Introduction from the artist
Singaporean lawyer-pianist Mark Cheng is Company Pianist at the Singapore Dance Theatre (SDT), former accompanist at the Singapore Ballet Academy (SBA), and Chairperson of the National University of Singapore Piano Ensemble Alumni (NUSPEA).
In March 2021, Cheng's debut recital, Mark Cheng in Recital, launched powerfully to a socially-distanced live audience - garnering the immediate attention of local press. The showing, on the subject of 'death', delivered an unabashed "90 minutes of simmering melancholy, brooding catharsis and violent death throes."
The three movements of Charles-Valentin Alkan's Op. 15, dedicated to Liszt, are Aime-moi (Love Me), Le Vent (The Wind), and Morte (Death). The British pianist Ronald Smith wrote: “Alkan's characteristics, exacerbated no doubt by his isolation, are carried to the edge of fanaticism ... at the heart of Alkan's creativity there is also fierce obsessional control; his obsession with a specific idea can border on the pathological.”
The English composer Sorabji sang praises of the Morte, believing it the “most remarkable piece of the collection ... The work is bursting with extraordinary daring—technical, pianistic and harmonic—and its close is as weirdly uncanny as it is audacious and original”.
