TRAVERSING / Ding Yi Music Company / Review

 

TRAVERSING

Ding Yi Music Company

Victoria Concert Hall

Saturday (11 April 2026)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 13 April 2026 with the title "Eclectic programme allows musicians to shine in Ding Yi concert".

The title of Ding Yi Music Company’s first evening of its concert season had to do with eclecticism and transcending geographical and cultural boundaries. Led by its chief artistic mentor Tsung Yeh, who regularly helmed similar programmes with the Singapore Chinese Orchestra, the concert was greater than the sum of its parts.

Tsung Yeh is the Conductor Emeritus
of the Singapore Chinese Orchestra
Photo: Ding Yi Music Company

Opening was the world premiere of Su Xiao’s short tone poem Sing A Pura. Beginning quietly with an air of mystery, the dizi gently rose above the percussion’s rhythmic accompaniment. The lilting dance that came after summed up the Chinese composer’s impressions of the city-state – lively, urbane and somewhat exotic.

More substantial was New York-based Singaporean composer Koh Cheng Jin’s Tang - Moonlight Fragrance, a single-movement concerto for orchestra inspired by Tang poetry. Huang Hsu-Lei’s long and impassioned dizi solo set the mood of contemplation. The demanding obbligato piano part with Ning An initially began as part of the general ensemble but soon grew in stature as the work picked up in tempo and volume.

Replacing guzheng and yangqin for creating specific sound textures, the part also included scraping the insides of the Steinway grand. Its percussive effects and virtuoso figurations also fueled the ethnic dance as the music lurched to a vigorous and wild close.

Photo: Ding Yi Music Company

The most demanding solo of the evening was by Yvonne Tay, whose guzheng worked overtime in Tang Jian Ping’s concerto Goddess of the Luo River. In a variegated score of multiple scenes, she cast a spellbinding thrall, from the gentlest of plinks to sweeping swathes of sound that rose above the orchestral throng. She literally personified the work’s subject, a figure of feminine grace and fearless self-empowerment.

Photo: Ding Yi Music Company

After a first half which did not pander to popular tastes, the concert’s latter half was to be much lighter. Bohemian cellist-composer David Popper’s Hungarian Rhapsody Op.68, arranged by Jon Lin Chua, was the virtuoso vehicle for Ding Yi’s Uzbek cellist Bekhzod Oblayorov. If the music sounded familiar, that was because it used the same Magyar folk sources as a number of Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies. As with those florid piano fantasies, the cello was obliged to jump through many hoops for an enjoyable romp.

Eric Watson’s Celtic Knots, receiving its world premiere, was an engaging succession of Scottish, Irish and Welsh melodies. Given the modal nature of the songs, among them Suo Gan (heard in Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun), these translated very well for Chinese instrumental treatment. And one has not lived without hearing the suona imitating bagpipes or Londonderry Air played on pipa.

Photo: Ding Yi Music Company

Closing the evening was the 1950s Chinese Socialist-Realist and populist Youth Piano Concerto, concocted by a committee of composers including Liu Shikun, Sun Yilin, Huang Xiaofei and Pan Yiming. Ning An returned as the brilliant soloist in three movements influenced by Russians Dmitri Kabalevsky and Sergei Rachmaninov but with Chinese characteristics. It was so well received that its final four minutes had to be encored.

Photo: Ding Yi Music Company