SINGAPORE COMPOSERS FESTIVAL:
FINAL CONCERT
Peranakan Museum
Saturday (23 March 2024)
VENU NADAM:
A SYMPHONIC CONFLUENCE
Vamshika Quintet & Friends
Black Box, Drama Centre
Saturday (23 March 2024)
This review was published in The Straits Times on 25 March 2024 with the title "Contemporary dissonance at Singapore Composers Festival, Vamshika Quintet's aural feast".
The Singapore Composers Festival was a one-day event organised by the Composers Society of Singapore (CSS) which included two talks and and two concerts. Its closing concert was a showcase by six young composers from CSS and its cross-Causeway counterpart, the Malaysian Composers Collective (MCC).
Interesting and thought-provoking may describe the works performed by the aptly-named Weird Aftertaste, a contemporary music ensemble comprising keyboardists Bertram Wee and Lynette Yeo, saxophonist Michellina Chan, violinist Christoven Tan and cellist Chee Jun Sian.
Music from the guests came first, opening with Sebastian Ooi’s Mujo for alto saxophone, which explored myriad capabilities of the instrument. Lyrical lines were interjected with assorted snorts and gasps, and clicks emanating from depressed keys, a representation of the state of impermanence suggested in its title in Japanese.
Ainolnaim Azizol’s Miroirs of Malay Rebab: Menghadap Rebab highlighted the modern cello’s kinship with the Malay spiked fiddle, with accompanying electronics sampling recorded sounds of techniques employed including pizzicatos, slides and the knocking of wood.
Spare a thought for those sitting near the speakers as Jellal Koay’s oMGgggG hOW dAR3 yoOouUwUu!!!!!1! for keyboard four hands blasted without apology the musical equivalent of Greta Thunberg-inspired expletives. Listen beyond the ear-shattering white noise, one may find a modicum of rhythm and demented organ-like chorales.
From the Singaporean composers, Avik Chari’s Cities I for saxophone, cello and electronics provided the most repeatable listening, its funky jazz-like themes and rhythms suggesting the chic of urban sophisticates. 14-year-old composing prodigy Nathanael Koh’s Of Eternal Time for synthesisers, violin and cello relived the reassuring chords of Frenchman Olivier Messiaen and a quest for inner peace.
Closing the hour-long concert was Ding Jian Han’s P. p. P. p., a play of contrasting sound textures and rhythms featuring all five players. With motivic fragments, pulsed ostinatos, alternating long-held and staccatos notes coming into the mix, the pointillistic score brought the festival to a resounding conclusion. To the creators, one can only heed, “Carry on composing!”
There are few things in this world more haunting or sensuous as the tones of the bansuri or Indian bamboo flute. Bring together five bansuri exponents, Niranjan Pandian, Raghavendran Rajasekaran, Logindran, Vishnu Veluri and Bian Tong who formed the Vamshika Quintet in 2022, an aural feast is the result.
Directed by bansuri veteran Ghanavenothan Retnam, the ensemble does not function like a typical Western ensemble with polyphony as a main goal. Instead, each player takes turns as his own virtuoso with others providing heterophonic backing and harmonies in fixed intervals. In addition, the quintet was accompanied by Lazar T. Sebastine (Carnatic violin) and percussion, Jayagowtham Annadurai (mridangam) and Lalit Kumar Ganesh (tabla).
The music was based on ragas, the quintessential framework and basis for Indian composition and improvisation. Titles like Pandian’s Divine Echoes and Ballad of Quintessence, Muthuswami Dikshithar’s Vathapi Ganapathim, and visiting composer-lecturer Vidwan Amith Nadig’s Leaf merely served as vehicles for musical magic – a free-flowing and almost improvisatory outpouring of expressions and emotions - to emerge.
In Nadig’s Ragam Thanam Pallavi, the concert’s centrepiece and longest work, guest-performer Samuel Phua’s mellow saxophone blended seamlessly into the ensemble. The music’s complex and ever-changing meters were comfortably negotiated, and there was even a segment of communal beating out of rhythms with no winds being heard.
Nadig’s Nuances saw Jonathan Tan’s dizi (Chinese bamboo flute) join the love-in. Far from being an interloper, his higher pitched and shriller timbre were absorbed as an integral part of the flute family. Adjectives like mesmerising, hypnotising and other-worldly came to mind all through the concert’s 90-odd minutes, performed without intermission.
In Lalgudi Jayaraman’s classic Mohanakalyani Thillana, the pristine tone of Rachel Ho’s Western flute in perfect conversation with any of the bansuris became true objects of beauty. One might add a glimpse of paradise itself.
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| Visiting bansuri specialist Vidwan Amith Nadig addressing the audience and performers. |
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