Jocelyn Ho pianist Piano at 10
Jocelyn Ho is another example of the outstanding and exciting musicians that Arts Bundanoon's concert audiences are hearing (and seeing).
Excellence at an Affordable Price is the Arts Bundanoon goal.
Biography
Hailed as an artist possessing “a surprisingly unrelenting physical technique” (The Australian) and “drawing unbelievably beautiful sonorities from the piano” (Fine Music Magazine), Jocelyn Ho has distinguished herself as one of the leading young pianists in Australia.
Born in Hong Kong, Jocelyn Ho started piano at the early age of five and continued her piano studies when she immigrated to Sydney two years later. After scoring a perfect University Admission Index and topping the state of New South Wales in the Higher School Certificate, she embarked on a medical degree with a scholarship, only to find her musical and mathematical desires unfulfilled. Consequently, she took on three majors simultaneously — pure mathematics and computer science at the University of New South Wales, and music at the University of Sydney.
Since then, Jocelyn Ho has won major piano competitions in Australia and overseas, including the first prize and the special prize for music by Haydn, Mozart or Beethoven in the 2010 Australian National Piano Award. She has also won the Sydney Conservatorium Concerto Competition, the Kawai Award, and has performed at the Sydney Opera House, the Dame Elizabeth Murdoch Hall at the Melbourne Recital Centre, the NSW Parliament House and extensively in the USA and Europe. She was a recipient of the 2007 Australia Day Award by the National Council of Women NSW, and has been broadcasted frequently on ABC Classic FM. Her album, “Luminous Sounds”, was released by Master Performers in January of this year.
Also a composer, Jocelyn Ho has had her works performed worldwide, from the Sydney Opera House to the Kansas City Fringe Festival. Influenced by her background in pure mathematics, her compositions have garnered her invitations to give talks and lecture-performances internationally, including at Third International Conference on Mathematics and Computation in Music at IRCAM, the Music, Pattern and Mathematics Workshop held jointly by the University of Edinburgh and Queen’s University in the UK, the International Image Conference in UCLA and the colloquium series at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities in the USA. Her composition teachers include Chen Yi and Anne Boyd.
Jocelyn Ho holds a Master of Music at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, a Bachelor of Science in mathematics and computer science at University of New South Wales and a Diploma of Arts at the University of Sydney. Her Master thesis is an in-depth investigation of Debussy’s 1913 piano rolls. She has also co-published a paper in the American Mathematical Monthly in February 2005. Currently, she is completing a Doctorate of Musical Arts with Gilbert Kalish at Stony Brook University. Her past teachers include Gerard Willems and Ian Hobson.
Jocelyn Ho is a Young Steinway Artist.
Concert review
Date: – 2nd August 2014
Venue: Soldiers’ Memorial Hall, Bundanoon
The artist: Jocelyn Ho, piano
Highly talented and internationally reputed Jocelyn Ho made her third appearance in Bundanoon. In her first appearance, she played remarkably difficult works including Ravel and Prokofiev. In her second performance, she played two piano works with her former teacher, Gerard Willems. The music offered in this recital was a selection of short works of the seventeenth to twentieth centuries.
The Program
The program was entitled, “Preludes to Paris”, comprising selections from
Louis Couperin’s Pièces de Clavecin, Frederic Chopin’s Preludes Op. 28, and
Claude Debussy’s Preludes Book II.
Louis Couperin (c. 1626 – 29 August 1661) was a French Baroque composer and performer. He only lived 35 years but was the first – if by no means the last - member of an extended family to achieve fame. Alas, his fame was for almost three centuries apparently transient. His preludes are unusual – he devised the unmeasured prelude for harpsichord which were written without rhythm or metre indications, leaving much to the performer. They were not necessarily part of a suite, the norm for the day.
Frédéric François Chopin (1810 – 1849) spent most of his adult life in Paris. He is so well known that one can only say that he elevated the prelude to the status of a concert piece. There are 24 preludes in Opus 28 - one for each musical key, at once following Hummel’s precedent and setting an example for later composers to emulate. Chopin wrote three later discrete examples. This program included a number of very popular examples amongst the fourteen that were programmed. Chopin is reputed not to have performed more than four during any one concert but Ms Ho was undaunted by their challenges, including in her program the Prelude in F sharp major.
Claude Debussy (1862 –1918) is a composer whose music is often performed at Piano at 10. On might add that his music was in safe hands with Miss Ho: her Master’s thesis comprised an in-depth investigation of Debussy’s 1913 piano rolls. These performances, recorded for reproducing pianos, have had a large influence in rescuing Debussy from mechanistic and literal performance practice. This reviewer is not aware that the composer recorded anything from Book II but Rudolph Ganz did in 1916. This program included items from Claude Debussy’s Preludes Book II (1912–1913), notable for its dissonances and harmonic ambiguity.
The Program comprised:
[Arise]
Couperin- Prelude in F major
Chopin- Prelude in C major
[Feathers, dust, fairies]
Chopin- Prelude in G major
Debussy- Prelude No. 4 “Les fées sont d'exquises danseuses”
Chopin- Prelude in C sharp minor
Debussy- Prelude No. 2 “Feuilles Mortes” (Dead leaves)
[Tumult]
Couperin – Prélude l'imitation de Mr Froberger in A minor
Chopin- Prelude in G minor
[Statues]
Chopin- Prelude in C minor
Chopin- Prelude in E major
[Dance: elegant vs. awkward]
Chopin- Prelude in A major
Debussy- Prelude No. 3 “La Puerta del Vino” (The Gate of Wine)
Debussy- Prelude No. 6 “Général Lavine – eccentric”
[Heart palpitations and rain drops]
Chopin- Prelude in D flat major
Chopin- Prelude in F sharp minor
Chopin- Prelude in B minor
[Blurred resonances]
Couperin – Prelude in G minor
Chopin- Prelude in F sharp major
[Illusions of pulse]
Chopin- Prelude in B Major
Chopin- Prelude in E flat minor
[Disharmonious hazes and noises]
Chopin – Prelude in A minor
Debussy- Prelude No. 1 “Brouillards” (Fog)
Debussy- Prelude No. 12 “Feux d’Artifice” (Fireworks)
The text in square brackets was supplied by the performer.
Reviewer: Neil Mitchell
General Comments:
The concert was held before a very large audience for Bundanoon (ca. 150 persons) on a cool, breezy and sunny day. The audience was quiet but warm and the performer made a brief introduction before the concert which was played without a break. No encore was offered.
It can be said that Louis Couperin’s music sounded very well on a modern piano, the freedom inherent in each piece made such a performance valid. It paired very well with Debussy’s much later music.
Ms Ho was well-prepared, more than equal to the demands of the program but was not helped by buzzing due to a stuck damper in the hall’s Kawai grand piano, a matter that is to receive attention.
Bundanoon audiences would undoubtedly welcome the astonishing Ms Ho at any future concert.