“The young Malaysian pianist Mei Yi Foo scooped an audience prize for her album of contemporary piano pieces, Musical Toys: she proved herself a terrific player, assured, intelligent and glitter-fingered. Her career, we heard, has been on the up since she was spotted by the composer Unsuk Chin, who noted that shed had three awful reviews of the type that meant she was probably a really interesting musician. ‘I dont only thrive on bad reviews,’ she added, accepting her prize. ‘I like good ones too...’ I am sure she will win many more. Jessica Duchen April 10, 2013 “Pianist Foo treats us to a disc of nursery miniatures and grown-up studies, but she plays everything with such joyful, uninhibited innocence and unerring precision that the titular embrace is apt. There is a playfulness to the whole album. She varies her tone in the fourteen toys by Gubaidulina to sound like the wheezing dissonances of an accordion, stuttering distant fanfares, birds pecking, bovine moodiness, toytown drums and the woody echo of a twilit forest - fantasies to charm the childish mind. She gives the first ever recording of Unsuk Chins Six Piano Etudes - but surely not [to] be the last. These are thrilling technically virtuosic pieces completed a decade ago and played here with total assurance by Foo whose interpretation from the threatening crescendos of the Scherzo to the formidable scales of Scalen and the intensely rhythmic Toccata must be definitive. Shes also not far off giving an unassailable performance of Ligetis witty Musica Ricercata, in which each movement adds a note from the monotone Sostenuto to the dodecaphone Andante Homage to Frescobaldi. Foo, a child of Malaysia... is very much a pianist to watch. Pass it on.” Words and Music: Chin Up Rick Jones August 8, 2013 “Malaysian pianist Mei Yi Foo, winner of the 2013 BBC Music Magazine Newcomer of the Year, has just released her second album, Musical Toys, on Odradek. Her approach to performance, on an unprepared, standard piano, playing intense miniatures by Bartók, Ligeti, György Kurtág and Helmut Lachenmann, abstractly parallels the principles of the prepared piano by framing serious compositions inside an imagined world of innocent, unhindered play. Technically demanding works are presented without sacrificing a near-prankish, Cageian sense of mischief, so that possibly intimidating, structurally complex and reflective seriousness is played with a light, fluent sense of joy and adventure, liberating the piano’s enduring capacity to surprise.” Sinfini Music Toying with the pianos history Paul Morley 20 May 2013
Posted on: Mon, 23 Jun 2014 08:33:09 +0000
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