TSUNG YEH 20 / Singapore Chinese Orchestra / Review

TSUNG YEH 20

Singapore Chinese Orchestra

Singapore Conference Hall

Saturday (19 November 2022) 

This review was published in The Straits Times on 23 November 2022 with the title "Yeh Tsung leads superbly honed charges".

 

Twenty years may be considered a relatively short stretch of time, but what Yeh Tsung has accomplished with the Singapore Chinese Orchestra as its Music Director since 2002 has been little short of awe-inspiring. During his tenure, he commissioned many new works for the medium of massed traditional Chinese instruments, including establishing a musical genre incorporating Southeast Asian elements now known as Nanyang music.

The official launch of the
Tsung Yeh 20 commemorative book.

 

This concert, commemorating his 20^th anniversary at SCO’s helm, had a maritime theme which relived landmark works from his first ten years. Central to its narrative were two explorers of historical times, Zheng He (Cheng Ho) and Marco Polo, alluding to Yeh’s role as an intrepid discoverer of new pathways in Chinese music.    

 

Former SCO Composer-in-Residence Eric Watson’s Sea – The Source of Life, written for the 2007 National Day Parade opened the concert. Its quiet beginning was a beautiful evocation of dawn, leading to a faster section filled with dance rhythms reflecting different cultures and ethnicities. The lively music declared that the sea belonged to everybody, and this feel-good number made for a rousing prelude.   

 

Next were three movements from another former Composer-in-Residence Law Wai Lun’s Zheng He - Admiral Of The Seven Seas, a large-scaled work commissioned for the 2005 Singapore Arts Festival. Its imposing opening, Sea Burial, led by plangent winds and percussion, saw the Hand of Fate deal the Ming dynasty commander an untimely demise. With SYC Ensemble Singers (Chong Wai Lun, Chorus Master) at full tilt, the echoes of O Fortuna from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana seemed almost appropriate even if the latter had more to do with itinerant Bavarian monks.

 

For this cantata, there were a key roles for narrator Jeffrey Low and tenor Zhuang Jie, and a cameo for soprano Joyce Lee Tung, who were excellent in fleshing out the romance of Zheng’s humble origins. The Voyage was the performance’s most colourful segment, a quasi-Wagnerian sojourn from Orient to Middle East, a picturesque seascape with birdsong later culminating in a rhapsody of Arabian dance movements. Here the imaginative scoring revealed Chinese orchestral instruments at their fullest potential.        

 

The concert’s second half comprised three movements from Liu Yuan’s Marco Polo and Princess Blue, composed for the Esplanade Opening Festival in 2002. Featuring similar forces and projecting as big sonorities as Zheng He, this was unfortunately the most derivative work of all.   

 

Its story centred on a fictional romance between Venetian explorer Marco Polo and the Kokachin Princess Buluhan, as he escorted the royal from Cathay by sea to her prospective marriage in Persia. As Providence has it, when they reach Eden in the East (guess where?), love blossoms. With every exposure, this music becomes increasingly cringeworthy and embarrassing.

 

The supposed love music with Italianate flavour (Neapolitan to be said) builds up inexorably, reaching a grand apotheosis with none other than the 1960s song Singapura (Oh Singapura, Sunny Island Set In The Sea)! Its grandiose Mahlerian ending, magnificently delivered by all on stage, nevertheless elicited a standing ovation. Hopefully this was for Maestro Yeh and his superbly honed charges, rather than the music. 

Leong Weng Kam, author of the
Tsung Yeh 20 commemorative book.