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Sound and fury meet elegance under Sayaka Shoji, Masaaki Suzuki
The Straits Times
|April 20, 2026
To paraphrase a Monty Python sketch, why is it that the world never remembered the name of Johann Wenzel Kalliwoda?
Violinist Sayaka Shoji performed with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Masaaki Suzuki.
(YORICKO LIU)
The answer, in this concert as in the sketch, became clear very quickly, and the juxtaposition of this Bohemian composer’s 5th and 7th symphonies against a Mozart violin concerto had uncomfortable echoes of the proximity of mediocrity to genius so devastatingly represented by Salieri in the film Amadeus (1984).
Kalliwoda has been described as “the missing symphonic link between Beethoven and Schumann”, but neither comparison is flattering to Kalliwoda.
Based on these symphonies, played here with great energy and distinction by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra (SSO) under eminent Japanese conductor Masaaki Suzuki, his most Schumann-esque quality is a certain thickness of orchestration, while his most Beethovenian trait is an inability to end a symphony without belabouring the arrival on the tonic key to the point of exhaustion.
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