Saturday, September 4, 2010
A Musical Trail
Музыкальное Путешествие
DATE & TIME3 September 2010 (Friday), 7.30pm
VENUEEsplanade Recital Studio
PERFORMERSong Ziliang
piano
PROGRAMMEBACH-BUSONI - Chaconne in D minor
BRAHMS - Intermezzi, Op. 117
CHOPIN - Balladein F minor, Op. 52
RAVEL - Valses Nobles et Sentimentales
SCRIABIN - Piano Sonata No. 5 in F#, Op. 53
DENISE LEE - Within the Horizon (2009)
Singaporean pianist Song Ziliang presents an evening of piano music with works ranging from the monumental Bach-Busoni Chaconne in D minor to Scriabin's mercurial Fifth Sonata. Also featured is local composer Denise Lee’s Within the Horizon (2009).
A graduate of the Royal College of Music (London) where he studied with Gordon Fergus-Thompson, Ziliang started playing the piano at the age of 4. After completing his O-levels, Ziliang served out his military service and left for Russia where he entered the Moscow Conservatory to study under the tutelage of Mikhail Petukhov. Whilst in Russia, Ziliang was featured in Channel U's Find me a Singaporean.
A prize-winner at the National Piano and Violin Competition 2001 and the XI International Nikolai Rubinstein Piano Competition 2008 in Paris, Ziliang has recently begun exploring the piano duo genre, performing most notably with Russian pianist Alexander Romanovsky at the RCM and Japanese pianist Chikako Murata at the Esplanade Concourse.
Firmly believing in bringing music to the masses, Ziliang frequently performs outreach concerts in venues ranging from The Arts House to the Tan Tock Seng Hospital, often juxtaposing pop with popular classics. He has also participated in charity concerts and proceeds from his last solo recital in 2008 were donated to the education fund of the National Museum, Singapore.
In September 2010, Ziliang will resume his studies (embarking on the Masters in Music programme) at the RCM under the sponsorship of Trailblazer Foundation. Join him in this musical trail through Singapore, Russia and United Kingdom!
I am terribly behind on my backlog of concert reviews (with one more upcoming tomorrow -_-) so I figured I will start with this most recent one.
The reason that I ended up going to this concert was pretty much a series of fortunate coincidences. When I went to watch Denise at the NPVC 2009, I happened to meet Ziliang, who was performing on the same day. Anyway time flew past and before I knew it, I was attending an ArtsSphere concert 7 months later with Lynn. Ziliang was there too and recognised me from that brief introduction long ago, and so I was invited to the concert!
Well actually, I did tell Ziliang not to give me a complimentary ticket and that I would buy one, but he must've thought I was just being polite HAHAhaa. So I ended up giving my paid-for ticket to my nice twin Lynn and that was how two of us managed to watch the concert.
My boss was so pleased that we were going to the concert after she read the pieces on the concert in Life! and zaobao. She even came to my office to ask if I knew 'these two musicians' (Denise and Ziliang).
The concert was interspersed with vocal introductions of the pieces by Ziliang, in both English and Russian. He was really quite fluent with the language, which was impressive, considering it's not a 'popular' language around these parts. It's the first time I've heard Russian properly, I think, so the novelty probably made it easier to get over the fact that 99% of the audience couldn't understand a thing he was saying.
I must say that Ziliang really brought the house down with the Scriabin piece. It was executed impressively. GREAT techniques! Though that was just how it sounded to my untrained, no-contemporary-music ear. Yes, I will get insomnia if I listen to that piece again, but nevertheless I can see why he said his friends wanted 'to come and see [him] die' over that piece. It's the most devilishy tricky piece. He seems to show a great affinity for contemporary works, looking at how they took up half of the programming.
The Chopin was another of my favourites, and it really showed off the strength of his piano techniques. I think Lynn and I had our jaws hanging after he polished off the ending with a series of sparkling running broken chords.
I was really looking forward to the Bach-Busoni, and I'm sorry to say that it was a little disappointing. It was a bad mistake to use the sostenuto pedal for any Baroque-style piece, and even more of a mistake to use it for the running scales. You can't avoid using the pedal, but to me it just sounded like it was being used too much. It just sounded like a barrage of smudged notes instead of the usual clean sounds. I couldn't really hear the counterpoint of much of the rich texture that is Bach over the cacophony.
Or maybe it was the acoustics of the studio, the pedal probably might have worked somewhere else less echo-ey.
That was just the one point that I disliked. Ziliang does seem to rely a tad too heavily on the pedal, to the point where whenever he ends a song, he releases his fingers first and relies on the pedal to hang on the the last sounds of the song before releasing the pedal. I've always told my students that the fingers should always control the sounds, and not anything external, and to hang on to the keys and screw the pedal if push comes to shove, so this is really odd. Maybe it's just me.
The turnout for the concert was excellent. It was almost a full house, I think.
It's great to see Singaporean pianists from my generation starting to lead the next wave of artistic talent. Makes me wonder if our bleak Singaporean pianistic scene will see some revival yet.
Omnia mutantur
11:44 PM
