PRESIDENT'S YOUNG PERFORMERS CONCERT / Singapore Symphony Orchestra / Review

PRESIDENT’S YOUNG PERFORMERS CONCERT
Singapore Symphony Orchestra
Victoria Concert Hall
Friday (27 September 2019) 

This review was published in The Straits Times on 30 September 2019 with the title "Young guitarist on top of his game".

The Singapore Symphony Orchestra’s President’s Young Performers Concerts have been an annual showcase of local talent in concerto performances since the 1990s. The series has spanned tenures of four presidents since Ong Teng Cheong, featuring the likes of pianists Shane Thio, Lim Yan and Abigail Sin, violinists Lee Huei Min and Chan Yoong Han, and even a saxophonist, Samuel Phua. Kevin Loh is the first guitarist to appear on this platform, although he has previously performed with the orchestra.

His concerto was no big surprise: Joaquin Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, surely the most performed and recorded guitar concerto of all time. While not presenting new insights, he gave a confident and big-hearted account of this familiar favourite. But how many people actually know its fast outer movements?

There was the intimate feeling of chamber music as Loh worked well with the orchestra, which relied mostly on strings and woodwinds in its narrative. Whether strumming out chords or negotiating tricky passage work, Loh was on top of his game. In the famous Adagio, he first accompanied Elaine Yeo’s sensuous cor anglais solo and then ventured out on his own. His sonorous mastery of the guitar’s lower registers was also a delight, sounding like some baritone majo (or Spanish gentleman) in love.  

The finale that followed erupted with festive colour, helped by the brass, especially the trumpets. Prolonged applause meant an encore, with Paraguayan guitarist-composer Agustin Barrios Mangore’s Waltz in G major (Op.8 No.4) being Loh’s perfect icing on the cake.

To balance the familiarity of Rodrigo, the concert led by SSO Associate Conductor Joshua Tan included two less familiar works. Opening the evening was Mendelssohn’s Die Schöne Melusine Overture, programme music on the legend of a two-tailed mermaid falling in love. Intricate woodwind passages and weepy strings painted a watery realm for an ill-fated romance to blossom, and eventually expire beneath the waves.

Max Reger’s Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Mozart, receiving its Singapore premiere, concluded the concert. The German composer, front-liner of the “back-to-Bach movement”, was responsible for some impossibly turgid pot-boilers, but this was thankfully not one of those. Based on the 1^st movement theme from  Mozart’s Piano Sonata in A major (K.331, the one with the Turkish Rondo), the variations were well-crafted but difficult to pull off.

One might regard this as an expanded version of Brahms’ Haydn Variations, as there were more than a few similarities. The theme itself was plainly stated, with excellent woodwinds to thank again, but the variations got increasingly florid while maintaining a basic outline.

Kudos go to both conductor and orchestra for keeping the variations tautly strung, without allowing instrumental ornaments and details to complicate matters. There were even stretches of Straussian opulence and beauty, all coming before the massive fugal finale and the theme’s glorious re-entry. This could have been one big contrapuntal bore, but it simply was not to be.

Concert photographs by the kind courtesy of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra.