DREAMSCAPES: PANG KAPANG & SCO / Singapore Chinese Orchestra / Review

 

DREAMSCAPES: PANG KAPANG & SCO 

Singapore Chinese Orchestra 

Singapore Conference Hall 

Saturday (1 March 2025)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 3 March 2025 with the title "Pang Kapang and SCO deliver an invigorating sonic encounter".

Music written for large orchestras of Chinese instruments is a relatively new phenomenon. It is, thus, little surprise that much of it is modelled on established examples in Western symphonic music. The poor composers simply plagiarise and misappropriate while better ones innovate to find the best of both worlds. 

This concert by the Singapore Chinese Orchestra led by guest conductor Pang Kapang, artistic director of the Suzhou Chinese Orchestra, featured four works which thankfully fell into the latter category. This made for an invigorating and satisfying sonic encounter. 

Wang Danhong’s tone poem The Clouds, The Mountains, and The Distant Geese opened the concert. Here was a very evocative score which fully exploited the myriad tonal colours of Chinese instruments, from its nebulous and misty beginning to a gentle awakening of the senses depicting scenes of nature. 

A plangent climax was reached, encompassing frenetic activity and percussive violence along the way, which eventually resolved with the solitude and stillness as the music began. One would look to works by the Finn Jean Sibelius or Briton Arnold Bax to find similarly rapt examples like this. 

Liu Changyuan’s Dreamscapes was an exciting concertante work which showcased SCO’s own erhu player Xu Wenjing as excellent soloist. Its premise of an ever-evolving state of reverie might have been inspired by the opium-induced stupor of Frenchman Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. However, the eventual outcome were closer to the continuous segments and variations that take place in German Richard Strauss’s tone poem Don Quixote. 

Xu virtuosity was evident from the outset, with her ability to ably shift gears from reflection and expressive feeling (in Dreams of Longing) to agitation (Dreams of Struggle) and Paganinian exercises (Dreams of Joyful Leaps) being totally admirable. Ample amplification enabled the erhu’s otherwise intimate voice to be heard over the orchestral throng. 

The second half consisted of two major works commissioned by Pang at the helm of the Chinese orchestras of Macau and Suzhou. Wang Danhong’s Macau Capriccio was a picture-postcard musical travelogue in the manner of Italian Ottorino Respighi’s Roman Trilogy, clearly a tribute to Western orchestral traditions. 

The Light of Church had the same vibes as the string hymn that opened Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture but the ensuing Portuguese Festival and Fireworks, a salute at Macau’s colonial history of centuries past, went all-Iberian in manner of melody, harmony and rhythm. 

In between were Fishing Song and Yearning, where the Chinese influence of plucked strings (pipas, ruans and liuqin) and weeping huqins held sway. Being the most accessible work of the evening, it also brought out the loudest and longest cheers from the audience. 

Zhang Zhao’s Gan Jiang Mo Ye Fantasia, a four-movement tone poem, essentially a battle piece pitting good against evil, raised the decibel level by several notches before concluding in a placid state of Nirvana. The lively encore of an idiomatic transcription of Johannes Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No.1 that followed was also very well-received.

Post-concert: Pang Kapang
& Xu Wenjing meet with fans.