Szymon Nehring's Chopin dazzles at PPO's 2026 opener

Jeffrey Ching, Glober, Calambro, Andión Fernandez, Diomedes Saraza Jr.
Grzegorz Nowak, Szymon Nehring, Jonathan Velasco, and Dennis Marasigan

Back in October 2025, music lovers had their fill of Frédéric Chopin's music while the XIX International Chopin Piano Competition was underway. The devoted were glued to the livestreams during unholy hours while those valued sleep opted to watch the uploaded videos later on. But nothing still beats watching a well performed Chopin, especially one of his piano concertos, live. Thankfully, Polish pianist Szymon Nehring was recently in town for the latest concert of the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra (PPO), thus able to fulfill that craving for a live Chopin performance.

For his stint with the PPO, Nehring harkened back to his days as a finalist at the XVII International Chopin Piano Competition back in 2015 by performing Chopin's Piano Concerto in E minor, Op. 11, the same piece he played at the competition's final round. Under the baton of Maestro Grzegorz Nowak, Nehring dazzled with his familiar and comfortable take on Chopin. He generated excitement through his impeccable musicality especially with his elegant phrasing of the second movement Romanze. His technical mastery was also on full display at the third movement Rondo that prompted some audience members to applaud even before the final note of the orchestra ended.

An étude or any of Chopin's miniatures would've sufficed for an encore, but Nehring felt very generous performed Chopin's Grande polonaise brillante, Op.22 instead. This felt like received a belated Christmas gift even though it's halfway past January already.

Fortunately, the PPO stepped up to the plate and kept up with Nehring. Gone are the tiny slips that occasionally plague the orchestra and ultimately distract from the overall performance. There were no indications that the PPO came from the long holiday break.

The PPO were on top form probably because they were kept on their toes by the Jeffrey Ching piece that opened the concert. Ching's avant-garde works, to put it lightly, have challenged audience and orchestra members alike with their complex musical language that local audiences aren't used to. Surprisingly, the Ching work that opened the concert, Fenghuang Singing, is one of his more accessible works.

Grzegorz Nowak and the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra

The piece had soprano Andión Fernandez and trumpeter Glober Calambro, positioned among the audience at the orchestra section, engage in a musical conversation while accompanied by atmospheric strings. Both Fernandez and Calambro then moved, always in symmetry, to different parts of the orchestra section, as their conversation continues. A handful of musicians were also positioned at the upper boxes and their interwoven flourishes gave this piece a more spatial, immersive experience.

More interesting was the second part that had a fugue played by muted strings. The muted sound combined with an ever lingering but faint dissonance gave the music an incorporeal quality. This was made more evident with the unexpected beats from the drum set that felt a lot more palpable.

Overall, the visual element provided by the soprano and trumpeter, coupled with the discernible architecture of the fugue, made this Ching work a lot more palatable compared to the ones that have been performed by the PPO for the past couple of seasons.

Fernandez performed an encore, Wuxingming lao huashi an aria from Ching’s soon to be premiered opera The Butterflies which is based on the Chinese legend The Butterfly Lovers. Sung in Chinese, the aria was surprisingly tonal for a Ching work.

All of this made up for a front loaded program with only Franz Liszt's Les Préludes S.97 listed for the second half. While the PPO performed this symphonic poem competently, it eventually felt like an afterthought. But after Nehring's splendid Chopin, as well as a surprisingly accessible Ching, there was no reason to complain.

Szymon Nehring performs Chopin with PPO

Back in 2017, the Chopin Institute livestreamed a concert by the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century under the baton of Gustavo Gimeno that included a performance of Frédéric Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor, Op. 11 with Szymon Nehring as the piano soloist.

This live broadcast made me stay awake way past my bedtime but that's a price I was willing to pay to see a performance by Nehring, a first prize winner at the 15th Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition (2017) and also a finalist at the XVII International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition (2015) when he was just only 19 years old.

Never did I imagine at the time that almost nine years later, I will have the chance to see Nehring perform the same concerto live here in the Philippines. 

Come January 16, 2026, 7:30 PM at the Samsung Performing Arts Theater, Polish pianist Szymon Nehring joins the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra (PPO) and Maestro Grzergorz Nowak in Preludi, the fifth concert for the orchestra's 41st Versatile concert season.

Szymon Nehring
Photo ©Bartek Barczyk

Jeffrey Ching's Fenghuang Singing, a work commissioned by the IMPULS Festival für Neue Musik in Sachsen-Anhalt to commemorate the 30th anniversary of German unification, will also be performed. Through music, this work describes the destruction and eventual rebirth of the cities of Magdeburg and Braunschweig while blending motifs from East and West German hymns. The piece also paints the image of the fenghuang or the phoenix bird from the Chinese ideographs in Mao Zedong’s calligraphy.

Andión Fernandez

Fenghuang Singing will also feature soprano Andión Fernandez. A soloist at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, Fernandez was last seen with the PPO performing in Ching's opera Before Brabant at the CCP's Children's Biennale back in November 2024.

Capping the concert is Franz Liszt's Les Préludes, his third and most popular symphonic poem. Initially conceived as an overture to the choral cycle, Les quatre élémens, Liszt later reworked this into his most familiar symphonic poem inspired by French poet's Alphone de Lamartine's Ode from Nouvelles méditations poétiques.

Tickets to PPO Concert V: Preludi, priced at P3,000, P2,500, P2,000, and P1,500 are available at TicketWorld. Subscription packages, where one can enjoy a 20% discount for the remainder of the PPO's 41st Concert Season, are still available. E-mail  salesandpromotions@culturalcenter.gov.ph or call the CCP Box Office at (+63)931-0330880 to be a subscriber.

MSO concert features soprano Andión Fernandez, cellist Matias de Oliveira Pinto, Jeffrey Ching's opus

The Manila Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Marlon Chen, presents a series of firsts in their upcoming season concert Double Concerto happening on September 1, 2019, 6:00 PM at the Power Mac Center Spotlight, Circuit Makati.

Berlin based cellist Matias de Oliveira Pinto and soprano Andión Fernandez-Ching join the MSO for the Philippine premiere of Jeffrey Ching's ritualistic new work, Celestial-Infernal Grand Nuptial Rite.

The concert will also feature Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Symphony No. 35 in D major, K. 385 and Matias performing Franz Joseph Haydn's Cello Concerto No. 1 in C major, Hob. VIIb/1 with cadenzas by Jeffrey Ching which has never been heard in local shores also. The thought of having a dash of Ching in a Haydn cello concerto is like having a mild breakfast tea spiked with strong liquor. 

And that alone should be more than enough reason to catch this performance.

A journey to a different realm in Jeffrey Ching's A Chamber Requiem

Featuring:

Andión Fernandez, soprano/whip

Lars Grünwoldt, bass baritone/guiro

Modern Art Ensemble

     Klaus Schöpp, piccolo/flute/alto flute/bass flute

     Unolf Wäntig, Eb clarinet/clarinet/bass clarinet

     Theodor Flindell, violin/re-strung and re-tuned violin

     Jean-Claude Velin, viola/re-strung and re-tuned viola

     Matias de Oliveira Pinto, cello/re-strung and re-tuned cello

     Yoriko Ikeya, piano/tam-tam

Programme:

Jeffrey Ching

     A Chamber Requiem

When cellist Renato Lucas told me back in November 2015 that composer Jeffrey Ching’s next work to be performed here would be his completion of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s unfinished Requiem, I had to take several moments to let that thought sink in. It was hard for me to imagine the classicism of Mozart combined with the contemporary, 21^st century idioms of Ching.

Some months later, still unable to grasp the notion of these two styles combined, I braced myself for the world premiere performance of Jeffrey Ching’s A Chamber Requiem at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. And I have to admit that I came in to this concert almost blind so to speak as my knowledge of Mozart’s Requiem is extremely limited. Yes, I know that Mozart died leaving the work unfinished and that there are many, mostly romanticized stories surrounding the work. Unfortunately, I have no idea which parts were truly by Mozart and which were the parts completed by Franz Xaver Süssmayr. This meant that I won’t be burdened by overanalyzing Ching’s work but still I had to be all ears throughout the performance.

A couple of days before the concert, I attended a reception in honor of Jeffrey Ching that was held at the residence of Michael Hasper, Deputy Head of Mission of the Federal Republic of Germany. There, I was able to have a brief chat with Jeffrey Ching and a few members of the Modern Art Ensemble that certainly got me into the mood to hear the new work already despite not knowing much about it.

Based on the title and the performers made up of only two singers and six musicians, A Chamber Requiem was more focused on the individual with the overall mood being more solemn and somber. Whenever soprano Andión Fernandez and bass-baritone Lars Grünwoldt sang, it was intimate and introspective.

What was most remarkable for me was the parts played by the six member Modern Art Ensemble composed of flutist Klaus Schöpp, clarinetist Unolf Wäntig, violinist Theodor Flindell, violist Jean-Claude Velin, cellist Matias de Oliveira Pinto, and pianist Yoriko Ikeya. Both Schöpp and Wäntig utilized all of the members of their respective instruments giving the piece more range, color and texture. But what really gave the work its distinct character was the additional violin, viola, and cello that were re-strung and re-tuned to the Qing dynasty scale. The unusual sounding string instruments were first heard during the Graduale, earlier on.  As the vocalists chanted in unison and the winds burst out brief phrases, the strings played long, sustained notes that sounded like an unstable drone. The juxtaposition of the chant with that of the distinctly Chinese sounding accompaniment fascinated me.

But the next time I heard the re-tuned strings near the end at the Responsorium, I was left perplexed. The trio playing in the standard western scale with their re-tuned instruments not only sounded as if they were playing the wrong notes, but the quality was also scratchy as if they weren’t capable of producing a good, solid tone yet. I think that this effect was intentional and by design but whatever it meant to convey was lost in me.

Another moment in the music that grabbed my attention was when Lars sang falsetto. I thought it was initially the flute that I heard until I realized otherwise. What made this bit more interesting was that Andión was singing along with him but with lower notes. It was a case of the soprano descending the depths while the bass baritone scaled the heights.

The inclusion of stage direction also gave the piece an added layer/dimension. Near the beginning, there was an extended moment of silence with everyone standing up with their heads bowed for about a minute. The second part opened with the musicians playing as they walked around the audience section. Both singers descended the stage and performed at the audience section at one point too. There were parts that were played offstage most notably the tam-tam that was immediately followed by a dissonant chord by the strings located at the back rows among the audience.

Probably the most striking stage direction was right at the end when Andión and Lars exited the theater while still singing, their voices fading away as they walked farther away. All the while, the members of the Modern Art Ensemble gathered around the piano and slowly closed the lid not unlike lowering a coffin to the ground. Then, it was suddenly pitch black. And it took me several moments to let everything that I've seen and heard sink in before I let my mind head back from a trip from a different realm which was Jeffrey Ching's A Chamber Requiem.

It is never a guarantee that one will get to like a Jeffrey Ching composition or any other contemporary piece for that matter. I was very relieved that the overall concept of the work being a Requiem mass and a basic familiarity of Mozart’s other works meant that I had more than enough to ease me through A Chamber Requiem. So it wasn’t that jolting whenever the piece took some unexpected left turns. The world premiere performance of Jeffrey Ching’s A Chamber Requiem was dedicated to the memory of Celia H. Fernandez.

Jeffrey Ching's A Chamber Requiem to have world premiere at the CCP

April 9, 2016, 7:30 PM

Tanghalang Aurelio Tolentino (CCP Little Theater)

Cultural Center of the Philippines

CCP Complex

Pasay, Metro Manila

Featuring:

Andión Fernandez, soprano

Lars Grünwoldt, bass baritone

Modern Art Ensemble

     Klaus Schöpp, flute

     Unolf Wäntig, clarinet

     Theodor Flindell, violin

     Jean-Claude Velin, viola

     Matias de Oliveira Pinto, cello

     Yoriko Ikeya, piano

Programme:

Jeffrey Ching

     A Chamber Requiem

The Cultural Center of the Philippines presents the world premiere performance of Jeffrey Ching’s A Chamber Requiem happening on April 9, 2016, 7:30 PM at the CCP Little Theater.

A Chamber Requiem, Ching’s own completion of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s unfinished Requiem Mass in D minor K. 626, will be performed by soprano Andión Fernandez, bass baritone Lars Grünwoldt and the six member Modern Art Ensemble made up of flutist Klaus Schöpp, clarinetist Unolf Wäntig, violinist Theodor Flindell, violist Jean-Claude Velin, cellist Matias de Oliveira Pinto, and pianist Yoriko Ikeya.

With this configuration, one can just imagine how different Ching’s revision of this work differs than that of the well-known completion by Franz Xaver Süssmayr. And the differences doesn’t end here. The press release states that he has set aside all existing completions by other composers like Süssmayr and examined Mozart’s manuscript sketches and his compositional procedures. With this in mind, he has completed the fragmentary Lacrymosa and Ossana fugues on a broader scale than any previous attempts.

More radical in this Requiem is Ching’s incorporating parts of a Chinese hymn using the Qing dynasty scale (I have no idea how the intervals in this scale are) that will require some string instruments to be re-strung and re-tuned.

The world premiere performance of Jeffrey Ching’s A Chamber Requiem is dedicated to the memory of Celia H. Fernandez. The concert is presented by the Cultural Center of the Philippines in cooperation with the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Manila and Makati Diamond Residences.

Ticket prices:

P1000 Orchestra Center

P800 Orchestra Side

For inquiries:

CCP Box Office at 832-3704

TicketWorld 891-9999