BEETHOVEN AT AN EXHIBITION / ADDO Chamber Orchestra / Review

BEETHOVEN AT AN EXHIBITION

ADDO Chamber Orchestra

Esplanade Rehearsal Studio

Wednesday (31 May 2017)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 2 June 2017 with the title "Classical music concert with smells of grass and sweat".

When one thinks of concerts, the idea is that of a seated audience listening and watching passively to whatever is being performed. This concert by the ADDO Chamber Orchestra conducted by Clarence Tan was conceived to challenge that convention. Even the venue, the secluded 6^th floor Rehearsal Studio in Esplanade, reached only by a long flight of stairs, seemed to further the notion.

Seating was strictly optional, and the atmosphere was social media friendly. The audience was heeded to take as many photographs or videos as one liked, and to post them on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Everyone was also free to walk between the widely-spaced musicians and immerse themselves in a surround sound ambience.

That was exactly what happened when conductor Tan gave the downbeat for Beethoven's familiar Fifth Symphony. With hardly any practice time and the intimidatingly close proximity of total strangers, the orchestra did not perform at a level beyond rehearsal standards, but that was besides the point.

The experiment of being an interloper moving freely within the orchestra's ranks was an interesting one, if only to experience a player's point of view and to witness how a work can sound so different under the circumstances. There were however some safety tips: keep a safe distance from being stabbed by rapidly wielded bows, and do not stand directly in front of the trombones.

Singaporean composer Hoh Chung Shih's Hi-lo Fide-lio received its Asian Premiere this evening. The work is a deconstruction of the vocal quartet Mir Ist So Wunderbar from Beethoven's opera Fidelio. The orchestra played fragments in the form of a canon, while historical recordings by Furtwängler, Walter and Böhm were blared through three speakers.

The audience could also tune in via handphones after scanning QR codes provided in the programme sheet. This made for one cacophonous outing, with people wandering in and out of the ensemble while others sitting and fidgeting with digital gadgets as the music played. The takeaway was this: there was a uniquely different perspective depending on what one did.

The final work was Mikhail Tushmalov's orchestral arrangement of Mussorgsky's Pictures At An Exhibition, originally a piano suite with a quasi-interactive inspiration. Its opening piece was titled Promenade, which imagined a visitor walking in a gallery between viewing art pieces, rather apt given this concert's context.

An added sensory element was the involvement of scent artists Christopher Yap and Johari Kazura who mingled with the audience bearing cannisters of various fragrances and odours, including freshly cut grass and fallen rain (pleasant) to smoke and sweat from a 3-day unwashed shirt (not so pleasant).

By now, sceptics might sense that the various scents distracted listeners from the sometimes ragged playing, but that might just be the whole point of it all. Our senses sometimes deceive us by the confusion of multiple inputs, which is why music is perhaps best experienced in complete and utter silence.

Scent artists Christopher Yap and Johari Kazura,
with composer Hoh Chung Shih in between,
taking their bow.

SETTS #3 / Southeastern Ensemble for Today's and Tomorrow's Sounds / Review

SETTS #3

Southeastern Ensemble for

Today's and Tomorrow's Sounds

The Chamber, The Arts House

Sunday (1 May 2016)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 3 May 2016 with the title "Concert with an edge".

Simply put, Southeastern Ensemble for Today's and Tomorrow's Sounds (SETTS) is the most avant-garde of Singapore's new music groups. Its latest presentation was not so much a concert but a sitting within a creator's workshop and laboratory, half-expecting something to blow up in the face.

Composer Wang Chen Wei arranges a
microphone to record the string quartet.

The artists and technical crew of UFO Project
prepare themselves as an amused audience
(including Pearl Samuel and Peter Kellock) look on.

Tables and floor were littered with metres of cables and wires, a veritable spaghetti connected to computers, cameras, microphones, electronica and various paraphernalia. There were possibly more composers, performers, collaborators and support staff in attendance than actual audience, but nobody was counting.

The 2-hour programme performed without break opened with Waves, conceived by UFO Project, possessing the polystylism that described Russian composer Alfred Schnittke's works. A string quartet (violinists Christina Zhou and Nanako Takata, violist Janice Tsai and cellist Lin Juan), playing a Bach-like chorale, was being peppered by electronic sounds, and soon they were completely submerged.

A dancer dressed as an alien in pink polka dots then commanded the floor, spinning a globe attached to a slowly rotating electric drill. The quartet soon returned, closing in a serene C major chord, perhaps symbolising that peace and strife on earth comes in waves and cycles.

The longest work was Chow Jun Yan's Childhood Rhapsody, from which four of six numbers were performed by pianist Shane Thio alongside the real-time painting of four canvasses by visual artist Frank Lee Foo Koon. Using combinations of brushes, rollers, improvised styli and Pollockian drip technique, these were more than mere scribbles.  Possibly representing suppressed memories of past trauma, the sometimes violent music was achieved by scraping and striking the innards of the grand piano.   

The chamber was then plunged into total darkness for Malaysian Goh Lee Kwang's The Air (Singapore). Snatches of clarinet (Colin Tan), flute (Roberto Alvarez) and oboe (Joost Flach) tones punctuating the stilness as a projected electronic stop watch counted the time elapsed. Resembling forest sounds at night and John Cage's Ryoanji, the work concluded just past the 10-minute mark.

Wang Chen Wei's Cosmic Echoes employed Alan Kartik's French horn skills, transformed by Kittiphan Janbuala's manipulations into time-phased distant tones. These had an unearthly ethereal feel, as if heard from some faraway galaxy with digitally transformed images from the Hubble telescope. In a similar vein, transformations were applied to Christoph Wichert's bassooon and vocalisations in Ding Jian Han's Hanged,  using Eric Tan Wei Fang's poetry read by dramaturge Natalie Hennedige. 

The final work, E-lab-oration, was a joint effort by Hennedige, Thai composer Anothai Nithibon and Singaporean Hoh Chung Shih. Its title provides certain clues, as this was derived from a Facebook chat-cum discussion, with protagonists played by French horn, bassoon, piano and Iskandar Rashid on percussion. Whether solo, in conversation, or engaging in debate and gentle disagreement, here was a forum of ideas tossed up, discussed, accepted or rejected.

Composer Hoh Chung Shih works on his
personal composer as a silhouetted Shane Thio performs.

By wait, who does the fourth instrument represent? One guesses that to be the audience, the fourth leg of a stable table, without whom created music and performances such as these would cease to exist. The stars of SETTS #4 strike back on 26 September at Esplanade Recital Studio, so be sure to return. 

All the performers and artists of SETT #3

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.

SINGAPORE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA'S Readings of Singaporean Compositions

SINGAPORE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA’S
READINGS OF SINGAPOREAN WORKS

On a Good Friday (22 April 2011), one week after the passing of Singapore’s “Father of composers” Leong Yoon Pin, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra afforded Singaporean music a most magnanimous gift – a 3-hour reading of symphonic works by four Singaporean composers. It is no secret that the SSO does not perform enough Singaporean music. Its Composer-In-Residence scheme had come to an untimely demise, the New Music Forum suspended indefinitely, so this reading session – a first in its 32-year history - came as a most pleasant surprise.

Judging by what was heard, it amply demonstrated a wealth of creativity that exists in our small but gradually expanding composers’ circle. We have recently witnessed in concert short works by Yuan Peiying and Darrell Ang, but this reading session afforded more time and space for more extended compositions.

The first work performed lasted 17 minutes, the first movement of Tan Chan Boon’s Third Symphony “Eden” (2004). Hailed by SSO Music Director Lan Shui as “greatest Brucknerian outside of Linz”, Tan (above) has written four symphonies, none of which have been performed in their entirety here. Violas introduce the main theme, one which was to permeate the entire movement. String tremolos provided that Brucknerian murmur, accompanied by birdcalls reminiscent of Wagner’s Siegfried. 

There is a second soaring theme heard on violas and solo trumpet, but the serenity of the Garden darkens with dissonance from the brass, but before long a third theme, one resembling “Deep River” is heard. This is the very theme that appears in Tan’s symphonic prelude Cherish and piano work Reminiscence (both written in 2008). The movement ends in a reassuring A major chord. On the strength of this very coherent reading, one looks forward to hearing the whole work sometime soon.

Tan Chan Boon, Tey Mun Sen 

& John Sharpley (L to R)

John Sharpley, originally from Houston, Texas, but resident in Singapore for the last 25 years, was next. The choice was a duet (above) from his yet-to-be-produced opera Fences Of The Heart. Soprano Amanda Colliver and tenor Juan Jackson sang the parts of star-crossed lovers caught in the confusion of Singapore’s 1965 expulsion from Malaysia, and consequent independence. Make no mistake, this is an opera in English by an American composer, not some souped up melange that borrows from Malay, Chinese or Indian inspirations. 

Unapologetically tonal, this duet contains some of Sharpley’s most beautiful music, from its darkly coloured orchestral introduction to its resonant words “A hotel is not a home” (referring to the iconic Lion City Hotel at Tanjong Katong), which spelt the uncertainty of that period of Singapore history. Incidentally, the title of the opera also appears for the first (and perhaps only) time in this deeply felt movement. When this opera will be finally be produced remains to be seen.

Bernard Tan & Jun Zubillaga-Pow (Back) 

with Robert Yeo & Leow Siak Fah (Front)

After a short interval, Kelly Tang’s concertante work Tropicata, for violin and orchestra (above) was performed by soloist Xu Jueyi and the orchestra. Resembling a first movement of a violin concerto, all it lacks is an extended development and cadenza. It is nonetheless an impressive virtuoso showpiece, with opportunities for display although the dense orchestration sometimes gets in the way. Eclectic and neo-Romantic, it superficially resembles the first movement of Kabalevsky’s “Youth” Violin Concerto but with the Stars and Stripes feel of a Bernstein or Barber. Tang has already composed two piano concertos (one dodecaphonic and one jazz) and one quasi-violin concerto (two movements for re:mix), so could a full-fledged violin concerto be due soon?

The final work (above) was by the youngest composer of the four, Hoh Chung Shih, and also the most modern. Avant-garde it might have sounded, but Mountain Bright (Shan Ming) appears a more sophisticated conception than initially perceived. Its relentless swaths of sound, like viewing a vast expanse of hills, peaks and clouds (the vistas of China’s Huang Shan come to mind), is divided between two ensembles. The smaller consists of piano, percussion and cello in obbligato parts, pitted against vast orchestral forces. 

The work is at once immense, static (like clouds gently dispersing and revealing yet more clouds), minimalistic but strangely hypnotic despite its high decibel output. The ensemble stopped several times; did the players get lost, one wondered. Did they know what they were playing? It was all a very good natured experiment, no frayed nerves or ignited tempers, and they picked up where they left. The music ended as abruptly as it began.

If Leong Yoon Pin were present, he would have been proud of his juniors’ efforts, and the gesture of goodwill extended by the SSO. Bernard Tan, now inheriting the mantle of Singapore’s senior composer and instigator of this reading was present, and he was encouraged by this showing. Perhaps SSO reading the works of Singaporean composers should become an annual affair, a platform where the best of our talents can display their creative wares. Let us hope that is not too much to ask for from our national orchestra.

Shane Thio, Hoh Chung Shih 

& Kelly Tang (L to R)

SYC Ensemble Singers Concert: Birth and Death / Review

BIRTH AND DEATH
SYC Ensemble Singers
JENNIFER THAM, Conductor
Esplanade Recital Studio
Sunday (8 March 2009)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 10 March 2009.

Way back in 1992, a Straits Times article named the Singapore Youth Choir (SYC) as the land’s top chorus. The choir’s commitment to new music and ability to galvanise young singers into a dynamic a cappella force were major reasons. Known as the SYC Ensemble Singers today, its conductor Jennifer Tham cited over 40 new works commissioned since the 1980s. Ten of these were given world premieres in 2004 alone, on the choir’s 40th anniversary.

One was Singaporean composer Hoh Chung Shih’s Birth and Death, a 5-movement meditation on texts by Vietnamese peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh, providing the title and framework to this concert. The movements were divided into three blocs, in a way reminiscent of Mahler’s view of his Fifth Symphony, incidentally a journey from death to rebirth.

The choir had two Chinese words to sing – sheng (Birth or Life) and si (Death) - but the ingenious treatment stood out. In the 1st movement, three lines of singers whispered the consonants “sh” and “s” while snaking around three islands of voices that sang the words. The brief 2nd movement issued beautiful harmonies in an antiphonal manner with half the choir placed behind the audience.

Italian composer Corrado Margutti’s D’Amore e d’Ombre (About Love and Shadows), with texts by renaissance artist Michaelangelo, contrasted soothing textures in O Notte (O Night) with madrigal-like runs in Fugite Amanti (Flee From This Love). The dissonances of the former provided a strangely surreal respite, while a semi-chorus of 4 in the latter held their own through much intricate counterpoint.

Hoh’s 3rd movement saw the choir in two concentric circles with their backs facing the audience. Then came arguably the two most accessible works, Lithuanian Vytautas Miskinis’ Time Is Endless, with its highly reassuring F major chords, and Australian Stephen Leek’s Burrinjuck, a paean to the glorious outback.

Back to Hoh, the aleatoric 4th movement featured the 28 singers striking pebbles in a random manner, while singing the two words on command from Tham’s hands (left). Shades of Gyorgy Ligeti’s metronomic masterpiece as the sound of stone gradually dissipated into silence. The final movement channeled the spirit of John Cage; absolute silence as the conductor’s strokes drew out the Chinese characters on the studio’s backdrop with the aid of Gavin Lim’s multimedia projections.

While appreciative applause greeted the performers, all that remained was the word sheng, boldly emblazoned. The cycle of life, death and birth continues in perpetuity.