Adagietto, scored for just strings and harp, was crafted with rare beauty. Completing the romp was the finale’s playful counterpoint, capped by the brass in its full glory.  

 

Another Singapore musical icon, T’ang Quartet, has had a turbulent 30^th anniversary season. It underwent yet another change in personnel, with SSO musicians violist Wang Dandan and cellist Jamshid Saydikarimov replacing Han Oh and Wang Zihao for its latest concert. While this configuration is unlikely permanent, founding violinists Ng Yu Ying and Ang Chek Meng can still be relied upon to make a good fist of whatever the quartet performs.  

Composer Chen Zhangyi takes a bow.

 

Two works by Young Artist Award recipient Chen Zhangyi were on show including the world premiere of Give And Take (Back And Forth), which comprised six short varied vignettes. Chen’s music blends aural lushness with gentle dissonances in a memorable way, apparent in the opening Towers and Fountains, a depiction of Singapore cityscapes, and Drunken Poets, where plucked pizzicatos and bowed strings merged seamlessly within a colourful canvas. Ear-catching also were  more rhythmic movements, such as the minimalist swagger of Gears And Cycles – Interlocked or  Night Grooves, where jazz, pop and rock rhythms provided an dynamic close.  

 

The quartet’s sensitive and perceptive insights made music come alive, replicated in Chen’s Twin Cinema for string nonet (two string quartets and double bass), which saw a fruitful partnership with younger musicians. Here both quartets had separate narrative threads, representing different cultures (Venice and Singapore) with their respective interactions and reactions being the work’s essence.

 

The concert closed with that favourite staple of the quartet repertoire, Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet in F major. In a performance that luxuriated in lyricism and thematic cohesion, it was the pizzicato paradise of its Scherzo that piqued the ears, and the finale’s irrepressible perpetual motion which brought on the loudest cheers. 

FAIRYTALES AND OTHER STORIES / More Than Music & Friends / Review

FAIRYTALES AND OTHER STORIES

More Than Music & Friends

Esplanade Recital Studio

Sunday (18 September 2022)

 

More Than Music is a duo formed in 2013 by violinist Loh Jun Hong and pianist Abigail Sin, who were fellow students at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory. Their chamber concerts have covered more than duo music, as they frequently involve friends who play other instruments, including guitar and trumpet. This evening, they were joined by SSO musicians, principal cellist Ng Pei-Sian and violist Wang Dandan, and in their typically informal style, waxed lyrical about the music.

 

This concert opened with just strings, Jun Hong and Dandan in Sibelius’ rarely heard Duo for violin and viola. A world apart from his gritty symphonic works, this piece oozed a somewhat austere kind of Nordic salon charm. The violin’s melodic lines were well supported by the viola’s harmonisations which were anything but facile or superficial. This served as an apt “once upon a time” introduction to the fare to follow.

 

Dandan came into her own for the first two movements of Robert Schumann’s Märchenbilder (Fairytale Pictures, Op.113). There are no actual stories attached to the pieces, but one can imagine the scenes. The lyricism and dreamy mood of the opening brought out from her a lovely tone, luscious and full-bodied, contrasted with the more resolute and martial strains of the piece that followed.

 

Abigail was a most sensitive accompanist, later continuing into Janacek’s Pohadka (Fairy Tale) with Pei-Sian’s cello as protagonist. The Czech’s musical idiom is unmistakable, vividly conjuring a fantasy world of yearning nostalgia and loss of innocence through simple and sharply contoured motifs. Pizzicatos opened the first of three short and linked movements, with a turn for the dramatic looming with each page. The second was more whimsical, rapturous in part yet tinged by an inner lament, with folk music strongly colouring this and the final section. Audiences are all ears whenever Pei-Sian plays, and this was no different.

 

More folk music followed with Samuel Dushkin’s violin and piano transcription of Stravinsky’s Danse Russe from Petrushka. Ensemble could have been a little tidier in this riproaring music, but there was no denying the energy and exhilaration the duo generated.

 

The main event of the concert was Brahms’ First Piano Quartet in G minor (Op.25), four movements of symphonic pretensions by the young German. Arnold Schoenberg was moved to orchestrate it, in a famously overblown piece bantered as “Brahms’ Fifth Symphony". It is a wonderfully ambitious work, so dripping with red meat and raw emotion as to become endearing in a certain strange way. The foursome, which had greatly impressed in Brahms’ Third Piano Quartet last year, was no less trenchant this time around.

 

The beefy musical material, offset by Pei-Sian’s lyrical cello in the second subject, was well-sustained in a performance bristling with pathos and tension. With Brahms, even an Intermezzo could be laden with an inner tension, but a scherzo-like section signalled a lightening of mood. The slow movement in E flat major showed that unison voices could sound just as profound, then rising in a march-like episode to a full-blooded and ecstatic climax before gently retiring.

 

Guilty pleasure has always been derived in the final Rondo alla Zingarese, a rollicking Hungarian-styled dance movement possibly more infectious than Covid itself. In supporting the strings, Abigail’s prestidigitation was always assured, later culminating with a cascading cadenza down to the foot of the keyboard. This exciting romp is guaranteed to bring out the loudest of cheers from the audience, and so it proved.

 

Still sticking with the dance theme, the quartet’s encore was Alexander Oon’s rocking arrangement of Astor Piazzolla’s Libertango. Its rhythms were more than infectious, the performance more than exuberant, offering a more than satisfying end to a concert that delivered more than expected.  

  

BEETHOVEN'S EROICA: A SYMPHONIC REVOLUTION / Orchestra of the Music Makers / Review

BEETHOVEN’S EROICA:

A SYMPHONIC REVOLUTION

Orchestra of the Music Makers

Sunday (30 January 2022)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 9 February 2022 with the title "Enthralling take on Beethoven's Eroica".

 

Alert concert-goers will have noticed that concert durations have more or less reverted to their original lengths. Although restrictions to ensemble and audience sizes remain, longer works are being heard. For example, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra presented Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony and Violin Concerto, both substantial offerings, just last week.

 

The Orchestra of the Music Makers (OMM) led by Chan Tze Law went one step further by performing Beethoven’s Third Symphony, also known as the “Eroica”. The longest symphony in the classical repertoire until Beethoven later conceived his monumental Ninth Symphony, it takes the best part of 45 minutes.

 

Although requiring feats of endurance and plentiful reserve from the players, this is small beer for OMM, whose young players have overcome even more massive works such as Mahler’s symphonies. The first two E flat major chords at its outset were vital, as these determined the tenor and direction which the symphony takes. Direct and incisively punched out, these heralded what was to be a taut and urgent reading.

 

However, hurried and hectic it was not. Instead one got the feeling that something momentous had occurred, and the entire first movement’s dynamic drive kept one guessing. This mystery was solved in the slow movement in C minor, as the titular hero had died and this was his funeral march. The somberness was palpable, and even magnified in its passionate play of counterpoint.

 

This tension was also upheld in the third movement’s Scherzo, where the contrasting Trio section provided some release in the form of a jocular trio of French horns, who nailed their parts with stunning aplomb. The finale’s variations on a theme from Beethoven’s ballet The Creatures Of Prometheus exhibited pure joy, as a universal dance of levity and humour. This performance had taken just 42 minutes, which was on the swifter side.  

 

Preceding the Beethoven was Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in E flat major (K.364), long considered to be his finest string concerto. Violinist Chikako Sasaki and violist Wang Dandan, both musicians from the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, were the soloists. For them this was ultimately a piece of chamber music, as they joined the ensemble to play the orchestral parts even before their actual solos began.

 

As soloists, they were evenly matched, each projecting clearly with singing tones and accurate intonation throughout. They also blended well, particularly in the technically tricky cadenzas. It was in the sublime slow movement where more of their individual voices were revealed, and one did not want these beautiful moments to end. The fast-paced finale was another show of joie de vivre, drawing loud and enthusiastic applause from the audience.

 

For an encore, Sasaki and Wang were joined by concertmaster violinist Zhao Tian to perform a trio arrangement of Mexican composer Manuel Ponce’s most popular song Estrellita (Little Star) by local composer Alexander Oon. Would Mozart or Beethoven have minded this syrupy-sweet diversion? Given their love of pretty melodies, probably not a single bit.   

     

All concert photos by Yong Junyi, by courtesy of OMM.