EARTH AND THE PLANETS + ELGAR'S CELLO CONCERTO / Singapore Symphony Orchestra / Review

 

EARTH AND THE PLANETS

+ ELGAR’S CELLO CONCERTO

Singapore Symphony Orchestra

Esplanade Concert Hall

Friday (23 January 2026)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 27 January 2026 with the title "Earth gets its due amid Holst's Planets in Joyce Koh's work".

When English composer Gustav Holst composed his seven-movement symphonic suite The Planets in 1917, he did not include Pluto (yet to be discovered) or Earth among them. In this Singapore Symphony Orchestra concert led by music director Hans Graf, our home planet finally got its own movement in a newly commission work by Singaporean composer Joyce Koh.

Performed as an overture, Koh’s 12-minute Earth opened with chimes of tubular bells amid a primordial soup of sound which coalesced into an aurally rich canvas of lush sonorities. Eschewing her trademark atonalism, the musical idiom and evocative French titles was closer in spirit to French composer Olivier Messiaen’s spiritually and cosmologically-inclined scores.

Incorporating three treble voices from the Singapore Symphony Children’s Choir, representing youth and innocence, she also included fleeting quotes of Mars and Jupiter from Holst’s original work as points of reference. Hers was a journey of mankind to the edge of the solar system and beyond, in a contemplation of the unknown and unknowable. In a word, breathtaking.

Joyce Koh gets the applause.

Separating Gaia and the other celestial orbs was Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E minor (Op.85) with young Austrian cellist Julia Hagen as soloist. From the outset, she distinguished with an outsized personality and singing tone, aided by the orchestra’s discreet and unobtrusive accompaniment.

Holding the audience in a thrall, she navigated the elegiac score with focus and purpose, overcoming the scherzo’s prestidigitation with ease and bringing catharsis in a deeply-felt Adagio. Elgar was not just commemorating loss of life and innocence in the recently concluded Great War but also paying tribute to his devoted but ailing wife Alice.

The tempestuous finale was not so much a triumph of the spirit but a struggle to battle the tears, a journey of passion which Hagen got spot on before finishing with a flourish. Her encore of the Sarabande from J.S.Bach’s Suite No.1 in G major was just as gripping.

SSO has come a long way since its premiere of Holst’s The Planets in 1997 under Choo Hoey’s baton, which was an unmitigated disaster because the female chorus from some unnamed girls’ school failed to enter when cued. No worries on this occasion, as the 78 ladies from the Singapore Symphony Chorus and Youth Choir (Eudenice Palaruan, Director) provided the perfect close to Neptune, The Mystic, its final movement.

Wordless and unseen, their hauntingly beautiful voices seemed to emerge from the ether with an unmistakable sense of awe and mystery. One could hear a pin drop as these held sway before fading into the distant abyss. Before that, the orchestra gave the most imperious of performances, with Mars, The Bringer of War setting a tone of violence and vehemence.

It was not just the popular movements like Mercury and Jupiter which impressed, but also the less obvious ones like Venus, Saturn and Uranus, where care and attention to detail and instrumental prowess came to the fore. This most memorable of outings to outer space was deservedly greeted with the most thunderous of applause and cheers.

Choral director Eudenice Palaruan,
representing the singers, gets the accolades.