THE
BUTTERFLY LOVERS
Singapore
Symphony Orchestra
Victoria
Concert Hall
Friday (19 February 2015)
This review was published in The Straits Times on 22 February 2016 with the title "Butterfly Lovers takes flight with 87-year-old conductor".
The Chinese New Year season was good
enough reason as any for the Singapore Symphony Orchestra to perform an entire
programme of Chinese music. The Butterfly Lovers was an obvious selling
point, but the real privilege was witnessing guest conductor Zheng Xiao Ying in
action. She is the doyenne of China's woman conductors, and at 87 this year,
also the oldest maestro to lead the SSO.
Unique is her ability to engage an
audience by addressing before the performance of each piece. She spoke in
Mandarin with clear, radiant tones, enthusing and waxing lyrical about the
music. This was probably a relief for Chinese-speaking audience members who
specially came, as Marc Rochester's very comprehensive programme notes had not
been translated into Chinese.
The show began with Li Huan Zhi's Spring
Festival Overture, where raucous percussion ruled the roost. Lyrical
moments came in Pan Yun's plaintive oboe solo, providing dynamic and narrative
balance to this festive piece. The orchestra responded with much alertness and
rhythmic savvy to Zheng's directions, but timbral colours were the forte in the
next work, Xu Zhen Min's A Tone Picture Of Border Village.
Imagine a scene in China's Far West
clothed in luscious Technicolor, a score combining Debussy's impressionist
hues, Bartok and Rosza's sensuous renderings of folk music, and infectious
frontier-town rhythms of Copland and Ginastera. Big solos for Jamie Hersch's
French horn, Evgueni Brokmiller's flute and Igor Yuzefovich's violin all
distinguished themselves in this delightfully indulgent wallow.
The orchestration prowess of Respighi
were relived in the Asian premiere of Huang Ruo's Three Folk Songs. One
will not hear more opulent readings of Feng Yang Hua Gu (Flower Drum
Song), Kang Ding Love Song and The Girl From Da Ban, all
familiar tunes, than this. It would seem that these composers could not wait to
break out from traditional heterophony to engage in unashamedly decadent
polyphony.
Conductor Zheng quipped that nobody in
China knows The Butterfly Lovers as Hu Die Ai Ren, but rather the
immortal legend of Liang Zhu (short for Liang Shanbo & Zhu
Yingtai). Composed by Chen Gang and He Zhanhao in 1958, it was a bold
experiment to translate the characteristic expressions of Chinese opera into a
totally foreign idiom of Western musical composition. The result was a virtuoso
violin concerto in single-movement sonata-fantasy form.
The soloist was SSO Associate
Concertmaster Kong Zhao Hui, who has performed this work over a hundred times,
including in SSO's concert tour to Switzerland in 2000. Garbed in resplendent hong
bao red, his reading came as naturally as breathing and vocalising for an
opera singer. His expressive use of portamentos (slides) were well
judged, blending perfectly in duet with Ng Pei Sian's cello, and even
furthering the music's fraught emotions with violent stamps on the floor. The
orchestra provided perfect partnership, including highlighting several portamentos
of their own to good effect.
Huang Yi Jun's lovely orchestration
of Liu Tien Hua's Liang Xiao (Beautiful
Evening) saw the first violins' melody gently accompanied by pizzicato
strings. The concert concluded with Chen Le-Gang's Sainaim Rhapsody,
based on Xinjiang and Central Asian melodies, a showpiece which could have been
first cousin to Ippolitov-Ivanov's Caucasian Sketches.
After standing for two hours, still
sprightly and energised by a standing ovation, Zheng offered as encore another
seasonal favourite: Huang Yi Jun's popular Hua Hao Yue Yuan (Beautiful
Flowers, Round Moon). An audience clap-along was the inevitable result for
this feel-good concert.
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| Photo: Teo Li-Chin |
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