Discounting the bastardisation of the association with the Popular Bookstore commercials, Vivaldi's Four Seasons is a masterpiece in composition, with the aural-visual link so perfectly crafted with attention to detail that the very depictions of nature leap out of the pages.

Tonight's Gala Concert featured American-Korean violinist Sarah Chang as ( Read more... )

It does not bode well when you cannot recollect when or what was the last performance of a piece of music you caught, and so it was that dontlikeyou and I left the concert at intermission with this cloud of doubt over our minds. Yes, let the record state that it has recently become habit for us to only stay for what we want to listen to, instead of sitting ( Read more... )

This evening at the SSO Gala titled after the star soloist, French violinist Renaud Capucon, was one for the archives, with a close-to-perfection reading of the warhorse that is the Beethoven Violin Concerto ( Read more... )

You win some, you lose some. Over two evenings this weekend, the Academy of St Martin in the Fields with director and soloist Joshua Bell presented two imperfect programmes to close the Singapore Arts Festival. Last evening had the more substantial Beethoven Symphony No 7 as the meat and potatoes with the beloved Mendelssohn Violin Concerto as the ( Read more... )

In continuation.

After the intermission, Joshua Bell returned to the fold, the piano bench reappearing in position. Some brainstorming for the possible favoritism alighted upon the possibility that the bench may be a necessity where the backless frame may be to facilitate movement, as one witnessed with vigorous lurches forward and lunges backward ( Read more... )

The concert was late in starting. Something one has not come to expect at the Esplanade. However, this evening's Singapore Arts Festival presentation of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields with Joshua Bell was something one had been waiting for months since March, so what was a couple more minutes' delay ( Read more... )

True to and living up to his name, Leonidas Kavakos was lionised by the crowds with a reception fit for a king at the close of the evening on Friday's SSO concert. The Greek violinist was soloist in Brahms' Violin Concerto and generously deigned to accord two encores to appease and reward the appreciative audience. Talk about throwing the ( Read more... )

You would be forgiven for thinking SSO first violinist Jin Li was a bit strange, sitting at the fringe of the section by himself usually, heretic by inference, hermetic by choice. However, his resume boasts impressive credentials that his colleagues would envy, among them having been under the tutelage of the late great Menuhin. So it is then that ( Read more... )

It sounds effortless... He makes it look effortless...

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With Itzhak Perlman, it is probably effortless...

When in London some years back, one of my favourite stops during the day would be Covent Garden, and not the Opera House mind, but just the market piazza where buskers, usually music students, are literally out to earn a buck or two ( Read more... )