Brilliant young pianist / Can NY critics be wrong?

Seventeen-year old Beah Darda C. Gumarang, already a Bachelor of Music degree holder in Piano Performance, gave a junior recital at the Fleur-de-lis Theater under the auspices of the St. Paul U. College of Music and the Performing Arts headed by Dean Sr. Anunciata Sta. Ana.

Initially, I was begging off from Sr. A’s invitation, the recital being non-professional. But I was enticed by the fact that Beah, a prize-winner in three local competitions at this early stage, had further essayed the formidable Shostakovich Concerto with the MMCO in 2005.

Poised and confident, the young pianist profoundly impressed the audience with her digital facility and skill, her strength that belied an unusually small, slight frame, her keen musicianship, and an expressivity both inherent and cultivated. Her singular grace in performance called to mind that of Cristine Coyuito, the pianists’ pianist.

Beah conveyed a firm grasp of style in the three-movement Concerto of the contrapuntal master Bach; she demonstrated grace and elegance in Haydn’s Sonata No. 48 in C Major, brio in Liszt’s concert etudes and a sensuous evocation of the sea, liquid and flowing, in Debussy’s Reflets dans l’eau.

Jose V. Rodis’ "Music Box" was delightful and charming, as though the "Planting Rice" melody were indeed delicately emanating from a music box. There was "togetherness" between Beah and Ruth Quiñones (the latter performing on a second grand piano) in Liszt’s Concerto No. 22 in A Major, the two generating excitement as they filled the hall with solid chordal sounds, these befitting the typically bombastic and florid piece.

Beah is assured of a brilliant future — if she perseveres.

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Organizer of "Adeste Fideles", Eddie Yap, more than being an avid music aficionado, is among the cognoscenti who are au courant even with the musical scene abroad. Eddie sent me a recent New York Times review by Sheila Melvin of Tan Hun’s "The First Emperor" as presented at the Metropolitan Opera House. The male lead was no less than tenor Placido Domingo.

Judging from Melvin’s write-up, the performance was a battle between the critic whose reviews were derogatory and even harsh — e.g., one wrote that the score was "an enormous disappointment " — and the audiences which filled the house throughout the entire nine-performance run, with every standing room space occupied, and ladies in fur coats pleading for extra tickets on closing night.

Melvin herself opined: "The work is indeed a milestone for its creators, Chinese culture and ‘coalescence’ — but also for the Met, which is striving to diversify its offerings and reach a broader audience, and for opera in general.

"It successfully humanizes the oft-told tale of Qin Shi Huang — the cruel but farseeing emperor who unified China in 221 B.C., built the Great Wall, buried alive dissident scholars, and was himself interred in a massive tomb surrounded by an army of terra cotta soldiers — by essentially turning it into a family drama, even as it explores such abiding themes as the nature of power and the power of music.

"It is aurally and visually exciting with music that is neither Eastern nor Western, but an organic juxtaposition of the two, and singing and acting techniques drawn from both Chinese and Western opera."

Composer-conductor Tan, retrieving an anthology called Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers Since Beethoven’s Time edited by Nicolas Slonimsky, quoted a review declaring the finale of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony ‘dull and ugly . . . stupid and hopelessly vulgar’.

Tan concluded: "History will have to choose between audiences and critics. And what I learned from this book is that history chooses audiences." Melvin surmised: "If Tan is correct, a future edition of Musical Invective may one day include excerpts from the many reviews that tried to bury his First Emperor.

"In the opera, drummers onstage strike huge red Chinese drums with stones, and tap glazed ceramic pots with sticks, choristers slap their thighs, and pit musicians shout and sing. Emissaries from Western and Chinese opera — mezzo-sopranos singing in English (Michelle De Young and Ning Liang and a Peking opera performer (Wu Hsing-Kuo) singing Chinese that morphs into nonsensical sound words — flit in and out of the drama as though weaving and unweaving the two traditions."

Thus did Melvin further describe the opera which audiences loved. Could the critics have been wrong?