FANFARE: BRASS, PERCUSSION & CARMEN / Singapore Symphony Orchestra / Review

 

FANFARE: BRASS, 

PERCUSSION & CARMEN 

Singapore Symphony Orchestra 

Victoria Concert Hall 

Friday (28 February 2025)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 3 March 2025 with the title "Eclectic programme highlights SSO's sections at their virtuosic peak".

Following the Singapore Symphony Orchestra’s great success in its three-city concert tour of Australia, music director Hans Graf led a very interesting programme of 20th century music that highlighted the orchestra’s different sections at their virtuosic peak. 

SSO Music Director Hans Graf shares
with the audience about the unusual programme.

The brass had the entire first half to its own, opening with Frenchman Paul Dukas’ Fanfare from his 1912 ballet La Peri with stunning aplomb. Three minutes was all it took to display a warmth of tone within a wealth of harmony. 

Just slightly longer was American Samuel Barber’s Mutations from Bach (1968) which subjected the Lutheran chorale Christe, du Lamm Gottes (Christ, You Lamb of God) to gradual transformations. Seamlessly merging the harmonisations by Joachim Decker and Johann Sebastian Bach, the music was a short but spiritually moving tribute capped by a French horn recitative near the end. 

Photo: Simon Yam

Arguably the most unusual work on show was German Paul Hindemith’s Konzertmusik for piano, brass and two harps (1930), where deeply sonorous brassy timbres were balanced by the scintillating sounds of Albert Tiu’s piano and the harps of Gulnara Mashurova and Charity Kiew. 

Photo: Simon Yam

The first two movements played like an extended Bachian prelude and fugue updated to modern times. The jaunty fugal subject established on piano would be shouted out by brass interjections, which soon took over to complete the outlandish display of counterpoint. 

The slow third movement’s Variations was scored only for piano and harps, an oasis of nocturnal calm before the syncopated finale’s romp where brass returned with a vengeance and even hints of jazz. The obligatory encore came from the splendid brass, a lovely transcription by conductor Graf of the sublime final chorus from Maurice Ravel’s opera L’enfant et les sortileges (The Child and the Magic Spells). 

Living Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin’s Carmen Suite (1967), a ballet of thirteen short movements, was scored for strings and percussion using popular themes from Georges Bizet’s evergreen opera Carmen. This was performed by SSO in 2021 during the pandemic before a very small audience, and it fully deserved the near full-house this evening. 

Photo: Simon Yam

By jumbling up the original sequence of melodies, chopping and slicing popular numbers, this was like viewing an old friend through a series of distorting mirrors and prisms. Particularly intriguing was the Torero movement, where its march-like melody abruptly disappeared, leaving just the accompaniment chugging along. 

Much was left to the listeners’ imagination, with the skillfully rejigged Habanera, Flower Song and Fate theme indicating the music, despite its glitz and glamour, was focused wholly on the subject’s tragedy. This was headily accomplished by the strings and five very busy percussionists. 

This very unusual concert was dedicated to the memory of SSO’s founding patron Dr Goh Keng Swee. Given his visionary ability to look outside of the box, he would have greatly appreciated the sheer eclecticism of its programming.