AN EVENING
OF SONGS AND ARIAS
FROM
AROUND THE WORLD
YEE EE-PING , Soprano
with SIM
YI KAI, Piano
Esplanade
Recital Studio
Sunday (3 August
2014 )
This review was published in The Straits Times on 5 August 2014 with the title "Soulful and exquisite singing".
For
all the major roles soprano Yee Ee-Ping has sung with the Singapore Lyric
Opera, including Manon Lescaut, Donna Elvira, Despina, Pamina and Micaela, the
2001 Young Artist Award recipient has never performed a solo recital here. That
is until this evening. Her exquisite selection of art songs was long overdue,
and showed why she remains one of Singapore ’s finest ever sopranos.
Yee,
who goes by her stage name Ee-Ping, is now a fully mature artist, for whom all
the excuses and excesses of youth no longer apply. Over the years, she has kept
her vocal apparatus well oiled, commanding an astonishing range of nuances and
possessing a voluminous heft fully capable of singing a house down. Her acting
and communicative skills remain strong points, and she connects immediately
with her audience.
The
moment she strode in with an Amazing
Grace one will not hear in any local church, it was a breathtaking
foretaste of things to come. Her diction and phrasing was close to perfection
in three songs by Roger Quilter, the dreamy and wistful emotions enclosed
within coming to the fore.
Even
more demanding were four Lieder by
Richard Strauss, which expressed the full gamut of love in all its guises. The Wiegenlied (Cradle Song) was caressed with a mother and lover’s tenderness, and
O Süsser Mai! (Oh Sweet May!) burst forth with unbridled joy.
Nostalgia
and longing were the colours of the first two French songs, Duparc’s Chanson triste (Sad Song) and Chausson’s Les temps
des lilacs (The Time of Lilacs),
while Delibes’s Les filles des Cadix
(The Girls of Cadiz) was infused with
an infectious theatricality that would not have looked out of place in Bizet’s Carmen.
Ee-Ping
emerged in a glittering gown for the second half, beginning with Gershwin’s Summertime (from Porgy and Bess) and the old American hymn Shenandoah, the purity of her delivery was simply touching. Three Chinese songs, My Homeland, Merry Lady
and Mountain Song (Yan Kou Di Shui) reacquainted her with her Mandarin-speaking
roots, and these were much enjoyed by the older members in the audience.
Pianist
Sim Yi Kai was more than mere accompanist, meticulously partnering singer
through ever breath and step. Other than a hatful of missed notes in the
Chinese songs, he was alert and sensitive throughout the 90-minute programme.
The
recital closed with two contrasting operatic arias. There are few moments as
spine-tingling as Dvorak’s Song To The
Moon (Rusalka), which Ee-Ping commanded
with disarming ease. And then she brought out the coloratura fireworks in
Rossini’s Una voce poco fa (The Barber of Seville), an imperious
show that was greeted with loud cheers. Her encore, O Mio Babbino Caro (Puccini’s Gianni
Schicchi), was no less ecstatically received. It is hoped that her second
vocal recital here will not be a long time in coming.
Photographs by the kind permission of Yee Ee-Ping and Sim Yi Kai.
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