DANCES OF PANAMA / Singapore Symphony Orchestra / Review

DANCES OF PANAMA

Singapore Symphony Orchestra

Victoria Concert Hall

Friday (19 November 2021)

 

How refreshing it is to attend a concert of string music that does not include the ubiquity of serenades by Dvorak/Tchaikovsky/Elgar or various combinations of Holberg Suite / Simple Symphony and Adagios / Adagiettos / Andante Cantabiles. What the audience got instead was an unusually eclectic programme of 20^th century and contemporary string music conducted by Uruguayan conductor Carlos Kalmar, who also served as friendly and avuncular host.

 

Rarities are the way to go, especially when good music is involved. The audience size was also encouraging, indicating that people yearn for music even if these were not familiar favourites. African-American composer William Grant Still’s Dances of Panama (1948) opened the concert. Its four movements could be classified as “light music”, that is easy listening cast in classical mould and orchestrated like concert music. There are probably ethno-musicological bases to these dances, sometimes sounding like Spanish music with occasional Caribbean influences, and may be enjoyed as one would Hungarian Dances and Slavonic Dances. SSO’s strings breathed life into these little-known numbers, and they just got started.

 

Great Dane Carl Nielsen’s Suite for Strings (1888) is perhaps the only familiar music to be heard, but it is still a relative rarity in these parts. An elegiac quality with weeping violins occupied the opening Prelude, with echoes of Grieg looming ever so closely overhead. The lively Intermezzo channelled Dvorak in its central waltz-like section, and it was in the finale where hints of Nielsen’s great symphonies may be discerned, such as an inexorable sense of exhilaration generated. Having grown up with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields’ famous 1970s recording, one could only long for a live performance, and here SSO truly fulfilled expectations.    

 

Pulitzer Prize winning American composer Caroline Shaw’s Entr’acte (2011) is well worth several listens because of her skilful subversion of what listeners take for granted as typical string music. This performance presented what sounded vaguely familiar but passed through a series of distorting prisms and lenses. Comforting string timbres coloured with incidental sounds like harmonics, portamenti, bows and fingers sliding on non-resonating strings added to a sense of wonderment. There was a central episode of pizzicato polka-ing which seemed like a modern update of the Johann Strauss classic, before winding down with Yu Jing’s strumming on her cello as the only sound as silence fell around her. Interesting, to say the least.

Cellist Yu Jing receives applause.

   

English composer Frank Bridge’s Suite for string orchestra (1909) was the evening’s truly neglected gem. Why has this never been played before? New rule: every performance of RVW’s Fantasia of Greensleeves must be reciprocated with this Bridge. Besides, it is a better and far more original work. The first movement Prelude has that pastoral feel common to fellow Brits with the use of modal themes, the ensemble responding with the richness of sonority worthy of RVW’s Tallis Fantasy. The second and fourth movements, both short and fast-paced, have the fluffy quality of light music but the heart rests in the third movement’s Nocturne. It is an elegy with the same soul-searching and moving ability as that overplayed Samuel Barber Adagio, but without the shrieking hysteria. It provided moments for reflection, a rare beauty that also saw short sublime solos from Yu Jing’s cello and Guan Qi’s viola.

 

String playing has long been the Singapore Symphony Orchestra’s strong suit. Covid or no, this concert upholds that assertion, and long may that remain. 

All photographs by Aloysius Lim, courtesy of Singapore Symphony Orchestra. 

TO PARIS WITH CÉDRIC TIBERGHIEN / L' ISLE JOYEUSE: CÉDRIC TIBERGHIEN IN RECITAL / Review

TO PARIS WITH CÉDRIC TIBERGHIEN

Singapore Symphony Orchestra

Esplanade Concert Hall

Thursday (11 November 2021)

 

L’ISLE JOYEUSE

CÉDRIC TIBERGHIEN Piano Recital

School of The Arts Concert Hall

Friday (12 November 2021)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 17 November 2021

 

Vaccinated travel lanes have truly been a boon for classical music performances in Singapore. Following two excellent concerts by renowned baroque ensemble Les Arts Florissants (France) earlier in the week, renowned French pianist Cédric Tiberghien performed with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra and gave a solo recital as part of the 2021 Voilah! France Singapore Festival.

Photo: Jack Yam

 

Mozart’s music featured on both evenings, with Tiberghien helming the tricky solo in the rarely-performed Piano Concerto No.13 in C major (K.415). The only other time SSO played this was back in 2003 with 11-year-old Abigail Sin as soloist. Tiberghien offered a seasoned veteran’s view of the celebratory work, with clarity of fingerwork balanced with flowing lyricism. There were also ample opportunities for display in cadenzas in all three movements.

 

While the jaunty finale’s Rondo delighted with alternating between major and minor keys, Tiberghien’s sly quote of the main theme from Mozart’s very popular Piano Concerto No.21 piqued the ears. His encore of Ravel’s Oiseaux Tristes (Sad Birds) from Miroirs, replete with bird calls, echoes and pregnant silences, did not seem out of place given that the concert opened with the Frenchman’s Le Tombeau de Couperin. Its four neo-baroque dance movements highlighted excellent solos from principal oboist Rachel Walker, which made this almost sound like a concertante work.

 

Leading the orchestra was Uruguayan conductor Carlos Kalmar who coaxed a glittering reading of Mozart’s Symphony No.31 in D major, also called his Paris Symphony. Paired woodwinds, brass and timpani lent an air of pomp and ceremony to its rather short-winded three movements, but the impact of pleasing an audience – Mozart’s original intention -  was certainly achieved.   

Photo: Nathaniel Lim

 

Tiberghien’s solo recital was centred on the idea of theme and variations. Mozart’s Sonata in A major (K.331) opened with a familiar lullaby-like melody, subjected to one of his best-known set of variations. Inventiveness and a sense of improvisation were given full rein in this tasteful reading that did not seek to provoke, but that would come later. The central movement’s Minuet and Trio delighted with regular crossing of hands, followed by the exuberant romp that is the ubiquitous Rondo alla Turca (Turkish Rondo).

 

The highlight of the evening was Beethoven’s Eroica Variations, using a theme from the ballet The Creatures Of Prometheus which later became the familiar subject of his “Eroica” Third Symphony. More a fantasy than strict set of variations, the rule book was thrown out with Beethoven’s multifarious interventions, humour and parodistic wit which made Mozart sound tame by comparison. Tiberghien lapped up all of this in a grandstanding reading, culminating in a busy fugue and emphatic close.

Photo: Nathaniel Lim

 

Inserted between the two was Debussy’s L’Isle Joyeuse, an impressionistic voyage to an imaginary land of happiness. This ecstatic outpouring contrasted well with his serene encore, Dutch pianist Egon Petri’s transcription of J.S.Bach’s Sheep May Safely Graze, where two hands gave the impression of three hands at play.  

The full review of the SSO concert with Cédric Tiberghien, first published on Bachtrack, may be found here:

Celebratory Mozart and glittering Ravel light up Singapore | Bachtrack

 

SSO GALA CONCERT: CAPUÇON PLAYS BRAHMS / Review

CAPUÇON PLAYS BRAHMS

Singapore Symphony Orchestra

Esplanade Concert Hall

Thursday (4 October 2012)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 6 October 2012 with the title "Unfamiliar, engaging Americana piece".

As Singapore Symphony gala concerts go, this one was unusual because only one out of three works performed was familiar to the audience. And it certainly was not John Adams’s Lollapalooza, composed in 1995 for British conductor Simon Rattle’s 40^th birthday, five minutes of minimalist ostinatos and rhythmic chugging.

It made for an engaging opening act, because it was not one of those mind-numbing play-by-numbers stunts but a rather sophisticated piece of Americana that had all the sections of the orchestra responding to its clockwork cues with utmost precision. The brass, with its dominance in the key themes, was particularly good.

Lollapalooza is American slang for something big and important, which certainly applied to the supposed main event with French violinist Renaud Capuçon starring in Brahms’s Violin Concerto. His rather slight built belied a large, generous sound which he projected for this most extrovert of solos. Never overawed by the orchestra, he was always on top of things with flawless intonation and a searing command of its alternating tricky and lyrical passages.

He performed the more traditional Joachim cadenza rather than the unusual Kreisler version of his recently issued recording with the Vienna Philharmonic, with an enviable control that was matched only by Rachel Walker’s exquisitely beautiful oboe solo in the slow movement. A hair-raising Rondo finale, as if balanced on a tight rope, completed this most invigorating of performances. As if to play down his own achievement, and acknowledging that of his very worthy partners in the orchestra, he did not offer an encore.

For the second part, the Uruguay-born Viennese conductor Carlos Kalmar presided over a most unusual symphony choice, the rarely performed Fifth Symphony in F major of the Czech nationalist Antonin Dvorak. Having being accustomed to the frankly overplayed Eighth and Ninth (New World) Symphonies, this was a welcome change.

Dvorak was beginning to cut his teeth as a symphony composer, and this 35-minute long work combined dramatics to be found in the Seventh Symphony and rusticity of the Eighth Symphony to good effect. It was an easy listen, cheerful in most part but coloured with a Mendelssohnian sad tune (which means it isn’t particularly sad) for the slow movement.

The cheery Slavonic Dance of the third movement was a lift for the spirits, and the finale that swung between nervous tension to moments of sheer sentimentality was all part of the composer’s good humoured disposition. The performance brimmed with energy from start to finish but most of all, the orchestra played like it enjoyed itself and was willing the audience to do the same.