THE
NYONYA JOURNEY
Singapore
Conference Hall
Friday (4 November 2016 )
This review was published in The Straits Times on 7 November 2016 with the title "Spicing up Peranakan tunes".
Peranakan culture came about through
Chinese immigrants travelling down the South China Sea to settle and go native
in the lands of Southeast Asia , which they referred to as Nanyang. The
inimitable melting pot of Chinese and Indo-Malay indigenous cultures came to
define their lifestyles, cuisine, dressing, language and mores.
This Singapore Chinese Orchestra concert
conducted by Yeh Tsung featured four world premieres of works celebrating the
Peranakan experience, each different and individual in its own way. Chinese
composer Xie Xiang Ming's Colours opened
the concert, its repetitive short and rhythmic motifs on winds and plucked
strings forming a patchwork that recalled minimalism and the patterns found on
local fabrics and tiles. There was a semblance of melody from the cellos but
that was not further developed with the work's abrupt ending.
Subtle were the local influences in East
Malaysian Simon Kong Su Leong's Tok
Panjang (Nyonya Delicacies) that
relived the spices and flavours to be found in a festive long table feast.
There were four linked parts, entitled Teh
Mata Kuching And Wine, Festival
Dishes, Nyonya Kueh and Areca, which whetted the appetite for
something equivalent to sambal belacan,
but this was not fully sated. Humming from the players closed the work quietly
as bibiks delved on the pleasures of
betel nut.
The most aromatic work was Chong Kee
Yong's Celebration of Faith, which
employed four ensembles: the main orchestra, a troupe of five offstage
musicians and two groups of winds on opposite balconies. Beginning with a
crackling old gramophone recording of ceremonial music, the music soon became
an Ivesian symphony of aural assails, each group operating independently of
each other. The heady piece closed with a clangourous procession of the quintet
marching out of the hall and receding into the distance.
The longest work was Dick Lee's The Journey of Lee Kan, the story of his
ancestor seven times removed who left the Fujian Yong Chun China
Lee himself gave a short introduction,
humourously referring to his forebear as “The First Mad Chinaman”, referencing
his bestselling 1990 album The Mad
Chinaman. Singer-actor George Chan sang the eponymous part while soprano
Felicia Teo Kaixin was his love interest Tuan Neo. Both singers were amplified,
but the volume could have been further boosted for more clarity above the orchestral
throng.
The music never got out of Lee's comfort
zone of writing for musicals in English, with pretty tunes and agreeable
harmonies par for the course. SCO Composer-in-Residence Eric Watson's expert
orchestration added to the colour, but there was no further room for an
edginess which would have made the work more memorable.
Had the words been in Hokkien, Malay or
both, the outcome might have been quite different, and likely more authentic.
As a musical experiment, this was a worthy effort that can be further
developed.
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| Composers and colleagues: Eric Watson (2nd from left), Chong Kee Yong (3rd from right) and Simon Kong Su Leong (extreme right). |
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