It was billed as a Piano Recital; which was precisely what it was. If, however, the Hong Kong pianist Susan Chan
had wanted a more descriptive billing, “Looking Back to the Past”, or simply, “Nostalgia”,
would have done the job. All nine works
in her recital at Singapore’s Yong Siew Toh Conservatory Concert Hall last
night were, in one way or another, concerned with revisiting the past from the
perspective of a later present.
It began with a slice of true nostalgia.
As a young boy in 1950s London, I learnt to love Bach and the piano
through Myra Hess’s reworking of “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” with its
superimposed harmonies, lashings of pedal and rich dynamic palette. Chan went one step further and rooted out a
version made by pianist Wilhelm Kempff in 1938.
Blissfully unaware of the period authenticity movement which grew up and,
to a certain extent, withered in the intervening years, Kempff threw in opulent
harmonies, sensuous phrasing, generous pedalling, copious expression markings
and an array of dynamics to create a piece of undoubted beauty. It is easy, now, to make this sort of thing
sound pastiche, even cloying, but Chan’s impeccable performance avoided any
excess of sentimentality by a faithful delivery of Kempff’s detailed score
gloriously enhanced by a clarity of touch which ensured the perfect balance
within the musical texture. Every line –
every note - was precisely placed to create an intricate web of detail, the
chorale line emerging effortlessly from the enveloping accompaniment despite
Kempff’s abrupt moving of it from treble to tenor half way through. The only minor irritant was Chan’s shying away from
the final fortissimo of Kempff’s “Wachet
auf” arrangement.
If Kempff laid on early 20th century romanticism with a
somewhat heavy hand in his Bach arrangements, a decade earlier Harold Bauer had
shovelled it on in spades, turning the discreet “My Soul Doth Rest in Jesus”
from Cantata 127 into something of a display for pianistic expressiveness. Again, Chan side-stepped any hint of irony in
her performance through some subtle inner shading of the texture and by
producing a tone which was simply gorgeous on its own terms. But if Bauer over-egged the Bach, his version
of César Franck’s Prélude, fugue et
variation thoroughly distorted the original, transforming it from a naïve
and innocent work for organ into something almost melodramatic. Lovingly lingering arpeggios inserted into
the bridge between Prelude and Fugue pretty well excluded any memories of Franck
but gave us all a chance to relish the delicacy and suppleness of Chan’s
fingers, each note ideally balanced to fit into an overall soundscape which was
translucent and shimmering. Her handling
of the metamorphosis of Fugue into the decorated restatement of the Prelude
(the somewhat disingenuous “Variation” of Franck’s original title) was a moment to savour and will
long linger in the memory.
There was one incongruity here; Mozart’s Variations on “Ah vous dirai-je,
Maman”. The nostalgia here may have been
Mozart looking back to the songs of his childhood, but more significant was Chan’s
performing approach which harked back to the days when playing Mozart was
considered more of a technical exercise than a musical indulgence. True, with 12 short variations mostly in the
same key, at the same speed and revisiting the same basic material, the work is
hardly a demonstration of great genius at its apogee, but with no significant
use of dynamic or even a hint of rubato to give the overall piece a sense of architecture,
we were left to ponder Chan’s essentially graceful technique, where tone and
balance rule the day.
The nostalgia of the second half of the recital was mostly in the guise
of memories of Chinese childhood. Most obviously
this came with Tan Dun’s Eight Memories
in Watercolor which, as Chan explained, were written out of homesickness
when the composer was first alone in Beijing and wistfully recalling the
stories and songs of the Hunan Province of his childhood. It was described in the programme booklet as
Tan’s “Opus 1”, but for all its youthfulness, Tan hallmarks were ever present;
the infusion of Hunanese folk songs, real or implied, married to the harmonic
and rhythmic discipline of the West, and with touches of jazz and dissonance
providing moments of enticing musical spice.
Here, Chan’s subtle sense of colour and discrete virtuosity resulted in
a performance which was as memorable for its delicacy and poise as for the
images it created.
The highlight of the recital both as music and performance, was Zhou Long’s
Pianobells of 2012. Chan clearly has a powerful affinity with
this music, and while Zhou’s memories of temple bells chiming in the winds
could have become a brightly lit musical tableau, his ingenious use of the
piano, exploiting a vast array of playing techniques and exploring its full pitch
range, coupled with Chan’s astonishingly intuitive tonal control – those huge
clusters in the bass had just the right weight to counterbalance the tinklings in
the treble – elevated this way beyond the merely evocative and turned it into a
work of considerable interest.
It was Zhou’s wife, Chen Yi, who contributed both the final and the most
recent work in Chan’s programme; Northern
Scenes of 2013. In this marriage it
is she who is, musically, often the more assertive, and that was the case here,
with her recollections of the mountain ranges of Northern China given an almost
angry – not to say bitter - edge. The
lasting memory of this piece, however, will be its ending which manages to be both
abrupt and protracted. Chan measured
this to perfection.
Again there was an incongruity, on this occasion four pieces unimaginatively
entitled Music for Piano, by the
Canadian composer Alexina Louie. Attempting
to revisit some of the compositional styles of the recent past, it was not always
easy in these brief exercises to recognise quite what those styles were, the
most successful piece being “Changes” which indicated a nod towards the phase
music of the Minimalists. I’m not sure
that Louie’s music stood up to close scrutiny, but with Chan’s amazing ability
to weigh each individual note and subtly to place it within a texture so that
it was both clearly defined yet absorbed into the overall soundscape, the
performance made an impression which will long linger in the memory.
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