Review: Concert
TOY TOY TOY!
re:Sound with Margaret Leng Tan
Yong Siew Toh Conservatory Concert Hall
Friday (14 September 2018 )
This review was published by The Straits Times on 17 September 2018 with the title "Riotous fun with toy pianos".
After
feasting on Baroque, Classical and Romantic repertoire in its first two years, Singapore
It
however opened with Leopold Mozart’s Toy Symphony, a 10-minute banality
that delighted in gimmicky effects of rattle, bird whistle, cuckoo call,
tambourine and jingles played over the strings. That nonetheless whetted the
appetite for mayhem to come, with Tan’s entry to plink on her Schoenhut toy
pianos for the rest of the show. She sat on a low stool but still towered over
her instruments.
Opening
with solo pieces by UK-based American composer Stephen Montague, she showed
what the fuss was all about. It takes a consummate virtuoso to get around the
driving tarantella rhythm of Mirabella, and with the help of tape, a
gamelan-like orchestral sonority was created in Raga Capriccio, a work
based on the repetition of just a few notes.
With
four arrangements for toy piano and string quartet by Milos Raickovich, some of
avant-garde and new music’s big names were celebrated. Most familiar were the
drolleries of Erik Satie’s Gymnopedie No.3. Tan then played on two
pianos simultaneously in Philip Glass’s Modern Love Waltz, carousing to
a Spanish-like rhythm. John Cage’s Dream was haunting, building up seamlessly
like Barber’s famous Adagio For Strings. Toby Twining’s Nightmare Rag
conjured a haunted house feel and with its tribute to The Addams Family theme
music, had the audience finger-snapping on cue.
The
music got denser with a combo of string, wind instruments and percussion in
Erik Griswold’s Gossamer Wings. Its three movements had lightness in
texture with the marimba’s timbre complementing that of the toy piano. The
final movement saw percussionist Michael Tan thumping it out on a toy drum-set
of his own. Michael Wookey’s Coney Island Sous L’Eau employed a bigger
ensemble, with a heady reliving of fairground music. The use of siren and
thunder effects reminded one of Satie’s surrealist ballet Parade.
The
concert closed with the full orchestra in Montague’s A Toy Symphony
(1999), conducted by the composer himself. This was the world premiere of its
2018 version, specially scored for toy piano part alongside six guest artists
deployed to the kitchen department. Joining the fray were the British high
commissioner and his wife, several orchestral general managers and community
musicians, and veteran comedienne-broadcaster Koh Chieng Mun.
The
three movement symphony was premised upon the nostalgia of playing with one’s
childhood toys in a musty attic. Highly dramatic horror movie effects ruled the
Noisy Toys, Slow Afternoon opening movement, and the audience got a
chance to hiss, shush and bird-whistle in the subsequent movements before the
procession of Ghost March, Tin Soldiers At Dawn which closed the work
with a terrific din. Serious work or not, it completed a smashing evening of
riotous fun.
No comments:
Post a Comment