NIGEL Thean captivated the audience with a mature and soulful rendition of the cello duet -- Ernest Bloch's Prayer from Jewish Life -- with Vivian Chua at the piano in Musical Jamboree 2008, the recent Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO) student's concert.

Finding Bloch's score difficult at first, Thean was undaunted. "It got easier as I trained and I spent quite a lot of time practising on the composition. I like slow reflective pieces particularly, the Jewish ones," says the 10-year-old boy.

"It takes me nearly two hours of practice each day although occasionally it would take an hour should I rest for an hour," he adds.

And practice makes for perfection. But did his tutor MPO cellist Julie Dessureault pressure him on his cello passages? "Not really, I practised on my own."

Thean worked on Bloch's Prayer, a section at a time and joined the separately practised parts together before coordinating the rehearsals with pianist Chua.
He was also one of the members of the cello quartet which performed a transcription of three of Felix Mendelssohn's Six Partsongs for Male Voices, Opus 50 - Turkish Drinking Song, Water Journey and Love and Wine for the first half of the morning's programme.

Finding the Mendelssohn's Opus 50 "very easy" to master, he says: "It wasn't highly technical to pitch the right notes."

He aims to become a solo cellist. Recipient of a scholarship at Cempaka International School in Cheras, he has also been awarded a full scholarship to a UK co-educational college renowned for training budding musicians -- Wells Cathedral School.

"Nigel is a born musician. He has progressed quickly and he has a view of music that is different from others of his age,"says Dessureault, a Canadian from a town near Montreal and who graduated from the University Mozarteum Salzburg in Austria.

"He picks up a lot on the finer points of music interpretation," adds Dessureault who started tutoring Thean four years ago.

Violinist Liu-Yi Retallick, 14, showed superb pitching and control in a well-balanced execution of Wieniawski's Fantasie Brilliante on Themes from Gounod's Faust, Opus 20 with Chee Su Yen at the piano just prior to the intermission.

"It was technically demanding but I had about two months of preparation," she says. Each day, the student from Kwan Cheng Girls High School had devoted between 21/2 hours to four, practising on the difficult violin passages of the Fantasie.

"I approached the difficulties of that score, section by section with the help of my mum, a musician and my tutor, MPO violinist Marcus Gundermann."

She also played the part for the first violin with the Encounter String Quartet in a masterly rendition of the contrapunctal first movement of Mendelssohn's String Quartet in E flat Major, Opus 12 to end the morning's programme.

"Technically this piece is simple and after you have played it for a while the contrapunctal lines of each of the four instruments are not distracting. But if you don't express yourself, it's boring,"she adds.

At 27, flautist Foo Chie Haur's quick but nimble technique in Francois Borne's Carmen Fantasy with Kong Su Mei at the piano, drew attention after the morning concert's interval break.

The composition is technically difficult as Borne had transcribed the music of Georges Bizet's opera Carmen for the flute.

"I started practising the piece at the beginning of the year but then I had work commitments for the next two months. I revived my practice for another month just before this concert ," he says.

His musical mentor MPO flautist Hristo Dobrinov is supportive. "He helped me a lot in achieving the required level of fluency and articulation for that fast tempo," adds Foo.

"The technique and sound takes time to develop and I have been a freelance flautist for over two years," he says. Foo also performs for the National Symphony Orchestra, a Chinese popular group - Dama Orchestra -- and with other chamber groups at certain functions.

However, it was the Encounter High Winds Ensemble's avant garde performance of local composer Yii Kah Hoe's How the Crocodile Got His Teeth, that drew notable appreciative applause for the second half of the programme.

Commissioned for the ensemble by oboist and conductor Joost Flach who conducted the work, it is a one-man drama play drawn from Antares' Tanah Tujuh - Close Encounters with the Temun Mythos (aboriginal folklore), narrated by Han See.

The tale recounts how the crocodile tricked the pangolin into parting with its teeth and thereby turned carnivorous.

The accompanying music explores the tonal effects of the ensemble instruments in creating the ambience of the play. "The crocodile is represented by a slow melody. The pangolin is introduced by a jerky theme," explains Flach.