Melvyn Tan

Few pianists have matched Melvyn Tan’s ability to move fluidly between the modern instrument and the 18th-century fortepiano. In the 1980s he ranked among the rare Asian performers exploring the earlier keyboard, and although his growing interest in Romantic repertoire drew him back to contemporary pianos he never abandoned historical ones. The year 2024 saw the appearance of his album Beethoven: The Final Sonatas.

Born in Singapore on October 13, 1956, when the city still formed part of British Malaya, Tan revealed an early gift by reproducing on the keyboard pieces his sister was learning. A family acquaintance employed by Australia’s Qantas airline began describing the boy’s talent to first-class passengers, one of whom offered to underwrite lessons at the Yehudi Menuhin School in Cobham, Surrey. There Tan worked with several distinguished instructors, among them Nadia Boulanger, before continuing at London’s Royal College of Music. When a conducting seminar proved unavailable he enrolled instead in harpsichord, an experience that sparked his fascination with earlier keyboards. A colleague introduced him to the fortepiano, then cultivated by only a handful of scholars; the college possessed none, so Tan located practice instruments elsewhere in the city.

Steady work proved scarce at first, and he sustained himself largely through continuo duties in Baroque ensembles. His first recording, issued in 1985, found him supporting soprano Catherine Bott on fortepiano for a collection of Haydn songs. By the close of the decade the historically informed movement had reached Classical repertoire, and Tan was prepared: for EMI he collaborated with Roger Norrington on a complete cycle of Beethoven’s piano concertos and appeared with both period-instrument and conventional orchestras across Europe.

In 1996 he resumed the modern piano much as nineteenth-century players had once adopted it, discovering that Schumann and similar literature exceeded the capacities of older instruments. Thereafter he maintained a presence in both domains, taping integral sets of the Beethoven sonatas as well as Debussy and Chopin preludes in New York, London, and Tokyo, participating in chamber groups, and partnering Anne-Sofie von Otter and Angelika Kirchschlager in lieder. When Tan revisited Singapore in 2005, officials sought to impose a penalty for evading compulsory military duty, yet he already held British citizenship. Contemporary scores have also attracted him; he has performed a fortepiano concerto written for him by Jonathan Dove.

His discography includes extensive releases on EMI and Virgin; the Norrington Beethoven concerto set reappeared on Virgin in 2008. Further albums emerged on Onyx and Signum Classics during the 2010s, among them the 2019 Onyx recital Miroirs devoted to demanding pieces by Ravel, Liszt, and Carl Maria von Weber. In 2022 he returned to the fortepiano for Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Op. 37, and Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, Op. 73 (“Emperor”), accompanied by the London Classical Players. The following year Signum Classics issued Beethoven: The Final Sonatas, performed on a modern instrument. At that point roughly thirty recordings stood to his credit.