Christina McEwan
IT MAY be seven years since Singaporean-born British pianist Melvyn Tan last played with the CPO (it was Schumann in 2009), but he has kept his ties with the country, visiting friends in Cape Town several times on holiday in the intervening years. He is back via Linz now on business – to play Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto in G minor with the CPO on May 12. And he is delighted to be playing not only with the CPO but in Cape Town’s “lovely City Hall”.
For Tan, life doesn’t stand still. He has just completed four years as artist in residence at the Singapore’s Yong Siew Toh Conservatory but still goes back to play and provide master classes to talented pianists. He is also closely involved as an advisor to young musicians forming chamber music groups. After his Cape Town concert (he also plays in Durban) he will be back to Singapore, this time performing with the Singapore Chinese orchestra and playing the Ravel G minor concerto, arranged for Chinese instruments. “It will really be interesting,” he says, to do this. “The work lends itself to this sort of arrangement, for it is quite eastern in concept. What is also interesting is that both kinds of music survive very well in Singapore, and many audience members enjoy both kinds of music.
“Singapore is a very special country,” he says. “It is prosperous, democratic, and the government supports the arts, unlike Malaysia which has seen huge problems in the composition of orchestras with foreigners being tossed out.”
Tan is looking to celebrate a “big” birthday in October, when he will turn 60. “I am delighted to be celebrating this with a new piece written for me by Jonathan Dove, a leading British composer. I will be taking it on your to Holland, Singapore, Melbourne, Adelaide after its premiere in the Cheltenham Festival in the UK in July.
Tan is very busy, and based as he is in London he is spending much time working especially in the UK with many recitals and concerts, and he does coach some students privately. He says he doesn’t get much time to play the fortepiano, which was what helped establish his name internationally. He actually played on Beethoven’s own Broadwood fortepiano of 1817 once.
What also established his name was a series of performances and CDs – all the Beethoven concerti, for one – with Sir Roger Norrington and the London Classical Players. While on CDs, he has a new one coming out in September. “It’s based on the master-pupil theme… Beethoven taught Czerny who taught Lizst so it runs from Beethoven’s last set of Bagatelles and Sonata op 109 to Lizst’s B minor sonata, with the E-flat variations by Czerny in between. It also includes the funeral march Czerny wrote for Beethoven’s funeral which wasn’t actually heard at the funeral but later!”
Tan has been acclaimed for the wit and poetry of his playing and praised by The Guardian as being “among the most thoughtful, elegant and refined of pianists”. He moved from Singapore to England at the age of 12 to enter the Yehudi Menuhin School and later the Royal College of Music. He has appeared as recitalist, chamber musician and concerto soloist at many of the world’s leading concert halls, from the Amsterdam Concertgebouw and London’s Wigmore Hall to New York’s Lincoln Center, and at the Salzburg and Edinburgh festivals. He has performed with such prestigious ensembles as the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Academy of St Martin’s in the Fields, the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, Salzburg’s Camerata and Mozarteum orchestras, Melbourne Symphony, Manchester Camerata and Southbank Sinfonia and on tour with the Australian Chamber Orchestra.
Arjan Tien will be back in Cape Town to conduct this Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra concert which also features Puccini’s Capriccio sinfonico and the Second Symphony in D by Brahms.
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