2019-27

7 Jun 2019, 7.30pm

Esplanade Concert Hall
Eric Lu & Yu-Chien Tseng
Singapore Symphony Orchestra

“There are great pianists. There are renowned pianists. And then there is Martha
Argerich.” A mildly cheesy marketing tagline by the SSO, but it nonetheless summed
up my decision making in early Apr 2019. I made a yolo decision and embraced the
wild abandonment of ‘youth’, throwing caution to the wind and purchased tickets
for all three concerts, despite having a professional exam the week after. The
cancellation of her concerts was a sore disappointment, but I can’t say that I wasn’t
mildly relieved that I have two additional half-days for more knowledge cramming.

Yet, with a tagline such as this, one could only imagine the aftermath of the
cancellation, almost a week before the concerts began. Think about the
inconvenience to overseas patrons - didn’t the curator brag about the diversity of
the audience and how far people have flown into Singapore to watch Martha
Argerich, prior to the start of the concerts last year? Think about the unsold
merchandise that the SSO marketing team had to contend with - these were
thoughtfully curated, and might even be better recordings than many of the soloists
we had the chance to witness in Singapore, but the sad truth is that the best
marketing campaign for merchandise sales in an era of music streaming was a live
performance by the musician himself.

It was a very healthy turnout for a concert that was only put up for sale for a total of
172.5 hours. With none of my friends whom I said “See you at Argerich” turning up, I
nonetheless showed up for the concert, because two concertos in one night by two
separate soloists was a rare opportunity.

The evening began very sombrely in Rachmaninoff’s tone poem Isle of the Dead.
While one would have encountered the composer’s obsession with the Dies Irae
motif in many of his other works, none of them would have adequately
foreshadowed and prepared me for the bleakness of this work. It was a truly
transcendental experience to listen live to one of Rachmaninoff’s symphonic
masterpieces.

21 year old Eric Lu, winner of the 2018 Leeds International Piano Competition, was
the soloist for Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1. His reading veered on the side of
sentimentality and romanticism, which caused a bit of problems with the orchestra
unable to match his tempo changes in parts of the 1st and 3rd movements.
Nonetheless, his acute sense of tempo rubato was matched by his excellent nifty
fingerwork, that the tempo changes never felt abrupt or overwrought. The highlight
was the Romanze, where he coaxed the most evocative and loving melody out of the
piano.
As an icing on the cake, Lu’s sublime and introspective encore in Brahms’ Intermezzo
in A Major, Op. 118 No. 2 was adequate evidence that he was on a trajectory to
becoming a renowned musician, and he can only get better with age and a greater
variety of life experiences.

Despite having watched the 24 year old top prize winner of the 2015 International
Tchaikovsky Competition twice in Singapore (Tchaikovsky concerto with the Hong
Kong Sinfonietta; Tyzen Hsiao concerto with the National Taiwan Symphony
Orchestra), this was only my first time witnessing Tseng Yu-Chien in action with the
SSO, having missed his 2015 competition win in the Sibelius concerto and his 2015
performance of Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy.

The Brahms Violin Concerto is perhaps a tough nut to crack, with it requiring the
most astute of violinistic abilities but yet sounding extremely unvirtuosic at times.
While Tseng’s interpretation was less fiery and more introspective than expected, I
found myself surprisingly endeared to what must be an excellent partnership and
collaboration between the soloist and orchestra. There were nonetheless still
moments for Tseng’s virtuosity to come through - the Joachim cadenza and the
ebullient third movement stood out in particular.

And in Tseng’s encore, Francisco Tárrega’s Recuerdos de la Alhambra arranged for

violin solo by Ruggiero Ricci, one gets to grips with Tseng’s growth as an artist in the
last 3 years.

What a night it was to witness these two young musicians! They have undoubtedly
shown that classical music still has its place and following with the younger
generations.