Strathearn Music Society Review – Jia Ning Ng
Wed 15th November 2023
The Strathearn Music Society has a proven track record of successfully promoting young performers at the start of their career and, as a Royal Conservatoire of Scotland graduate of only one year’s standing, Singaporean pianist Jia Ning Ng was an ideal fit here. Her Crieff concert was in fact the sixth and final stop in her Scottish tour as winner of the recent RCS Governors’ Recital Prize, coming after appearances in Peebles, Falkirk, Biggar, Kelso and Inverness.
Well…. if anyone in St Andrew’s Halls last night was there even partly in a spirit of kindly encouraging the younger generation they would surely have been astounded by the maturity and musical accomplishment on display. The very best players have always been able to build on and add to the experience of their teachers but it was hard to credit what a fully-formed artist Jia Ning Ng has already become in such a short time. You don’t showcase Schubert’s B flat piano sonata to close a recital unless you have 100% confidence in your ability to sustain forty minutes of the most taxing music in the repertoire and fully engage your audience for every second in the process. On a purely practical level there would have been five previous different instruments for Jia Ning to deal with on her recent travels, each one presenting its own particular challenges, but it was evident from the outset that her ability to engage with her listeners and to communicate the breadth and depth of her chosen repertoire went far beyond mere technical prowess. This sort of confidence is part physical and part emotional but Jia Ning’s stage personality and presence came over as holistic and entire in every sense – she has the capacity to inhabit rather than interpret the notes on the page so that they are heard as at once familiar and secure but also fresh and spontaneously-felt. Each of Schubert’s four movements was perfectly-judged for tempo, mood and overall structure and demonstrated the complete tonal range and sensitivity necessary to bring off such an all-embracing work. In particular the seemingly diametrically opposed middle two movements felt like one single unit, with the elfin grace of the Scherzo an absolutely necessary and inevitable extension of the sublime pathos of the preceding Andante.
And that was only the second half of the evening. Opening with Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no 17, “The Tempest”, Jia Ning delivered a powerful, imaginative and fluent reading in which delicacy and strength combined to enhance the composer’s vivid and dramatic conception. Again, the central Adagio, with its undeniably Schubertian foretastes, was a high spot.
A selection of Schumann’s “Bunte Blatter” complemented the two sonatas. These character pieces, assembled from earlier unpublished pieces after the success of Album für die Jugend, are identified solely by tempo indications rather than specific pictorial titles and leave as much or as little to the imagination as desired. Suffice it to say that there was no shortage of stimulation for appreciative minds in this performance.
Overall, a seriously good concert from a very special musician.
