The programme book describes the inaugural Ong Teng Cheong Concert as a spotlight for "the best and brightest young musicians", which is a heady claim that needs several qualifiers. Firstly, beginning this year, each concert focuses on one instrument and this year's instrument is the piano. Secondly, Sunday night's concert was so dominated by participants (performers and audience) from the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA) that one could be forgiven for thinking that it was a NAFA concert.

The concert began with the premieres of two chamber works by NAFA lecturer-composer Goh Toh Chai. Trios seem to be a very popular format with Singaporean composers, and here Goh's Piano Trio joins the ranks of Kelly Tang's Piano Trio and Ho Chee Kong's Visions of Earthstone which were premiered respectively on 1 April 2001 and 2 April 2002 (no, really).

This was our first experience of Goh's music, and what we liked about his unconventional approach was the absence of preciosity and orthodoxy. As the curtain-raiser, it set the evening's mood for youth and newness. The notes tell us that the Trio was conceived as a student work for four voices - violin, cello and the two hands on a piano. Unfortunately, it ended up sounding, for the most part, more of a two-way exchange between the piano and the two strings. One voice would carry the thematic material, while the other would fill out the aural spaces with rhythm, chords and various interjections, swapping places every so often.

Most people, as it is, already have difficulty following serial music, and the lack of a clear framework to Goh's largely abstract material did not help the bewildered audience very much. The lack of purposeful direction in the Trio compounded the distancing effect on the audience, not to mention a certain (shall we say) lack of musical inventiveness which failed to reward the listener's sense of excitement and anticipation. And all the more so for a contemporary composer, who has license to throw off traditional constraints and is free to use practically any method - not to say gimmick - to engage the listener.

(Left) Ms Sutini Goh, with violinist Kevin Lefohn at the NAFA Commuter Concert.

Not that it was the fault of the student musicians, who played with concentrated, unexaggerated intensity of expression and technical security - pianist Sutini Goh (and not Albert Lin, as the Chairman's welcome message in the programme book suggests) has in fact been previously reviewed by the Inkpot in a NAFA Communter Concert. However, it was hard to make sense of the music from the dense, roiling clouds of overly-elaborate heterophony. But maybe we should forgive the music its flaws, bearing in mind this was a student work. (Well, so was Kelly Tang's Piano Trio, but what a difference between the two!)

Goh's Variations on Rasa Sayang is more recent and indeed received its world premiere at the hands of Albert Lin. Not to sound curmudgeonly, but Variations was not much of an improvement over the Trio. Goh has no shortage of creative ideas in moulding the central theme, but he just doesn't allow himself enough exposition to work those ideas out (let alone play "guess the influence" with the listener). Instead, he is content to tail off each variation into an apparently random and banal juxtaposition of styles and postures. One is reminded of Phoon Yew Tian's Variations on a Transfigured Theme 'Rasa Sayang' (yet another student work), with its imaginative use of tone colours and translucent textures.

Lin was an earnest advocate of this music, tackling it with relish and poise (albeit uncharacteristically reading from score.) It isn't that the Variations make no emotional or technical demands of the pianist, but one needs to ask whether it merited the high-tension voltage and extraordinary amounts of pedal which Lin applied. The result? Excessive swatches of purple prose, and some surprisingly vulgar playing: the variation whimsically called 'Boogie Woogie', for example, seriously lacked a sense of humour.

Goh's music was followed by an hour-long set of five Romantic pieces, four of which were virtuoso transcriptions (and a dead giveaway as to Ms Nellie Seng's intentions of display and spectacle.) Busoni's extravagant pianistic reworking of Bach's Chaconne from the Violin Partita in D minor needs a sense of epic struggle, with its transmutation of textures, sonority and even tempo, in an attempt to realize harmonies which were hinted at but unfulfilled in Bach's original version for violin.

Ms Seng's intensively subjective response, here as well as in the tortuous passages of the Bellini-Liszt Reminiscences de Norma, was to pound away at the keyboard with startling aggressiveness. She smashed her way through fistfuls of chords and stepped up the gas pedal. Her inclination towards over, and in some cases, misplaced, emphasis sacrificed elegance and finesse for a sopoforic haze of percussive sonorities which did not endear.

There were moments of idiomatic poetry and insight, to be sure, none more evident than in the Chopin Ballade and Chopin-Liszt Polish Songs. She left no doubt as to her technical prowess and quality, yet at the same time exhibited a reluctance to let the beauty of the music through. In the final reckoning, her brash approach, coupled with the sheer length of the set, left everyone completely drained of energy by the time she was finished. Sometimes, less is more.

In a strange twist of programming, the second part of the evening was shorter than half the length of the first, with only three works on display. These were shared between sixteen students at NAFA, who came on in ascending order of age, reminiscent of the Raffles City Music Marathon mass displays. And that's not to say anything about the eclectic 'rojak' of a programme - but more on this later.

Reich's Six Pianos received a welcome airing - and especially so soon after the percussion group Nexus's recent visit in 2001, whose members have actually recorded this work with Reich himself (on the DG Classikon label, catalog number 439 431-2.) Reich, as far as the minimalist school goes, is "minimalism with a vengeance": near-insignificant textual alterations streched out over time-spans best measured in twenty-minute chunks, with themes gradually moving in and out of phase, surging back and forth in hypnotic waves. The audience could be forgiven for thinking that six handphone ringtones could be programmed and allowed to just keep ringing and ringing...

The energy level of the playing here was high, with the melodic variation unfolding as a gradual process, but never overwhelming the underlying original theme. But the beauty of Reich's ostinato was in the big picture - listening to Six Pianos is not unlike staring at one of those 3D Magic Eye pictures which were so recently popular, and seeing a copasetic depth-image emerge out of seemingly nothing.

For this effect to be achieved, the tension between the stasis of repetition and the slow evolution of melodic change has to be subtle, so much so as to be unnoticeable. This requires the performers to possess, on one hand, the stamina for iterative exactness and on the other hand, a keen understanding of the layers comprising the architecture of the piece. This was impressively accomplished by the six NAFA wunderkind, all below the age of 12. They were evidently well-rehearsed, playing with precision and keeping up a strong, infectious rhythmic line.

Milhaud's Brazileira and Holst's Jupiter exist in two-piano versions, here augmented to four and six pianos respectively in special arragements by the head of the School of the Young Talents at NAFA, Mdm Fang Yuan. You have to wonder if this was a worthwhile exercise, because the resulting timbre of six concert grands in the reverberance of the auditorium was mind-numbingly syrupy and thick. We'll say this again - less is more.

(Left) Darius Milhaud at the piano.

In both Milhaud and Holst, the tendency was for tempi to be unwaveringly fast. One could sense that the students were uncomfortable with too sharp changes of dynamics or tempo that could throw their ensemble off, even if they all looked determined to bring out their best and put it on display. As a result, in the Brazileira, despite the flurries of notes, pounding dance rhythms and striving melodies, the music lacked the last bit of spontaniety and got nowhere fast. The tendency for the students in Brazileira to nod their heads at the first down-beat of each measure was also very distracting - quaintly eccentric at best, but we hope that this is not how they're being trained to keep in time in chamber playing!

Holst's Jupiter was even more of a travesty. We could live with the selected tempo for the opening allegro giocoso, but was the andante maestoso of the hymn and the lento maestoso of the hymn's recapitulation lost in the transcription to six pianos? Surely, the pianists were not scrambling through the music in order to catch the last 11.55 pm train departing at City Hall MRT Platform 1?

It would be hard to say whether it was their untrammelled enthusiasm, or being assailed by a random smörgåsbord of musical styles and arrangements lumped together, that left everyone dizzy and bereft of energy by evening's end. It is challenging enough (even for experienced audiences) to sit through two hours of chamber and piano music. The lack of thematic unity or programmatic direction is criminal.

As praiseworthy as the Music Box purports to champion "the best and the brightest" of local musicians, the evening's display perhaps says lesser about the student-pianists (with whom we find no issue at all in terms of basic musicianship) than perhaps about the quality of music pedagogy in Singapore. The up-and-coming Singapore Conservatory of Music is certainly going to give NAFA a run for its money.

Picture of Darius Milhaud was obtained from the www.arts-musique-europe.com webpage on Milhaud.

Both Benjamin Chee and Deanne Tan had an earful of music.

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