OVERALL NOISE RATING: 1 (a rapt and quiet audience)

The Noise Rating Index is a partially objective measurement of pagerblasts, 9pm and 10pm watch beeps, coughing-during-the-pianissimo-bits and other really inapt noises emitted in the concert hall during the music itself. It is measured on a scale of 0 to 5, in increasing annoyance.

This review has been kindly sponsored by The Substation.

Prior to this concert I have only heard of but never actually heard Seow Yit Kin play, a little testament to the irony that most (all?) of our native best musicians are rarely heard at home. Called "most wonderful" by Arthur Rubenstein, invited to study in London by Lord Yehudi Menuhin at the age of twelve, trained with Nadia Boulanger and Vlado Perlemuter, and winner at the BBC Piano Competition at the age of 19 - if you missed this recital, make sure you don't miss his performance of Beethoven's 4th piano concerto with the SSO and Shui Lan this coming January 10th and 11th.

There is an elemental quality to Seow's playing. It is not merely unforced, effortless but wholly natural - flowing, wandering, shining and even 'breaking' like water. Fluid, it flows where it has to flow, and one cannot say that it should or should not be there. In a way, Seow's pianism is unassuming, letting the music speak for itself and yet, it subtly draws the human with it into rhapsodic rivers and brooks of luminous invocation.

Seow's rendition of the Beethoven Variations struck me with its completely natural unity - each variation flows into the next, the silent pauses like a wisp of mist through which we pass between them. The whole again like water, variations departing and rejoining, different tributaries yet the same river, the same water. His pianism is simply unforced. With Seow, contrasts between loud and soft chords never jar. His performance of Schubert's D784, "The Tragic" seemed to me to emphasise the rhapsodic than the "tragic", capturing more of the quality of "The Wanderer over a Sea of Mist", combined with the unmistakable Schubertian lyricism which was magic - or rather a natural wonder - in Seow's hands.

This rhapsodic element, this spontaneous ability to allow the music to unfold in the most unaffected way which I cannot emphasise enough, is surely most fitting of French music. One of Seow's three encores was Debussy's Claire de Lune, which from its first two notes was simply magical all the way. His playing infused the air, like a shimmering field of colour suspended above a Monet canvas; the Impressionistic colours floated like a mist of light in the CHIJMES Hall, intangible to the physical hand, indescribable by pen. Delicate, but never sentimentalised.

Chia Han-Leon does not play the piano. To the lovely Lesley and Evelyn - if you're reading this, thanks for holding our tickets!

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