POULENC'S LA VOIX HUMAINE / Review

POULENC’S LA VOIX HUMAINE

Jennifer Lien, Soprano 

Shane Thio, Piano

Ivan Heng, Director

Streamed on the Internet @ SISTIC Live

Saturday (18 July 2020)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 20 July 2020 with the title "Home-grown rendition of The Human Voice a rare gem".

Until the embargo of live concerts is lifted post-circuit breaker, music lovers will have to be content with pre-recorded digital concerts. Presented by the Singapore Symphony Group in its Victoria Concert Hall Presents series, this 2018 production of Francis Poulenc’s single-act, single-singer chamber opera La Voix Humaine (The Human Voice), first streamed last weekend, was a rare gem.

Performed before a live audience, its plot involved Elle (the generic “She” in French) in a final conversation with her former lover. Central to the 1958 opera, adapted from playwright Jean Cocteau’s 1928 script, was the telephone, a modern convenience and prop that was supposed to figure prominently throughout.

Wrong numbers, crossed connections and inept telephone operators were comedic elements in the serious melodrama. However, in director Ivan Heng’s conception, that physical means of communication was totally expunged. This allowed protagonist Elle the freedom of movement, to wander about onstage and sing without impediment.

The telephone’s only hint was a long red cord tightly wound around the grand piano on which pianist Shane Thio played. Also absent was Elle’s faithless lover, although his insidious presence might be inferred in furtive onscreen projections and Thio’s sockless red sneakers.   

Enlivening the anguished Elle was USA-based Singaporean soprano Jennifer Lien, whose monologue was a tour de force of lyrical and dramatic role-play. The former Business Times journalist turned operatic diva was fully immersed in the multi-faceted part and emoted brilliantly in idiomatic French (with the audience well served by English transliterations).

Through the opera’s compact 40 minutes, she brilliantly lived through Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief. Shifting effortlessly between denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, she often mixed these up in an intoxicating melange of fraught and barely-contained emotions. With hysterical outbursts alternating with episodes of lucidity, this was a multi-layered and grandstanding performance.

Poulenc’s music was unremittingly tonal, but liberally laced with dissonances and abrupt figurations. Lien flitted through recitative and outright song, where a penchant for sentimentality was revealed, albeit briefly. There was a short waltz-song sequence midway through, with a cascade of falling pills projected behind the performer. This was more than an allusion to a drug-induced fit of pique, also fortified by a well-placed bottle of liquor.

Whatever was Elle’s fate (suicide by overdose, gunshot or strangulation by telephone cord) became immaterial by the opera’s passionate but lyrical close. All that remained were the frenzied circumstances and states of mind that led to her fateful (and ultimately fatal) decisions. In short, The Human Voice was an in-depth treatise of the human condition, fragile psyche, warts and all. That it was captured with such trenchancy speaks volumes of all the artists involved.       

SSO 2020/21 SEASON OPENING CONCERT / Review

SSO SEASON OPENING CONCERT

Singapore Symphony Orchestra

Streamed on the Internet @ SISTIC Live

Saturday 11 July 2020

This review was published in The Straits Times on 14 July 2020 with the title "Moving orchestral performance an optimistic sign of SSO's future".

In a Covid-19-free alternative universe, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra would have given its first concert under newly introduced Chief Conductor Hans Graf this evening at Esplanade Concert Hall. In reality, the opening concert of the 2020-21 season was instead a stay-at-home event under current circut-breaker and social distancing rules.

Nonetheless, electronic tickets were issued on a pay-as-you-wish basis. There was even a glossily produced digital programme booklet complete with full programme notes and all the trimmings to accompany the viewing experience.

The concert’s main event was a reliving of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony in B minor, also known as the “Pathetique”, recorded on 17 January this year. That evening was incidentally the Austrian maestro Graf’s first concert after being named as Shui Lan’s successor at the orchestra’s helm.

Despite being the Russian’s bleakest and most depressing work (premiered in 1893 just a week before his untimely death), Graf’s vision was one of clear-headedness, steering clear of a surfeit of histrionics and hysteria.

By no means undemonstrative, the opening movement’s theme of pathos from the strings came across as sufficiently weepy, and the furious fugato that interrupted the catharsis was a jolt to the senses. The slow movement’s waltz was guileless and bittersweet, with Christian Schioler’s insistent timpani taps providing hints of underlying menace to come.

The unrelenting march of the Scherzo was a crescendo of true vehemence, with an inexorability that was gripping, almost to the point of suffocation. There was a smattering of uneasy applause at its conclusion. In between movements, there were also chorus of coughs from an audience not wearing facemasks, a scenario surely to be a thing of the past.

The finale’s descending chordal strings mirrored the opening movement, but now worn down with a genuine desolation. A glimmer of hope offered by the major key in its central section was short-lived, soon descending into despair, depression and doom. This was a truly moving performance, well-captured on video by multiple camera angles with high defination visuals and realistic sound. This might well be a glimpse into the future, a brave new world of SSO music-making under Graf’s inspired direction.

There was also a delicious encore, a performance of the Largo slow movement from J.S.Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins. The soloists were the prodigious 13-year-old Singaporean violinist Chloe Chua and Japan-born, Berlin-based violinist Karen Gomyo, who was originally scheduled to perform at this opening concert. They performed most sympathetically but remotely, partnered by 24 SSO musicians and guest harpsichordist Darrell Ang, all playing from their homes.

While one longed for the real-time live concert experience, modern technology has provided a well-meaning and worthwhile but hopefully temporary surrogate. 

CD Review: EVOLUTION by DONALD LAW

EVOLUTION

DONALD LAW, Piano

KNS Classical A/085

Its been several years since a Singaporean pianist produced a recital disc, and Donald Law’s debut album is much welcome amid this Covid-19 pandemic. The award winning pianist who pursued studies at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts and London’s Royal College of Music provides an hour-long chronological history of the piano sonata form. Beginning with the late Classical (Beethoven in 1821), following through to the Romantic era (Chopin, 1844), before closing in the early twentieth century (Janacek, 1905), this an enthralling musical journey.

Law gives an idiomatic reading of Beethoven’s Sonata No.30 in A flat major (Op.110), the most formal member of his final sonata trilogy. Its lyricism is well-realised, as is the third movement’s sense of pathos. The contrapuntal lines of the fugal finale are delivered with utter clarity, and on this count, I am certain that he will be a convincing Bach player. Only in the folk-flavoured central fast movement does the fast Trio section comes across as being hemmed in by politeness and discipline.

Moving on to Chopin’s Third Sonata in B minor (Op.58), Law has a strong grip of the first movement’s narrative sweep, and omitting the exposition repeat helped. All through the work’s arch lyricism, there is an undercurrent of tragedy and vulnerability that pervades, and this is best heard in the Largo third movement. If there were any music to compliment the gaunt and haunted look of the consumptive Chopin’s famous daguerreotype of 1849, this would be it. Law shapes this with much sympathy and understated beauty. While the etude-like second movement could have been more mercurial, the finale’s Rondo romp is delivered with a sure-headed and often thrilling inexorability.     

Arguably the best performance comes in Leos Janacek’s two-movement Sonata 1.X.1905 (“From The Street”), prompted by the murder of a worker in a street demonstration. Besides covering all the notes, Law gets to the dark heart and soul of this disturbing work. From its brooding opening movement (Presentiment) through an arch-like progression to its violent climax (Death), the canvas is filled with myriad shades and nuances of grey amid stark black and white musical imagery. A third movement had been discarded by the composer, but this “unfinished” torso stands, like a life cruelly interrupted, a masterpiece completed by its bleak finality.

With this excellent recital disc, Donald Law announces himself as a true artist and major new voice in Singapore’s classical music scene.

This recital may be enjoyed on various digital platforms at:

Evolution - KNS Classical