Next week sees an exciting week of chamber music happening at the Esplanade Recital Studio, with a selection of rarely/never-heard quintets by Nordic composers, fusion jazz/anime/film music, and contemporary music. Plink, Plonk, Plunk picks: don’t miss out on these three concerts!
24 May 2015 – Take 5 Piano Quintet: Northern Lights
Explore the mystical lands of Scandinavia in chamber works written for piano quintet by Finnish composer Jean Sibelius and Norwegian composer Christian Sinding. At once grand, intimate and emotional, these pieces evoke the majestically bleak landscapes of the region.
Sinding’s Piano Quintet in E Minor premiered in 1889 and created a sensation by breaking many of the rules of traditional composition. His composition influenced Sibelius to compose Piano Quintet in G Minor the following year, a piece that anticipates his famous orchestral works.
25 May 2015 – Tze Toh: Land with No Sun, PR0MEMOR1A
Jazz pianist and composer Tze Toh presents a mainly-piano concert that pushes boundaries of piano music, bringing together not only various genres from jazz, film score, fusion, classical, Anime soundtracks to the orchestral and textural, but also combines “live” piano performance with sound design.
He has dreamt up a storyline of a futuristic city of 2050 where, because of pollution, humans live in sky-cities because the earth is no longer suitable for living in. Artificial mechanical lifeforms known as Archivists observe and collect data on human beings daily – the memories and dreams. They were built into our new system/society to logically maintain order and progress – a fail-safe to prevent future global conflicts like the last war that devastated the planet, and drove Man from the Earth’s surface to seek a new Utopia in the skies. In this concert, a sequel to his Land With No Sun concert featured earlier, Tze continues to explore themes/issues that affect our world today such loss of natural environments, impact of technology on human evolution and society etc. through his performance.
Joining him are violinists Christina Zhou and Gabriel Lee.
Tickets are available at Peatix at $25, student concessions at $18 available.
27 May 2015 – Quinnuance: Refracting Rituals
When one tries to combine both terms, to refract a ritual, and pass it through a thought process so that it comes out different on the other side, what happens?
Join Quinnuance as they ponder upon life and music in Refracting Rituals to present an evening of varying perspectives.
Quinnuance has been featured in The Straits Times! It erroneously labels Clarence and me as composers, and i’m afraid the only compositions i write for them are made up of words, not music…
So join the real composers of Quinnuance – Alicia, Bernard, Lu Heng and Terrence, along with our conductor Clarence, and musician friends for an evening of music-making: who knows what you’ll discover?
Tickets at $25 from Sistic or the Esplanade box office!
