EARTH: UNHEARD / Ding Yi Music Company / Review

 

EARTH: UNHEARD 

Ding Yi Music Company 

Esplanade Recital Studio 

Sunday (20 April 2025)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 22 April 2025 with the title "Returning to the basics and celebrating earth".

The secret of appreciating chamber music is to look beyond the big sound of massed instruments, paying attention instead to details found in individual instruments. In this same spirit, Ding Yi Music Company’s invitation was to put aside worries of life and listen to the song of the earth, which has far more to offer than meets the eye. 

Photo: Moonrise Studio

This varied two-hour long concert was loving look at folk and ethnic traditions, encapsulated in five varied works curated by Ding Yi concertmaster Fred Chan Hong Wei and artistic advisor, banhu specialist Hu Yu from Beijing’s Central Conservatory of Music. 

The evening opened with Hu’s Echoes of the Mountain which featured just nine players. The songs and dances (shan ge) of highland peoples were relived in this contemporary but tonal work, with melodic interest provided by Chan and Chin Yen Choong’s huqins and Ng Hsien Han’s dizi. Alternating between contemplative and animated sections, the music was a celebration of a way of life that risks being lost forever. 

In Yang Yong’s Three Folk Sentiments, musical scenes of village life were accompanied by projections of Chinese art. In Rising Sun, a finely-balanced heterophony was honed by Hu’s banhu joining the ranks. 

His solo in the central Lament, supported by the plaintive xiao and guan, was a moving portrait of sadness and deep thought. Comic Interlude, which closed the suite, was not so much a playful scherzo but a bantering conversation between close friends. 

The most modern and abstract work on show was Taiwanese composer Tsai Cheng-che’s Mahakala, which was ritualistic and drew from various Asian spiritual movements including Hinduism, Tibetan Buddhism and their Chinese derivatives. 

With the hall in semi-darkness, Yvonne Tay’s guzheng was joined by Ng Hsien Han’s dizi and Wong Wai Kit’s zhongruan, trooping from the wings. They had different chants to intone in addition to the drones and groans with the bold bowing of guzheng strings. Calming and hypnotic, the audience was witness to some religious ceremony taking place. 

Receiving the loudest cheers were two concertante works with full ensemble conducted by Dedric Wong De Li. Young Artist Award recipient Wang Chenwei’s Barong Dance is destined to be a popular favourite. Like his other Nanyang music, it used gamelan scales, in this case representing the lion-like Barong (benign guardian of the forest) and Rangda (malevolent witch-queen), both pitched in an eternal battle between good and evil. 

This well-known Balinese dance could not have had a better orchestral representation. The bigger issue is whether the imposing sheng solo by Soh Swee Kiat, with wind power substituting for percussion prowess, could ever be surpassed. 

The final work was Zhou Juan’s Polyphonic Returns, an impressive show with Hu as banhu soloist which traversed from gentle serenade to rapturous dance rhapsody. Much like the first work, this was a clarion call for a return to the basics, where the simpler things in life really matter.