LOVE, POULENC
9th Singapore Lieder Festival
Victoria Concert Hall Music Studio
Last Friday & Saturday (15 & 16 November 2019)
Chang Tou Liang
2019 marked the ninth edition of the Singapore Lieder Festival, organised by the Sing Song Club founded by tenor Adrian Poon and pianist Shane Thio. Over the years, the group performed over a thousand art songs, encompassing great German lieder cycles, English folksongs, French chansons and premieres of songs by Singaporean composers.
This year’s offering was a distillation of the 2013 festival, which showcased the complete melodies of French composer Francis Poulenc (1899 to 1963). In two short but intense recitals last weekend, three singers and the indefatigable accompanist Thio reprised some of the key song cycles. Given Poulenc’s penchant for melancholy, humour, irony and luscious tunes, that seemed irresistible.
The first evening opened with soprano Teng Xiang Ting in Poems of Louis Aragon, two widely contrasting songs dripping with socialist notions. Beautiful lyrical lines distinguished C (I Have Crossed The Bridges Of Cé) while her finely articulated French surmounted the tricky Fetes Galantes. While making her name as an operatic diva, Teng showed she was equally adroit as an art song interpreter.
Busier of two singers, she also sang Fiancailles pour rire (Light-hearted Betrothal) and La Courte Paille (The Short Straw), comprising some 12 songs. If there were a composer able to cram multiple layers of emotions and nuances into diminutive musical bon mots, that would be Poulenc. Make no mistake about the seemingly simple words and settings, as hidden meanings and entendres abound.
Tenor Adrian Poon sang in both evenings. The five songs in Banalites (Banalities), Poulenc’s most familiar cycle, received vivid characterisations. Smoky decadence in Hotel, the tipsy waltz-song in Voyage a Paris and moving plaints of Sanglots (Sobs), highlighting mercurial shifts of moods, were easily taken in his stride.
A minor controversy involved a male voice singing La Dame de Monte-Carlo - Poulenc’s longest song - about an ageing madame’s desperate plight, casting her last hopeless die in the gambling table of life. No worries. Considering Poon’s cross-dressing act in New Opera Singapore’s recent production of Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, this was par for the course.
On the second evening, Poon tackled Tel Jours Telle Nuit (As The Day So The Night) and Calligrammes, 16 songs in all. These were darker and more aphoristic, with the piano part more pointillist and fraught. The former was a kaleidoscopic metaphorical journey from day to night, encompassing all shades in between, while the latter was inspired by war and personal loss.
The third singer, baritone Daniel Fong, covered the songs on animals and artists. Le bestiaire (The Book Of Beasts) included curiosities like a camel, Tibetan goat, grasshopper and crayfish, all under a minute long. More substantial was Le travail du peintre (The Work of the Painter) where Poulenc’s artist friends were portrayed in vignettes – Picasso, Chagall, Braque, Gris, Klee, Miro and the little-known Jacques Villon. The last provided a most noble of endings, a touch that was simply Poulenc.
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