Making one's debut in a country with a piano recital can be a risky affair – you don't have the support or distraction that a concerto appearance allows and the recital can often lead to your being invited again immediately or never again.

Last year Singapore heard a second prize winner of the Van Cliburn Competition, Valery Kuleshov in a splendid recital that will long be remembered. This year, the Crystal (third) prize winner of the twelvth Van Cliburn made her mark in a recital of Beethoven, Chopin and Liszt.

Sa Chen's debut performance started with Beethoven's Tempest Sonata, a risky affair for such a well-known sonata that one is bound to be compared with others, yet it is by no means easy to interpret.

The first movement started off strongly and was a nuanced reading, a Romantic view with rhetorical pauses and agogic tempo changes in the best Schnabelian mould, though it risked highlighting the episodic element of the music rather than its structure.

Sometimes momentum was sacrificed in favour of fantasy, a quality that extended into the lyrical second movement Adagio, whose highlight was the beautiful singing tone of Sa Chen's playing and was equally romantic. The last movement, with its famous melody, could have benefited from slightly more forcefulness of expression. It was very refined, well-behaved Beethoven, a portrait that may differ from what we hear of his playing nowadays.

The five Chopin waltzes, rarely programmed into recitals (they are usually spared for encore pieces), formed an interesting second set of pieces, though honestly they seemed a little remote from the world of Beethoven. Starting off with the fifth, Sa Chen used a little more sustain pedal here, before compensating for  the reverberant acoustic later and using less. Here was Chopin at his most elegant. No surfeit of emotion here, just very straightforwardly played, though still very muscular. The C-sharp minor waltz could hardly be more beautifully played, appropriately somber and with melancholy always just below the surface. You might even say this was Chopin played like Mozart. Only in the famous Minute waltz was the glitter and be gay aspect of Chopin lacking it was a poker-faced performance that missed the playful nature of the music.

The Polonaise-Fantasie was on different league from what had come before, Chen's technique confident and reassured. Nebullious and poetic, Chen is right at home in the fantasy element of music and her performance was thoroughly engaging.

The second half of the concert as a whole continued on the same high level as the Polonaise-Fantasie. Starting with her friend Chen Xiao Han 's Four Excerpts from Flowers and Paintings – a musical compendium of compositional technique – here reminiscent of Debussy, there a hint of Messiaen, she made short work of her fellow pianist's composition, making perfectly natural the pentatones, bird-calls and unusual upper-register sonorities what might have seemed forced in lesser hands.

Albeniz's Un Corpus en Seville from Iberia was next, and Sa Chen's playing here was absolutely ravishing.  Always refined, crystalline, with carefully graduated dynamic variations, it was as far as a flamboyant interpretation as can be imagined, staying studiously away from virtuoso display while still encompassing a large array of colours. Episodes in the music were nevertheless delineated carefully,forming a continuous musical narrative.

Rarely heard because of its difficulty, Liszt's Spanish Rhapsody is a blockbuster textbook of technical difficulties found in his music – a monster of a piece that can have you for breakfast if you're not careful. No fears of Sa Chen ending up as anyone's meal here - she surmounted the magnificently, showing again a strong dramatic profile, while never resorting to vulgarity to prove a point. The trouble about much of Liszt is that it needs a really virtuoso, secure technique to get all the notes before the music can speak – something Sa Chen achieved effortlessly. In her strong musicality, she reminded me of Lazar Berman, though no-one listening to Sa Chen would mistake her for a Russian pianist. Her performance, flawless and astonishinglyeffortless, was alone worth the price of entry for the concert.

In ending off, Chen presented a bewitching account of the Chinese classic "Autumn Moon on a Calm Lake" – Ping Hu Qiu Yue – replete with shimmering arpeggios, presumably to calm the nerves of the excited audience. Disappointingly, only one encore was featured, but given the length and difficulty of the recital, perhaps not unexpected. Sa Chen converts will be able to catch her with the SSO later this year.

By Derek Lim

 

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