Concert review: Engaging musical outreach and unusual piano-vocal recital in two weekend concerts

Youth & Serenity: A Faure Fete The Music Circle

The Music Circle Studio
Last Saturday, 5.30pm

An Evening With Chelsea Guo Chelsea Guo (piano and voice)

School of the Arts Concert Hall
Sunday, 7.45pm

Two unusually different musical events took place last weekend – a chamber music concert and a piano/vocal recital.

The first had about 50 people, including many children, packed within a cosy studio in The Music Circle’s school premises in Queen’s Road. This was an interactive concert meant to introduce young people and their parents to the joy of chamber music performance.

On show was a rare airing of late Romantic Frenchman Gabriel Faure’s autumnal Piano Quintet No. 2 In C Minor (Op.115) performed by some of Singapore’s finest chamber musicians – pianist Cherie Khor, violinists Tang Tee Tong and Clarissa Lim, violist Christoven Tan and cellist Leslie Tan.

Presenter Moegi Amano, a pianist, gave a short talk on Impressionism and Faure’s history.

Strictly speaking, Faure was not classed as an Impressionist composer like Claude Debussy or Maurice Ravel, but his more traditional music still provided instances where the imagination was allowed to run freely.

As youngsters were busily colouring pictures of Eiffel Tower or pasting paper strips, the quintet performed as they would at a serious concert. The audience was prompted to visualise children playing in a park in the flighty second movement and a peaceful river scene in the slow movement. 

Applause between movements was not discouraged, and all through this rarefied and sometimes austere music, many moments of beauty were illuminated, with listeners kept attentive and enraptured.

Musical outreach has seldom been this engaging or unstuffy, and more schools are encouraged to win more followers to classical music by pursuing such persuasive means.

The second concert featured one artist in dual roles of pianist and singer. While this is a given in pop music and jazz, it is unheard-of in classical music.

Enter American-Chinese pianist and soprano Chelsea Guo, an undergraduate at New York’s Juilliard School, whose delightful programme centred on the love triangle of Robert Schumann, his wife Clara and their friend Johannes Brahms.

The recital’s first half was all piano, opening with Robert’s Kinderszenen (Scenes From Childhood), musings on juvenile memories rather than didactic pieces for children. Innocence and simplicity were well brought out, the popular Traumerei (Dreaming) and the closing Der Dichter Spricht (The Poet Speaks) being particularly poignant.

Two contrasting Romances, Clara’s Op. 21 No. 1 and Robert’s Op. 28 No. 2, confirmed that she was no less of a serious composer than her husband.

Brahms’ youthful Variations On An Original Theme (Op. 21 No. 1) provided the most technically challenging moments for the fingers, but Guo prevailed.

The second half was all vocal, with Guo multitasking by being her own pianist. In Mir Klingt Ein Lied (In Me Sings A Song) is based on the melody of Frederic Chopin’s Tristesse Etude (Op. 10 No. 3) with the difficult bits left out, a mellifluous prelude to three songs by Clara which revealed far more of Guo’s art as interpreter.

Her German was idiomatic, her tone pure but resolute, paving the way for Robert’s song cycle Frauenliebe Und Leben (Woman’s Love And Life).

To modern sensibilities, the words by Adelbert von Chamisso seem anachronistic and misogynist, that a woman is forever in the thrall of her man. It thus worked best just to pay attention to the music, and Guo expressed in its eight songs a wealth of emotion and colour, her voice never overshadowed by the piano’s rich details and textures.

The recital closed with Robert’s Du Meine Seele (You My Soul), better known as Widmung (Dedication) and written for Clara as a wedding gift, in the showy transcription by Franz Liszt.

That heartrending romp and the Chinese song Moli Hua (Jasmine Flower) as encore brought the house down.