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

PRESIDENT’S YOUNG 

PERFORMERS CONCERT

Singapore Symphony Orchestra

Victoria Concert Hall

Friday (26 August 2022)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 31 August 2022 with the title "Soloists shine in young performers concert".

 

The Singapore Symphony Orchestra’s annual President’s Young Performers Concert was inaugurated during the 1990s to provide talented local musicians a platform to play concertos with the nation’s only professional orchestra. The series was supported by the classical music-loving then-President Ong Teng Cheong, who personally graced these concerts and is also the only Head-of-State to have led the orchestra from the podium.

New SSO Associate Conductor
Rodolfo Barraez, from Venezuela.
Vive El Sistema!

 

This year’s edition, with President Mdm Halimah Yacob in attendance, had the distinction of featuring three soloists besides introducing the orchestra’s newly-appointed Associate Conductor, young Venezuelan maestro Rodolfo Barraez in his debut concert here.

 

Opening with Swiss composer Arthur Honegger’s Pastorale d'été (Summer Pastorale), the orchestra lost no time in creating an air of balmy indolence. Sultry strings set the mood, as Jamie Hersch’s ever-steady French horn, backed by excellent woodwinds, gently roused Nature from her slumber.

 

That made for a totally atmospheric curtain-raiser, after which the orchestra sensitively partnered pianist Pualina Lim in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.9 in E flat major (K.271). One of his longest and technically most demanding concertos, it was unusual for having the piano stake its claim from the outset. Lim did so with total confidence, following up with playing of fluency and elegance.

 

Unfazed by its digital challenges, there was also room for her to brood in the pathos-inducing slow movement, the poetic heart of the work. The final Rondo was taken a tad cautiously but enough contrasts were made such that the mincing little minuet at its centre came across as a graceful interlude, before the work wound to a brilliant conclusion.  

 

Further virtuosity arrived in Hummel’s Introduction, Theme and Variations (Op.102) with oboist Quek Jun Rui, student of Yong Siew Toh Conservatory, at its helm. Typical of early Romantic showpieces from the 1820s, its main theme was of a comedic and operatic quality. Quek revelled in plaintive bel canto lyricism before launching into variations that got increasingly hair-raising as the minutes progressed. Displaying immaculate articulation and dexterity, its vertiginous heights were conquered with fearless aplomb.

 

The evening’s fascinatingly varied fare was completed with Richard Strauss’s Four Songs (Op.27), which included some of the German opera composer’s best-known melodies. New York-based soprano Evangeline Ng established an imposing Valkyrie-like presence by possessing a vocal heft that took no prisoners.

 

Originally scored with piano accompaniment, the dense orchestrations could have easily overwhelmed lesser singers, such as in Ruhe, Meine Seele! (Rest Thee, My Soul!), but Ng comfortably overcame the odds. Cutting through a swathe of sound, her ecstatic outburst in Cacilie was followed by further raptures in Heimliche Aufforderung (The Lover’s Pledge), a drinking song with erotic overtones. In the final song, Morgen (Morning or Tomorrow), concertmaster Kong Zhao Hui’s sublime violin solo provided the gilded edge for Ng’s entreaties for a hope of future happiness. With these three fine soloists, Singapore’s musical scene has a bright future ahead.

President Mdm Halimah Yacob
meets with all the young talents.

All photographs by Nathaniel Lim / Singapore Symphony Orchestra.

QIN LI-WEI PLAYS FOUR SEASONS, ALPINE SYMPHONY / Orchestra of the Music Makers / Review

QIN LI-WEI PLAYS FOUR SEASONS

ALPINE SYMPHONY

Orchestra of the Music Makers

Esplanade Concert Hall

Sunday (28 August 2022)

 

This concert by the Orchestra of the Music Makers (OMM) conducted by its Founder and Music Director Chan Tze Law was long in coming. Last year, Chinese-Australian cellist Qin Li-Wei was to have performed Astor Piazzolla’s Four Seasons of Buenos Aires with the orchestra but a change in quarantine requirement for returnees from overseas put paid to the original concert date. Restrictions to onstage ensemble size also meant that the immense forces that staged Wagner’s Die Walkure in January 2020 (remember those carefree pre-pandemic days?) could not be assembled until now. Marking a return to “normality”, this evening was to be the final event requiring the mandatory use of face masks as restrictions will be lifted on 29 August.

 

The four works of Piazzolla’s famous tango tetralogy Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas were composed as separate entities from 1965 to 1970. It was Ukrainian composer Leonid Desyatnikov’s arrangement for violin and strings which united all the seasons as a whole. Championed by Gidon Kremer and his Kremerata Baltica during the late 1990s, universal exposure was ensured. 

Piazzolla - Desyatnikov - Shin

The version for cello, arranged by young Singaporean Jonathan Shin, received its World Premiere this evening. None of the music, which begins with Verano Porteño (Summer) and ends with Primavera Porteño (Spring), is changed except that this edition now sounds more mellow and smooth-edged. The camp glissandi that used to shock listeners have been toned down, but one could always count on Li-Wei to bring out his unflappable and drop-dead stylish manner which worked well in this highly lyrical yet rhythmic music (as with very much else).

 

All the cheeky Vivaldi quotations were retained, popping out when one least expected them. This performance also included two interludes added by Shin. Last of All and First Warmth were inserted between Summer and Autumn, and Winter and Spring respectively. Both were essentially slow movements from Vivaldi’s Winter and Spring dressed up with hazy backing dissonances, making them sound like distant reminiscences. So why was Winter interloping between Summer and Autumn? It did not make sense until one realised that those hot months in Argentina (Southern Hemisphere) actually corresponded to December and snowfall months in the Northern Hemisphere. The performers’ panache was accorded a prolonged ovation, and the audience was rewarded with the most cellistic of encores: Saint-Saens’ The Swan backed by strings and harp. That was simply sublime, as expected.

 

The two-hour long concert was completed with a rare outing for Richard Strauss’ most grandiose and nearly hour-long tone poem, Eine Alpensinfonie (An Alpine Symphony). Incidentally, the last time this was played in Singapore was a concert by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra led by Lan Shui in February 2012 That concert also featured Qin Li-Wei in the first half playing Dvorak’s Cello Concerto. Scored for humongously large orchestra including over 40 Yong Siew Toh Conservatory students and off-stage brass of 16 players (including 12 French horns), this looked like the largest assemblage of musicians since Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand (also by OMM). Far outnumbering the SSO group of ten years ago, it also produced the most impressive sonic racket of them all.    

 

Following Strauss’ programme for all 22 linked sections of the symphony was the easiest part, his orchestral portrayals of sunrise, mountaineering day-trippers, alpine meadows (with seven clanging cow-bells no less), streams, glaciers and the like were brilliantly brought out by the young orchestra. Conductor Chan Tze Law’s command of the forces and overall pacing of the overlong narrative was excellent, and never was the music allowed to drag. A relative lull, somewhere between being lost in the thickets and dangerous moments before summiting, however saw some dorks in the audience applauding enthusiastically. What have they been listening to all this time, and have they not taken a climb (even up that ant-hill called Bukit Timah) before?

 

The huge climax at the Summit has to be the greatest burst of sound one has encountered in Esplanade in a long time, and to think that SSO first played this in Victoria Concert Hall back in 1994. How times have changed. And who was not waiting for the Thunderstorm (Gewitter und sturm) scene complete with wind machine (a rotating drum driving a canvas roll) and Wagner tubas at full pelt? Just as impressive was the moment when Joanna Paul’s organ entry (a rare sortie for Esplanade Concert Hall’s scandalously underused Klais organ), signalling that the hazards of mountaineering are over and all’s well with the universe (or for those climbers at the very least). Kudos go also to the lighting people whose illuminations of the orchestra faithfully followed the time of day as portrayed in the symphony, beginning with dim light, graduating to full daylight and then retreating to nightfall.    

Notice the change in ambient lighting
as nightfall looms in the Alpine Symphony.

 

OMM was made for concerts such as this, and its magnificence in bringing out the full capabilities of a modern symphony orchestra is the reason why Esplanade exists. The long and tumultuous applause it received at the concert’s conclusion remind one and all why people love music, attending concerts and sonic spectacles, and the intendent pleasures all these bring. 

Watch OMM play the Alpine Symphony here:

MESSIAEN'S HARAWI / 10th Singapore Lieder Festival / Sing Song Club

MESSIAEN’S HARAWI

10^th Singapore Lieder Festival

Sing Song Club

Victoria Concert Hall 

Dance Studio

Wednesday (24 August 2022)

 

The Singapore Lieder Festival, named in these pages as the nation’s best kept secret, made a comeback for its 10^th edition with a single-night event. The Sing Song Club gave the Singapore premiere of twentieth-century French composer Olivier Messiaen’s song-cycle Harawi (1945), part of his love-and-death trilogy inspired by the legend of Tristan and Isolde. The two other parts include the massive Turangalila Symphony, performed by the SSO in 1994 and 2017, and the choral Cinq Rechants, which has yet to receive its premiere here.

  

 

Harawi comprises 12 songs in French (written by Messiaen himself), based on Peruvian Quetcha poetry, music and folklore on the said subject of love and death. The songs were shared by tenor Adrian Poon and soprano Jennifer Lien, partnered by Singapore’s very own Graham Johnson, the intrepid pianist Shane Thio. The music bears similarities with Turangalila albeit on a smaller scale, with its shared musical idioms of violent dissonances and paradoxically comforting harmonies, and by its use of recurring themes.

 

Birdsong abounds, notably the green dove (colombe verte) representing the forbidden love between protagonists Piroutcha and Toungou. Their eternal love can only be truly consummated in death, by the latter’s decapitation amid cosmic levels of upheavals. Erotic and gory in equal measure, this was what made Harawi the cult favourite it is. While Turangalila was the extroverted crowd pleaser, Harawi was the introverted sleeper of Messaien acolytes.

 

Both singers were excellent and well-matched in their selected songs, reflecting a kind of yin and yang in opposing yet complementary viewpoints. Poon was the grounded terrestrial spirit of sleeping cities (La ville qui dormant), mountains (Montagnes) and the realm of animals (monkeys and the ubiquitous birds) while Lien revelled in the mystic ideals, love (L’amour de Piroutcha), parting (Adieu) and celestial forces, the sun (L’escalier edit, gestes de soleil) and stars (Katchokatchi les etolies). Both conveyed the outward ruggedness and inner beauty of the music very convincingly.

Doundou tchil,
now repeat it 19 more times...

 

Besides singing in idiomatic French, repetitive onomatopoeic words also stole the show, such as the recurring doundou tchil and katchikatchi sung by Lien (representing a dance with ankle bells and grasshoppers respectively), and Poon’s shrieking cries of ahi and o (Repetition planetaire) as well as the monosyllabic pia (Syllables). Their synchronisation with Thio’s dynamic pianism in these rhythmically complex and extremely tricky numbers were a marvel to behold from start to end.

Ahi...ahi....O....
(Repetition planetaire)

 

Held in the high-ceilinged and mirrored space of Victoria Concert Hall’s Dance Studio, with its sonorous and not-too-reverberant acoustics, the performance was very well received by a small but extremely appreciative audience. The floor sprinkled with multi-coloured origami pieces (possibly celebrating the recent repeal of 377A) representing birds, grasshoppers and stars made a very nice and atmospheric touch for a landmark in Singapore music history.

 

Whence will the next performance of Harawi take place? Given that Messiaen’s Quatour pour le fin du temps and Turangalila, Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, Bernstein’s Mass, Wagner’s Walkure, and the complete melodies of Debussy, Ravel and Poulenc (thanks also to Sing Song Club) are no longer strangers to Singapore audiences, one can hazard to say that cannot be too long from now, and coming from yet another adventurous group of musicians. Yes, a revolution of sorts has begun.

KEVIN LOH Guitar Recital & CLARISSE TEO Piano Recital / Review

RAY OF LIGHT

Kevin Loh (Guitar)

CLARISSE TEO IN RECITAL

Clarisse Teo (Piano)

Esplanade Recital Studio

Wednesday & Sunday (17 & 21 August 2022)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 24 August 2022 with the title "Young talents shine in summer concerts".

 

August is the month when music students overseas return home for their summer vacations, presenting concerts that are invariably impressive showcases of their artistic progress. The last week saw two such recitals from some of our brightest sparks. Singapore’s generational talent of the guitar, Kevin Loh, now an undergraduate at Cambridge University, surveyed the history of the classical guitar with varied works from the baroque to the 21st century.

 

Beginning with a transcription of J.S.Bach’s Cello Suite No.6 in D major, he showed that this music sounded just as idiomatic on the guitar as the original instrument. Most notable was his natural, unforced manner with music-making, allied with faultless articulation, which made for a pleasurable experience. Besides being totally in tune with the rhythmic aspects of its antique dance movements, his selection of three of Spaniard Fernando Sor’s Bagatelles also oozed charm and personality.  

 

Young Singaporean composer Lim Kang Ning’s Serenata del Caffe provided much-needed contrasts, its melancholy and introspection resembled an intimate conversation between two friends over coffee. Two of Schubert’s Lieder (art songs) transcribed by Johann Kaspar Mertz were a demonstration of the art of cantabile, not least the famous Serenade from song-cycle Schwanengesang (Swan Song). Outright virtuosity came in two Sonatinas by the Briton Lennox Berkeley and Mexcian Manuel Ponce, which displayed a mastery of myriad styles and techniques. Loh capped these off with a rip-roaring encore in Antonio Carlos Jobim’s Felicidade.   

 

Just as impressive was the solo recital of rarities by pianist Clarisse Teo, presently pursuing a musical doctorate at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. How often has one attended a recital of sonatas by Russian composers Nikolai Medtner and Anatoly Alexandrov? Both were born in the 1880s and lived well into the age of modernity. Bastions of the conservativism, they shunned atonality and avant-gardeism, composing some fourteen piano sonatas each.

 

Medtner’s Sonata-Skazka in C minor combined Romantic era lyricism with surprising whimsicality, the term skazka being the Russian equivalent of fairy tales. Alexandrov’s Fourteenth and Third Sonatas were even more obscure, both receiving their Singapore premieres. Paradoxically, the later 1967 work sounded far more traditional – including a masterly set of variations - than the earlier single-movement piece of 1920. All three sonatas presented thorny technical and interpretive challenges, but Teo delivered with crispness and passionate aplomb.

 

Sandwiched in between these were Englishman Arnold Bax’s Dream In Exile, a ruminative work of nostalgia serving as both a fantasy and lament, reflecting his love for the land of Ireland. More familiar was American Lowell Liebermann’s Gargoyles, four short movements of musical grotesquerie that juxtaposed eerie calm with coruscating violence. Teo’s confidently eclectic tastes extended also into her encores, Dane Rued Langgaard’s impressionistic The Restless Wind from Gitanjali Hymns and Frenchman Francis Poulenc’s rapturous Homage To Edith Piaf. No Chopin or no Rachmaninov in a piano recital? No worries. 

Kevin Loh's recital was presented by Kris Foundation.

KAHCHUN WONG AND SCO / Singapore Chinese Orchestra / Review

KAHCHUN WONG & SCO

Singapore Chinese Orchestra

Singapore Conference Hall

Saturday (20 August 2022)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 24 August 2022 with the title "Conducting prowess of Wong Kah Chun on show".

 

Singaporean conductor Kahchun Wong (better known to locals as Wong Kah Chun), recently appointed Chief Conductor of the Japan Philharmonic, made a triumphant return to the orchestra that helped launch his podium career. While still a student at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory, he was an Assistant Conductor of the Singapore Chinese Orchestra under Yeh Tsung’s mentorship, a position that paved the way to success in multiple international competitions.

 

Conducting entirely from memory, the concert opened with the Singapore premiere of Oscar-winning composer Tan Dun’s Fire Ritual. This 2018 violin concerto was adapted from his film score Nanjing 1937 (1995) and designated “a music ritual for the Victims of War”. An example of “orchestral theatre”, musicians are part of the act with extra-instrumental activity including vocalisations, sound effects (such as rustling of paper) and offstage maneuvers.  

 

The soloist was SCO’s own zhonghu player Wu Kefei, who performed on three huqins of different registers. The zhonghu’s low and gutteral voice, raw and earthy, was contrasted with the erhu’s pathos-inducing plaints and the gaohu’s mimicry of birdcalls. More than a juggling act, her virtuosity was well-matched by playing of poetry and alluring elegance.

 

Wind players strategically placed in offstage locations provided stunning antiphonal effects that contributed to the visual and aural spectacle. The half-hour work, part temple ceremony and part movie-music epic, laid bare the perpetual toll of history: the suffering of common people.

 

Quite different, and arguably more spectacular, was the world premiere of Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures At An Exhibition in an orchestration by conductor Wong for Chinese instruments. Orchestral transcription of this piano suite abound, the most popular being Frenchman Maurice Ravel’s, recognised for its originality and richness of colour. Wong’s no-holds-barred edition, however, topped every other by maximising the full timbrel possibilities of every instrument at his disposal.

 

Central to this self-described sinfonia concertante was the quintet of soloists formed by Tan Man Man (erhu), Lee Cheng Jun (dizi), Zhang Yin (pipa), Ma Huan (yangqin) and Benjamin Boo (percussion). Leading the parade, they provided most of the melodic interest by revelling in feverish and frenetic activity, while the orchestra filled in with near-psychedelic textures and details.

 

Wong was keen to avoid imitating novelties from other scores, instead springing surprises of his own. In The Old Castle, where Ravel used the saxophone, Wong employed low dizi accompanied by wordless voices. Metal plates and heavy chains provided rhythmic impetus to Bydlo, the lumbering ox-cart. The Ballet Of Unhatched Chicks became a riot in the henhouse, winds having a field day besides sneaking in several roosters and even an odd koel.

 

Only someone from Singapore could have transformed the marketplace in Limoges into a bustling pasar resounding with Malay drumming. The xun (ocarina) and a Tibetan prayer bowl gave In Lingua Mortua (In The Language Of The Dead) the eerie vibes it deserved, while the hall’s ornamental ancient bianzhong (bronze chime bells) found their niche in the closing Great Gate of Kiev. Accompanying projected pictures drawn by primary school children, this rich smorgasbord of sound and colour led by Wong could be described in two words: absolutely brilliant. 

MOZART PIANO CONCERTO NO.24 & BRAHMS SYMPHONY NO.1 / Singapore Symphony Orchesra / Review

MOZART PIANO CONCERTO 24

AND  BRAHMS SYMPHONY 1

Singapore Symphony Orchestra

Esplanade Concert Hall

Thursday (18 August 2022)

 

When one has thought that every orchestral work by Robert Schumann has been heard in concert, up pops his Overture, Scherzo & Finale (Op.52), composed in 1841, around the same time as his Spring Symphony (Symphony No.1 in B flat major). This almost became his Second Symphony but it lacked a slow movement, and got neglected as a result. Its Singapore premiere was led by Swiss conductor Stefan Blunier, who made it sound like some forgotten masterpiece.

 

The first movement resembled one of those formal overtures that preceded an opera or incidental music (like Manfred or Genoveva), a slow introduction in E minor heralding an Allegro section proper with all the elements of sonata form. The playing was intense and incisive, its exertions greeted with premature applause (and not for the last time this evening) upon its conclusion. The Scherzo had fidgety jumping figures on strings which would have made an effective piano piece as well, before closing with a finale in perpetual motion. Here the musical paths of Schumann and Mendelssohn may have converged, with the obligatory fugato and an emphatic apotheosis to round up the work on a reverberant high. Unjustified neglect? Probably not. Would one like to hear it again? Yes, certainly.  

 

The orchestra also provided a stirring ritornello to Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.24 in C minor (K.491), just one of two concertos in the minor key. Its sturm und drang set the tone for Scottish pianist Steven Osborne’s entry, voiced with crystalline clarity and elegance. This is how Mozart should be heard in the context of a modern orchestra, with melodic lines that “flow like oil” (to repeat a favourite description of his), contrasted with crisply delivered chordal phrases. Accompanying orchestral textures were always discreet and light, allowing the piano to project its full voice over the accompanying dramatics.

 

Nowhere was this better illustrated in the romance-like slow movement. Much like the corresponding movement of the D minor concerto (K.466), its purity of conception was well realised and the temptation to gild the lily with added ornamentations was averted. Osborne played his own cadenzas for the first and third movements, always tasteful and never overdone, but still in the vigourous spirit of storm and stress. The finale’s theme and variations romped home with an inexorable aplomb, and Osborne’s impeccable musicianship was capped off with a sublime encore: a hymn-like G major Keith Jarrett improvisation.

 

The serious tread of C minor established by the Mozart continued into the second half’s Brahms First Symphony (Op.68). Conducting seated on a high stool which bobbed up and down with every shift in bodyweight, Stefan Blunier coaxed a performance of utmost gravitas and grandeur from the orchestra. The opening movement was expansive with Christian Schioler’s ominous timpani beats broadly spaced out, but it felt just right. Anything slower would have been sluggish,and this built up to a most gripping of expositions and development. This great body of sound continued into the slow movement, which resonated with a beefy richness over which Rachel Walker’s piquant oboe and concertmaster Wang Xiaoming’s violin solo were highlights.

 

Brahms’ scherzos tend to be more tense than actually playful, but here a sense of levity dominated with Ma Yue’s clarinet solo providing a feel of lightness. At points, it sounded like one of his delightful Hungarian-styled dances. The finale alone was worth the price of entry; its portentous build-up, the brass chorales (never mind the odd cracked note) and the big striding hymn tune, almost Brahms’ personal "Ode to Joy". Here the expansiveness, evident from the symphony's very first bars, had come to a glorious and passionate fruition. This was one performance which relived the great recordings of the masters, of whom Klemperer and Jochum come to mind. The audience, segments of which had applauded prematurely after each movement, was however moved to give the loudest and longest of ovations.