It is getting to the stage where any concert featuring Clarence Lee is
almost guaranteed to be something special, and that was certainly the case with
Monday lunchtime’s students’ recital at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory in
Singapore. Lee opened with Chopin’s Ballade in F minor holding the usually restless
audience in thrall from the very outset.
He does not indulge in the physical mannerisms, the exhibitionist quirks
or the machine-like obsession with technical precision of other pianists on the
threshold of their careers; rather he addresses the piano as the means by which
he is going to convey the visions and ideas of the composer, and through subtle
nuance of tone and a real appreciation of musical architecture, he communicates
a powerful sense of interpretative authority.
His focus is, above all, on communicating the story of the music, and
all his efforts go into that. In this
case we had a vivid and compelling Ballade
delivered, as the title suggests, in the manner of a detailed and absorbing tale. Those irritating Chopin-isms much beloved by
so many pianists – anguished pauses, copious rubatos and rolling ecstatic
expressiveness – had no place here, and the result was a performance of real
musical distinction.
More vivid story telling came with two movements from Stravinsky’s Violin
Concerto. Violinist Xu Minjia and
pianist Ge Xiaozhe delivered a superbly lyrical “Aria II” and a truly
scintillating “Capriccio”, and if, in both movements, the impact of the
respective openings was not fully sustained through to the end – in the Aria it
needed a little more interpretative coordination to match Xu’s instinctively poetic phrasing with Ge’s
crisply articulated piano line – both players showed a real affinity with
Stravinsky’s almost obsessively driven rhythmic writing and his sharp-edged,
crystal clear textures. Perhaps wit and
colour were at a premium; but we could all appreciate the astonishing technical
assurance of these two players in music which is not always easy to
communicate.
One of the good things about having so iconic a Head of Brass as Brett
Stemple is the prominence given in performances in the Conservatory to the
tuba. Although he would be the last
person to agree, Stemple is probably doing more to elevate the tuba from its perceived place as Big Round Bottom
than anyone else around today, not by writing new music or promoting it shamelessly
in performances, but by imbuing into his students that same sense of musical
integrity and conviction that characterises his own playing. Today it was the turn of Teng Siang Hong to
present two short and very descriptive pieces, beginning with a movement from
the Tuba Sonata by the 65-year-old Norwegian composer Trygve Madsen. The haunting, evocative theme given out by
the tuba at the start immediately characterised Teng as a sensitive player
whose beautifully smooth and rounded tone, gently caressed by the slightest
hint of a vibrato, was supported by a wonderful level of breath control and
stability. If the music told tales of
fjords and forests, it avoided any hint of the kind of deep grotesqueries we
might be tempted to look for in tuba writing.
A fine work, beautifully and compellingly played today. Although largely reflective and at times
subdued, Quiescence, composed by Teng’s
accompanist for the day, Low Shao Suan, revealed its origins as a piece for
double bass rather than tuba, and from the long sustained notes to the frequent
alternations of notes, it was certainly far more idiomatic of string than brass
writing. But in Teng the work had a fine
advocate who not only took ownership of these rather obvious string-isms and
made them sound quite at home on the tuba, but also understood the piece to be
far more than just a catalogue of technical devices. As with Lee and Xu, Teng
also showed that a combination of real technical skill and intense interpretative
awareness can create vivid and wholly absorbing musical performances.
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