VCHpresents Chamber: More Than Music, More Than Love

MORE THAN MUSIC, MORE THAN LOVE

20 & 21 JUL 2021, 7:30PM VICTORIA CONCERT HALL

PROGRAMME J.S. BACH Arr. Dmitry SITKOVETSKY Aria from Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 (arranged for String Trio)

4 mins

Loh Jun Hong, violin Dandan Wang, viola Ng Pei-Sian, cello (The HEAD Foundation Chair)

JONATHAN SHIN After Haruki Murakami’s short story “On Seeing The 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning” (Composed 2020, Concert Premiere)

7 mins

Loh Jun Hong, violin Abigail Sin, piano Timothy Wan, narrator

BRAHMS Piano Quartet No. 3 in C minor, Op. 60 I. Allegro non troppo II. Scherzo: Allegro III. Andante IV. Finale: Allegro comodo

40 mins

Loh Jun Hong, violin Dandan Wang, viola Ng Pei-Sian, cello (The HEAD Foundation Chair) Abigail Sin, piano

CONCERT DURATION: approximately 1 hour 15 mins

MORE THAN MUSIC

More Than Music is a chamber music concert series founded in 2013 by two of Singapore’s top young musicians, violinist Loh Jun Hong and pianist Abigail Sin. More than Music combines their commitment to artistic excellence and extensive experience as performing artists with the belief that classical music should be fun, meaningful and all about connecting with people.

More than Music concerts reimagines the classical music concert experience by bringing both the music and the performers to the audience in an intimate manner. Instead of remaining silent and standing far off, the performers speak directly to the audience, sharing their own stories about the pieces and the lives of the composers whose works they have chosen to bring to life.

More Than Music concerts create an engaging and convivial atmosphere, inviting audiences to encounter and experience classical music in a more personal way, bringing world-class chamber music performances to new audiences, up close and personal.

ABIGAIL SIN piano

Singaporean pianist Abigail Sin’s musical journey has taken her to concert venues across the globe, from the Aram Khachaturian Concert Hall in Yerevan to Wigmore Hall in London. A top prize winner of several international piano competitions, she is an alumnus of the prestigious Verbier Festival Academy and is a Young Steinway Artist.

Abigail is the co-founder of the More Than Music concert series in Singapore, which aims to bring classical chamber music to new audiences. In 2020, More Than Music recorded and released video performances of the complete Beethoven Violin Sonatas, along with educational outreach content.

A recipient of the Lee Kuan Yew Scholarship, Abigail completed a PhD at the Royal Academy of Music, where she studied with Prof Christopher Elton. In July 2018, Abigail joined the academic faculty of the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music in Singapore.

LOH JUN HONG violin

DANDAN WANG viola

Singaporean violinist Loh Jun Hong is a founder of “More than Music” and has served as co-Artistic Director of the 2015 Singapore International Festival of Music.

Dandan Wang started her violin studies at the age of six. When she was 16, she switched to viola studies with Prof.

Xi-Di Shen. In 2010 she started her undergraduate studies in the Shanghai Conservatory of Music with scholarship.

A graduate of the Juilliard School and Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, NUS, Jun Hong’s performance track record ranges from performances in Lincoln Center, New York, to solo recitals in France, UK, Germany, New Zealand, Hong Kong and China, to leading the Verbier Festival Orchestra as associate concertmaster, in Switzerland, under the baton of Charles Dutoit, Daniel Harding, Valery Gergiev and Gianandrea Noseda.

He has won numerous awards, including notably the Top Outstanding Young Person Award for Cultural Achievement by Junior Chamber International & First Prize at Gisborne International Music Competition. He is a part-time lecturer at YST Conservatory and plays on a 1726 Mezzadri from the Rin Collection.

In 2015, she was invited by well-known Chinese Composer Tan Dun to perform his chamber music pieces in Shanghai and Beijing.

In July of 2016, she was admitted to Pacific Music Festival, one of the most famous festivals in the world. She also served as Principal Viola and performed with Maestro Valery Gergiev and violinist Leonidas Kavakos.

In 2016, after graduating from San Francisco Conservatory, Dandan was a guest violist for the San Francisco Symphony and at the same time, a fellow musician of the San Jose opera Dandan has served as a violist tutti in the Singapore Symphony Orchestra since February 2018, and as a coach in the Singapore National Youth Orchestra.

NG PEI-SIAN cello Pei-Sian performed in important music festivals including the Brighton, Edinburgh, Manchester International Cello Festival, Kronberg Academy, and performed chamber music with artists including Yo-Yo Ma, ChoLiang Lin, Renaud Capuçon, Alina Ibragimova and the Borodin Quartet.

Ng Pei-Sian was Commonwealth Musician of the Year in 2007, winner of the Gold Medal and First Prize at the 55th Royal Over-Seas League Music Competition held in London.

He has performed concertos with major Australian symphony orchestras, Singapore Symphony, Collegium Musicum Basel, Estonian National Symphony, Hong Kong Philharmonic, and performed around the world in venues including Royal Festival Hall, Wigmore Hall, Konzerthaus (Berlin), Lincoln Centre and Carnegie Hall.

Born in Sydney in 1984, he began studies in Adelaide with Barbara Yelland and later with Janis Laurs at the Elder Conservatorium of Music before completing his studies at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester under Ralph Kirshbaum where he recieved the RNCM Gold Medal.

Pei-Sian is currently Principal Cellist, The HEAD Foundation Chair, of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra and a faculty member at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, Singapore. He performs on a 1764 Giovanni Antonio Marchi cello, Bologna.

TIMOTHY WAN narrator

Timothy Wan graduated from the National University of Singapore in 2013. He has since been involved in the English and Mandarin theatre scene locally, and counts himself very fortunate to have had the chance to work with many likeminded individuals and companies in the arts. In addition to his involvement in the theatre scene, he is also an avid musician and singer, as well as regularly being engaged as an emcee and host for various events. He firmly believes art is an avenue for bringing people together to engage and dialogue.

PROGRAMME NOTES Music, like many forms of art, provides us with a means of temporarily escaping reality. As we listen to a piece of music, we are invited to step into a fantasy world, which may sometimes give voice to narratives that mirror our own or allow us to glimpse experiences beyond our own lived realities. In a live concert, we gather to share these dreams together, emerging transformed by the journey.

The pieces that we have chosen for this programme are dear to our heart.

They each explore the fragile beauty of our human existence while yearning for something more. We are delighted to share these dreams with you tonight.

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685 - 1750) Aria from Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 (arr. Sitkovetsky) The Goldberg Variations earned their nickname from an anecdote of dubious origin by Bach’s early biographer Johann Nikolaus Forkel, who suggested that the variations were commissioned by a Count to be performed by his young harpsichordist, Johann Gottlieb Goldberg as a cure for the Count’s insomnia. Bach’s original title page introduces the work as “Keyboard Exercise, consisting of an Aria, with diverse variations for harpsichord with two manuals, prepared to delight the souls of music-lovers.”

This description underscores the conviction held by Bach, and many other composers, of the power of music to communicate on a spiritual level as well as to provide everyday entertainment.

The Aria of the Goldberg Variations is one of the most beloved melodies in the repertoire. Deceptively simple yet exquisitely intricate, it beguiles the ear while capturing a sense of wide-eyed wonder at the sublime.

Violinist Dmitry Sitkovetsky’s brilliant string trio arrangement, published in 1985 to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Bach’s birth and dedicated to the memory of the celebrated pianist Glenn Gould, has allowed a new generation of musicians and music-lovers to listen to this masterpiece in a new light.

JONATHAN SHIN (b. 1992) After Murakami’s “On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning” The Japanese expression mono-noaware (物の哀れ) is famously hard to translate. The closest approximation is a feeling that lies between “nostalgia, melancholia, a yearning for times past, and a respect for the transient.”

(Tokyo Weekender) Some translations offer “the ahh-ness of things” or “the awareness of the ephemeral nature of things.” (Berkley Center) In a lot of Japanese media, mono-no-aware is portrayed as a pervading, bone-deep sense of a wistful acceptance that things come and go, and that’s that.

One of the essences of the piano is that every note begins to decay from the first moment of its existence. There is no exception to this law: a note can never

grow louder after it is depressed. A bowed instrument, conversely, can hold a note virtually indefinitely; the note can grow louder or stay the same in intensity. Each piano note rings the impermanent fate of all things, and every note on the violin perseveres against this fate.

When More than Music approached me with the commission to set a text to music, it was this potential conversation/contrasts of essences, this specific “ahh-ness” that recalled to me the deep poignancy of my first Haruki Murakami story.”

(Notes by the composer, Jonathan Shin) JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833 - 1897) Piano Quartet No. 3 in C minor, Op. 60 I. Allegro non troppo II. Scherzo: Allegro III. Andante IV. Finale: Allegro comodo It is often tempting to draw links between the personal lives of famous composers and their music which we play and get to know intimately for ourselves. The lush, brooding music of Johannes Brahms is ripe for such flights of imagination, particularly with regards to his close relationship with Clara Schumann, the wife of his close friend Robert Schumann. The speculation over whether Brahms’s deep affection for Clara was ever romantic in nature, or indeed reciprocated, has fuelled endless discussions about “Clara” motifs in his music and hidden messages that reveal his longing and emotional torment.

With the Piano Quartet in C minor, Brahms himself suggested, somewhat sardonically, in a letter to his publisher that the quartet was a musical depiction of the protagonist from Goethe’s novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Goethe’s character Werther is driven to despair over his unrequited love for his friend’s wife - a scenario with striking similarities to Brahms’ situation with the Schumanns. Even if one chooses not to read melodramatic narratives into the Piano Quartet in C minor, it is undeniably one of Brahms’s finest compositions, an arresting, passionate work brimming with Romantic ardour.

The first movement launches us into a world of pathos and drama, opening with a resounding octave in the piano on the tonic note C, followed by an anguished, falling motif in the strings.

A contrasting lyrical theme in E-flat major offers consolation and stirrings of hope. The second movement is a turbo-charged Scherzo that pulsates with powerful, driving rhythms. A heartwrenchingly beautiful cello melody ushers us into the Andante third movement. It is an oasis of tenderness in this emotionally turbulent quartet, a daydream of perfect, unattainable bliss.

The finale features soaring melodies over restless, anxious accompaniment figurations, seething with relentless intensity right up to the brusque, defiant ending.

Notes by Abigail Sin (except where indicated)

SINGAPORE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Founded in 1979, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra (SSO) is Singapore’s flagship orchestra, touching lives through classical music and providing the heartbeat of the cultural scene in the cosmopolitan citystate. Our Chief Conductor is Hans Graf.

While the SSO performs frequently at the Esplanade Concert Hall, for a more intimate experience, we return to the place of our beginnings, the Victoria Concert Hall (VCH) – the home of the SSO. The VCH is host to our popular Children’s, Family and biannual free Lunchtime Concerts as well as our VCHpresents chamber series.

HANS GRAF Chief Conductor

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