PIANO QUINTET SERIES CONCERT IX / Take 5 / Review

PIANO QUINTET SERIES CONCERT IX

Take 5

Esplanade Recital Studio

Sunday (31 March 2013)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 2 April 2013 with the title "5 take on Russian piano quintets".

There are about six piano quintets that are heard with any regularity in concert halls around the world today. So kudos go to local chamber group Take 5 for reaching its ninth concert without repeating a single work. But that also meant scouring the fringes of the repertoire, and the ensemble came up trumps with the Singapore premieres of two rarely-heard Russian piano quintets.

Anton Arensky (1861-1906) was a student of Rimsky-Korsakov and in turn was the teacher of Rachmaninov. His quintet in D major (1900) was the epitome of Romanticism and traditionalism, opening with a Tchaikovskyan melody in the usual sonata form. Not the most original or inspired of works, it nevertheless has a high charm factor, not least when the violin solos fall upon Foo Say Ming’s reliably steady and unfailingly sweet tone.

The slow movement’s theme and variations were not unlike those in Schubert’s Death And The Maiden, showcasing Chan Wei Shing’s cello in full bloom. The light-hearted scherzo, full of Mendelssohnian ebullience, was a playground for piano acrobatics which Lim Yan lapped up most gratefully. The finale, predictably for a schoolmaster, was textbook example of how to conjure up a fugue from earlier themes. Its apparent seriously was soon exhausted as the quintet ably wound up for a heady close.

Made of far sterner stuff was the Piano Quintet in F minor (1944) by Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919-1996), also known as Moisei Vainberg, the Polish-born Jewish composer who fled the Nazis by escaping into the Soviet Union. A close friend of Shostakovich, it was inevitable that his music would share the same introspection and dark mordant humour as the more famous Russian.

Curiously, the quintet opened with the piano playing a plainchant-like melody an octave apart, with the melancholy redolent of another Russian, Rachmaninov. How Weinberg used simple, even unremarkable motifs and built them into powerful statements was classic Shostakovich. The level of angst invested into its pages soon piled up, along with discords and dissonances, relieved time and again by attempts at satire and wit.

The central Presto revolved around a psychotic little waltz, but the starkest of Largos, built upon sustained and repressed rage revealed a bare-knuckled anger waiting to burst free. Its denouement was however a most peculiar of finales, with strings playing repeated notes a tone apart – like a demented version of Chopsticks – with the piano commenting in the background, before launching into the mock-gaiety of a highland jig.

Like the deliberately ambiguous finale of Shostakovich’s piano quintet composed four years earlier, Weinberg had found his own release. The members of Take 5, which also included second violinist Lim Shue Churn and violist Chan Yoong Han, delivered with a convincing aplomb and the straightest of faces. A standing ovation accorded by segments of the audience was rewarded with a welcome reprise of the Scherzo from Arensky’s Quintet, something far less intimidating.

Take Five: Review of Piano Quintet recital on 17 August 2008

Here is my review of the concert given by Take Five, a piano quintet formed by Singaporean musicians, which appeared in The Straits Times on 20 August 2008.

TAKE FIVE

Lim Yan, piano

with members of the SSO

Esplanade Recital Studio

Sunday, 17 August 2008

The chamber music scene in Singapore is really picking up and opportunities abound for local musicians to make history. Take Five, a quintet formed by pianist Lim Yan with violinists Foo Say Ming and Lim Shue Churn, violist-for-the-evening Chan Yoong Han and cellist Chan Wei Shing, seem to relish doing that.

Their bold ambition is to perform all the piano quintets in the classical canon. Going through the four warhorses (Schumann, Brahms, Dvorak and Franck) one at a time, their third recital also showcased a rarely heard quintet and one by a local composer.

Kelly Tang's six-minute-long Quintet of 1996 is a model of compactness and concentration. Opening like a Second Viennese School product, his bitty motifs peppered the ear with sparks and shards of sound. Melodic interest soon became discernable as an arch-like structure was formed, but it ended as the senses began to pique. This is a work that will repay further visits.

The concert began with the early Dvorak Quintet in A major (Op. 5), written before he became the distinctive voice of Czech nationalism. Its dark-hued tones channelled Wagner, while folk-like rhythms made themselves felt, albeit without the heart-on-sleeve transparency of the mature and familiar Quintet Op. 81, also in the same key. The reading of the angst-filled slow movement and hot-blooded rush that is the scherzo-cum-finale was invigorating, making the work sound greater than initially suggested.

This self-same vehemence and sense of purpose continued well into the second half, where the mighty Brahms F Minor Quintet (Op. 34) awaited. In the first movement's sonata form, white-hot playing on stage was matched only by the intensity etched on the faces of the performers. The quintet could have afforded to relax a little in the slow movement's Andante, instead of sounding tense in parts. Perhaps that was an inevitable lead-up to the Scherzo's unstoppable march to the abyss.

Where silence from the audience would have been much appreciated between movements, the well-filled venue erupted with applause. This altercation may have thrown the strings off-kilter as intonation went awry briefly in the beginning of the finale. The musicians, however, rallied in a hell-for-leather finish that finally brought the house down.

As a much-demanded encore, the quintet reprised the Tang work, proving that repeated listening does make the heart grow fonder.