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AudioImage Wind Ensemble

Esplanade Concert Hall

Sunday (11 August 2013)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 13 August 2013 with the title "Xinyao tune wins over audience".

Sunday afternoon concerts at Esplanade Concert Hall are synonymous with light music and audience outreach events. In conjunction with National Day, the AudioImage Wind Ensemble conducted by Clarence Tan presented a programme of works wholly by Singaporean composers. However not all of it was light or easy going.

The concert began innocently enough with the familiar Malay tune Di Tanjung Katong wittily dressed up in joget rhythm by Bernard Lee. The three loud emphatic chords at its end seemed to recall a bygone era, one occupied by the late and venerated Leong Yoon Pin (below), whose music followed. 

Daybreak and Sunrise, his only work for wind band, was evocative with its slow introduction leading into a brass chorale and march. Chinese motifs with hints at Elgar coloured its climax before closing on a surprisingly quiet note. Then the music took on more austere tones.

There should be some rightful place for Lee’s Wind Field II, but its atonal pages and episodic character, with the instrumentalists (and listeners) seemingly grasping for straws, sounded out of place here. The audience was becoming restless, with teenagers chatting and one child crying, whether out of boredom or for respite, it is anyone’s guess. It also did not help with ushers scampering up and down the aisles in search of errant photographers, real or imagined.

Chen Zhangyi’s impressionistic Toward Dawn was atmospheric in the use of tone colour, and almost echoing Leong’s earlier effort, built to a fulsome high before ending quietly. This is a work that repays further listening. Cultural Medallion recipient Kelly Tang’s (right) Sarabande made more concession for listeners, its graceful lilt and warm Andrew Lloyd Webber-like harmonies provided a soothing aural salve.

Jeremiah Li’s Two Portraits were studies in contrasts. Solo cello, marimba and percussion provided an unusual wind-free timbre for Nuances, which played on a triplet leitmotif. The infernal dance of Clockwork’D was about jabbing ostinatos and Bernsteinesque jazzy turns.

The 75-minute long concert concluded with a return of the familiar. Unfortunately the arrangement of Count On Me, Singapore by Chen was stodgy, an over-reliance on long-held notes and resonances impeding its natural flow. The loudest cheers were reserved for Liang Wern Fook’s (left) xinyao classic Xi Shui Chang Liu, in a light-hearted clap-along with Dixieland echoes transcribed by Wong Kah Chun.

It certainly does not hurt to write a good and memorable tune, and this fact was not lost on its audience.    

AudioImage Wind Ensemble
conductor Clarence Tan (right)
with bilingual MC and
composer Liong Kit Yeng. 

THE ART OF WIND ENSEMBLE 2011 / Audioimage Wind Ensemble / Review

THE ART OF WIND ENSEMBLE 2011
Audioimage Wind Ensemble
Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts
Sunday (17 July 2011)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 19 July 2011 with the title "A whiff of Asia-Pacific with wind ensemble".

The Audioimage Wind Ensemble is a community-based band housed at Siglap South Community Club. Its annual concert helmed by young conductor Clarence Tan was an ambitious 2-hour effort showing why it prides itself as “the finest wind ensemble of the East”.

The concert opened with a transcription of the Bach-Busoni Chaconne. With strict and formal lines lending well to the art of variations, these were read with good sense of proportion and utmost discipline.

Also in the classical domain was the Alto Saxophone Concerto by Russian academic composer Alexander Glazunov. Although written in his unabashed Romantic style, it attempted some jazz-like flourishes, gratefully reciprocated by Ang Yi Xiang’s nimble and good-humoured virtuosity.

There was an Asian-Pacific flavour in four works, beginning with Brian Balmages’s PELE, a French horn concertante work about the Hawaiian goddess of fire. Hornist Alan Kartik’s exuberant part ably shaped the work’s narrative, from peaceable calm to an onslaught of spewing lava before arriving at a final appeasement.

Inspired by Indonesia was Shin’ya Takahashi’s Jalan-Jalan, a symphonic sojourn in Bali. His idea of a stroll was more of a sprint that packed in scenes of village life and closing with a rowdy procession and feast.

Also dominated by an insistent percussion beat was the World Premiere of Singapore Hoh Chung Shih’s Wayang Kulit. The work pitted five widely-spaced brass players whose eructations was not a description of the shadow play but rather an exercise of light and shade, mostly white, grey and jet black.

The late-lamented Leong Yoon Pin’s music was heard for a third consecutive evening. Daybreak and Sunrise, his only original work for wind band, explored the sonority of the medium to the max. Asian-inflected motifs were fleetingly quoted in a pastoral scene that quickened into a Colonial English-styled march. Instead of ending in bombast, it dissipated into a series of repeated passages, as if meaning “Life goes on…”

The final work was Joseph Kreines’s arrangement of the final movement of Gustav Mahler’s mighty Third Symphony. Here one misses the sustaining qualities of strings, which make the music truly memorable. However the burnished warmth of the chorales and overwhelming climaxes gave much to cheer about.

After this, it was an anti-climax to hear as a long encore, the medley from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom Of The Opera. At least the young people in the audience were sent home happy.