DANCES OF PANAMA / Singapore Symphony Orchestra / Review

DANCES OF PANAMA

Singapore Symphony Orchestra

Victoria Concert Hall

Friday (19 November 2021)

 

How refreshing it is to attend a concert of string music that does not include the ubiquity of serenades by Dvorak/Tchaikovsky/Elgar or various combinations of Holberg Suite / Simple Symphony and Adagios / Adagiettos / Andante Cantabiles. What the audience got instead was an unusually eclectic programme of 20^th century and contemporary string music conducted by Uruguayan conductor Carlos Kalmar, who also served as friendly and avuncular host.

 

Rarities are the way to go, especially when good music is involved. The audience size was also encouraging, indicating that people yearn for music even if these were not familiar favourites. African-American composer William Grant Still’s Dances of Panama (1948) opened the concert. Its four movements could be classified as “light music”, that is easy listening cast in classical mould and orchestrated like concert music. There are probably ethno-musicological bases to these dances, sometimes sounding like Spanish music with occasional Caribbean influences, and may be enjoyed as one would Hungarian Dances and Slavonic Dances. SSO’s strings breathed life into these little-known numbers, and they just got started.

 

Great Dane Carl Nielsen’s Suite for Strings (1888) is perhaps the only familiar music to be heard, but it is still a relative rarity in these parts. An elegiac quality with weeping violins occupied the opening Prelude, with echoes of Grieg looming ever so closely overhead. The lively Intermezzo channelled Dvorak in its central waltz-like section, and it was in the finale where hints of Nielsen’s great symphonies may be discerned, such as an inexorable sense of exhilaration generated. Having grown up with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields’ famous 1970s recording, one could only long for a live performance, and here SSO truly fulfilled expectations.    

 

Pulitzer Prize winning American composer Caroline Shaw’s Entr’acte (2011) is well worth several listens because of her skilful subversion of what listeners take for granted as typical string music. This performance presented what sounded vaguely familiar but passed through a series of distorting prisms and lenses. Comforting string timbres coloured with incidental sounds like harmonics, portamenti, bows and fingers sliding on non-resonating strings added to a sense of wonderment. There was a central episode of pizzicato polka-ing which seemed like a modern update of the Johann Strauss classic, before winding down with Yu Jing’s strumming on her cello as the only sound as silence fell around her. Interesting, to say the least.

Cellist Yu Jing receives applause.

   

English composer Frank Bridge’s Suite for string orchestra (1909) was the evening’s truly neglected gem. Why has this never been played before? New rule: every performance of RVW’s Fantasia of Greensleeves must be reciprocated with this Bridge. Besides, it is a better and far more original work. The first movement Prelude has that pastoral feel common to fellow Brits with the use of modal themes, the ensemble responding with the richness of sonority worthy of RVW’s Tallis Fantasy. The second and fourth movements, both short and fast-paced, have the fluffy quality of light music but the heart rests in the third movement’s Nocturne. It is an elegy with the same soul-searching and moving ability as that overplayed Samuel Barber Adagio, but without the shrieking hysteria. It provided moments for reflection, a rare beauty that also saw short sublime solos from Yu Jing’s cello and Guan Qi’s viola.

 

String playing has long been the Singapore Symphony Orchestra’s strong suit. Covid or no, this concert upholds that assertion, and long may that remain. 

All photographs by Aloysius Lim, courtesy of Singapore Symphony Orchestra.