Melvyn Tan

Singaporean-born pianist Melvyn Tan is among the few artists that has succeeded performing about both the contemporary piano as well as the eighteenth hundred years fortepiano. His parents observed his capability to play back again by hearing the piano music his sister was training, and a family group friend who worked well like a stewardess for Australia’s Qantas flight started to brag about his capabilities to travellers in the first-class section. One of these agreed to financing the youngster’s musical education in the Yehudi Menuhin College in Cobham, Surrey, Britain. Tan analyzed piano there, using the ageing Nadia Boulanger as you of his educators, and then shifted towards the Royal University of Music in London. Necessary to undertake a course of research furthermore to his piano main, Tan tried to find yourself in a conducting course, but discovered it shut. He enrolled in harpsichord studies rather and became thinking about early keyboard musical instruments. In his third season on the RCM, a pal introduced him towards the fortepiano, which at that time was the province of just a couple academic specialists. The faculty did not also own among the musical instruments, but he researched around London and discovered places to apply. Sense that he couldn’t perform both musical instruments justice, Tan quit the present day piano altogether. For a while pickings had been slim, and Tan produced a bare living playing harpsichord continuo parts in Baroque music ensembles. In the past due 1980s, nevertheless, the historical functionality movement begun to transfer to Classical-period territory within a big method, and Tan was prepared. For EMI he produced some recordings with conductor Roger Norrington, including an entire group of Beethoven’s piano concertos, and he performed broadly with both historically focused and mainstream orchestral ensembles. In 1996, Tan came back to the present day piano almost in the manner that Romantic-era music artists had arrive to it when it had been brand-new: as he transferred forward into afterwards repertoire (like the piano music of Schumann), he became disappointed with the specialized possibilities of old musical instruments. Since that time Tan continues to be similarly prominent in both mainstream and historical-practice spheres. He provides recorded comprehensive cycles of Beethoven sonatas and of Debussy and Chopin preludes in NY, London, and Tokyo; continues to be dynamic in chamber ensembles; and provides followed Anne-Sofie von Otter and Angelika Kirchschlager in lieder repertory. He offers ventured into modern music and occasionally performs a fresh fortepiano concerto, created for him by composer Jonathan Dove.