REVIEW: "Vigorous, meaty, scintillating" - Julian Chan at the Festival of Chichester

Festival of Chichester Music 2024 (42 concerts) – at Christ Church, concerts 6 and 10.

Friday 21 June (7pm): Julian Chan piano – ‘Home and Abroad’:

Debussy, Estampes (Prints), L 100: Pagodes, La soirée dans Grenade (Granada Evening), Jardins sous la pluie (Gardens in the Rain).

Lysenko, Ukrainian Rhapsody No 2 (1877).

Liszt, Venezia e Napoli S 162: Gondoliera, Canzone, Tarantella.

All three works introduced verbally, then played with no significant pause between.

Godowsky, Java Suite: I. Gamelan; II. Wayang-Purwa, Puppet Shadow Plays; III. Hari Besaar, The Great Day; IV. Chattering Monkeys at the Sacred Lake of Wendit; V. Boro Budur in Moonlight; VI. The Bromo Volcano and the Sand Sea at Daybreak; VII. Three Dances; VIII. The Gardens of Buitenzorg; IX. In the Streets of Old Batavia; X. In the Kraton; XI. The Ruined Water Castle at Djokja; XII. A Court Pageant in Solo.

Sunday 23 June (3.30 no interval): Mera Trio – Izzy Howard violin, George Strivens horn, Julian Chan piano:

Dame Ethel Smyth (arr Ethel Smyth), Concerto for Violin, Horn & Orchestra – Allegro Moderato; Elegy (in Memoriam) Adagio; Finale, Allegro.

Johannes Brahms, Horn Trio – Andante, Scherzo (Allegro), Adagio mesto, Allegro con brio. No interval.

Vigorous and meaty, scintillating and gripping, dynamically transportive. Julian Chan is young, emerging, and from Malaysia. Not only in listening pulse rate, in artistic contribution he set the bar high in artistic contribution for the Festival of Chichester’s 32 classical offerings following his own two concerts in three days.

Chan even flagged up this coming Saturday afternoon’s music in Priory Park with his extensive exposition on Javanese gamelan’s mesmeric south east Asian effect on imaginative Western classical piano composers. On Friday, he showcased two such pioneering explorers. Chan used Claude Debussy’s French mini-masterpiece, his familiar Pagodes, as foretaste to a maxi-opus majoring on the gamelan subject, composed by a Lithuanian-American, Leopold Godowsky – the dozen oriental sound pictures, in western paint, of his stamina-testing and rarely-performed Java Suite.

Chan’s a considerable virtuoso himself, already, befriending technical and artistic challengers others might sidestep – Charles Valentin Alkan or Olivier Messiaen, for instance – and guided by Ian Fountain and Michael Dussek at the Royal Academy of Music.

He unfolded Debussy’s triptych in feel and colour with a viewpoint on Pagodes that was panoramically expansive. Then Spanish dancing his way through Granada town after its cautionary Sunday-morning bells, then drenching his audience in the cascading deluge of a Normandy garden in thunder and rain. From then on, Chan had his audience gladly hanging onto the handrails for the ride.

He brought Mykola Lysenko’s Ukrainian Rhapsody No 2, not only with rumbustious, rougher-hewn dancing sounding a long way from Granada – in boots, not shoes – but also releasing sweeter, less smoky or sweaty and more filigree, romantic strains. A breakneck finish rounded off a piece Chan was reading off an iPad, but then it was back to his own mega memory and a ‘small matter’ of Liszt in Italy, on pilgrimage, in Venice and Naples.

Chan let us lean back in the boat on the gurgling, lapping, eddying canal and enjoy the gondoliers’ songs. He gave them to us in tenor, baritone and bass answering voices across the water, until the restless harmonic and live energy of the concert’s entire first half raced to its zenith. Tarantella overrode toccata, and Chan (Liszt) revved up the engine to speed us away home across the lagoon.

See the titles above for the Java Suite’s scenic compass and ambition, as (the composer’s title) Phonoramas: Tonal Journeys for the Pianoforte. At first you thought it was just more Debussy, but with Godowsky now the painter, Chan’s verveand skill with tone shifted us beyond a keyboard impression to a large, more orchestral wall tapestry. Without providing Godowsky’s own descriptions of his 12 Java Suite pieces, now available online, Chan made it easy for us to conjure our own multitudinous images for the titles, as he did with his London Wigmore Hall debut audience this month.

But with all the predominant overflowing human life and activity, it wasn’t until the eighth piece that wildlife got a word in edgeways and Godowsky, in The Gardens of Buitenzorg, seemed more drawn to birdlife than botany. In the ninth, human street song achieved its own space. In The Kraton restored the gamelan atmosphere and after simplicity swelled to clamour, it subsided back into reflection, to complete a satisfying tone poem. The Ruined Water Castle relaxed the ear. Then the final Court Pageant, dissatisfied with mere ceremony, exploded into such trumpeting, fanfaring, singing and dancing celebration that Chan had his audience tempted to do the same as they parted into the night.

Despite the testing demands of creating this vividly changing picture screen, Chan appeared unflagging and inexhaustible in his application, endurance, readiness, and continuing accuracy and alertness. Those valuing this will be excited to follow this pianist’s future.

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Before news about the Mera Trio, first the inside scene at Christ Church. Compact, modern brick with loose, charmingly sky blue seating, a space easily sound-filled by Chan, soft or loud, on its small Blüthner piano. Chan himself, a slim, slight 5ft 9in, deep-voice friendly, in an elaborately printed dark blue and white Malay shirt. For several minutes during the Lysenko, soft evening sunlight angled through high windows behind the audience, creating artsy reflections of Chan’s playing hands on the chancel wall behind him.

The scene switched for Sunday. Halfway down the side wall, the players were placed between the two vertical stained glass windows, the same light blue prominent, admitting afternoon light, and the audience in chairs arced in a shallow curve, gently embracing the ensemble, encouraging extra audience inter-connection. And indeed there was easy conversation between some of audience and the Mera Trio during horn player George Strivens’ spoken introductions and explanations about the music, the composers, and horn-playing technique. The players in white and black made one colour concession: violinist Izzy Howard’s gold necklace and large asterisk earrings matched the French horn.

“We used to play in red shirts,” Chan grinned. “That’s why we’re called Mera – it means red in my language!” Mera Trio are five years together, with individual careers now underway. Howard’s varying first-violins orchestral experience includes the LSO, RPO, Bournemouth SO, Britten Sinfonia and London Sinfonietta. She performed her first concerto (Brahms) last year and is doing The Four Seasons this.

Strivens has already arranged and had premiered songs by Ravel, Canteloube, and Richard Strauss – his famed Four Last Songs, for this line-up, is now published. He has had works composed for him and, as a Britten-Pears Young Artist making his second consecutive annual Aldeburgh Festival appearance, the day before this Chichester appearance he was in a hand-picked seven-piece ensemble performing Britten’s church parable Curlew River with leading tenor Ian Bostridge.

For their compact presentation of two works back-to-back, Mera were instantly on the ball. Ethel Smyth’s forthright and assertive personality – musical as well as personal, which stars such as Brahms, Liszt and Tchaikovsky no doubt experienced first-hand – had the Trio standing to attention! Chan faced Smyth’s own arrangement of the orchestral part of this scantily known double Concerto for Violin and Horn. And any audience also at his Friday concert will have been unsurprised at his calmly superb handling of its needs.

The moderately paced opening movement had Howard and Strivens summoning the singing qualities of their solo instruments as well as their punch, with a melodic main theme in triple time and a tip-toeing second, in duple. The Elegy was two-voiced conversation, the piano eventually intervening, then summarising sparingly, to set up closure with the solo voices in low dialogue.

The finale of any carefully delineated musical piece of several movements is usually the biggest compositional challenge. Here Smyth seems intent on having fun out in the country. Perhaps the horn is male, the violin female. Smyth switches rhythms entertainingly, sometimes to stabilise the music’s momentum, sometimes to liberate it. Moods alter with, for example, the piano stomping a new pace in seven-league boots, then later unveiling a more sinister atmosphere. Then it points out a new path (key) and sends the other instruments flying off together. The horn breaks into a hunting cadenza with dramatic violin responses, then gallops playfully away but stops for the violin to catch up. Joviality reigns.

The best part of being in a horn trio is you have Brahms to move and excite your audience. If Dvorak upstaged him with a great Cello Concerto, Brahms upstaged everybody writing chamber music with his Horn Trio in Eb. Ensembles like Mera owe their existence to this stirring, emotional work. The movements are in the telling alternative plan of slow-fast-slow-fast. Twice Brahms is gorgeously sad and gloomy, desolate, well-nigh despairing, but twice exhilarated and exalting, both defiantly and accepting of life.

I go to hear this to be willingly rent asunder by everything about this music. Mera Trio didn’t short-change me. They were tight-reined and powerfully unbridled all in one. In the beautifully unsettling first movement’s culmination, they were magnificent, almost radiant. In the second, they were on fire for the scherzo and carressingly broad, sweeping then subsiding, for the trio. Chan so deftly, so subtly prepared the scherzo return, which the Mera unleashed with even more fist-clenching vehemence than before.

In the grief-stricken third, blurred by tears (think German Requiem, but sung by two sorrowing singers), all three players showed instinct for innate drama among the tension. The finale they attacked not just con brio (eg. Eroica Symphony, opening movement), but dashing presto. For the listener, first, an unnerving shock – then white-knuckle ride thrill, and I was unable to write legible notes. A performance of a very high order tore to the finishing line in blistering triumph.

A parting speculation for those who know this work. Or at least are aware of its compositional circumstances (mother Brahms’s death, the composer in the Black Forest). Pealing bells, happy, hardly funereal, recur in the finale, albeit more British than Brahms’ European. Is their peal a beckoning solace or the call from something deeper? Or marking the passing of another lost hour? Is Brahms’ searing horse galloping away from the bells? Or towards them? Or vacillating back and forth, undecided or confused?

Richard Amey