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

MUSICAL FRONTIER / Ding Yi Music Company / Review

MUSICAL FRONTIER

Ding Yi Music Company

with ensemble PHASE

Esplanade Recital Studio

Wednesday (1 November 2023)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 3 November 2023 with the title "Conquering musical frontier". 

 

Ding Yi Music Company’s mission to further Chinese instrumental chamber music has often seen collaborations with musical cultures outside its sphere of influence. Its latest guests were five musicians from the Seoul-based South Korean traditional instrumental group ensemble PHASE.

 

Korean instruments are variants of older Chinese instruments, and while these appear similar on surface, different sound palettes are the result. The five players in stunning hanbok, who performed on piri and daegeum (wind instruments), haegeum (bowed strings), gayageum and geomungo (plucked strings), opened accounts with Korean composer Sngkn Kim’s Music For Five Instruments (Op.6-3).

 

This was deliberately slow music, filled with long-held notes and silences, where stillness and stasis ruled. Minimalist in extremis, one was drawn and mesmerised by its raw and unembellished sonic textures. Encapsulated within just nine hypnotic minutes, was this the primal sound of creation?

 

Ding Yi, led by conductor Lien Boon Hua, had a similarly spare work of its own in Liu Yuan’s Porcelain, where pointillist fragments and shards coalesced into a kinetic whole, symbolising the process of making pottery and fired earthenware. Similarities between two different but related musical cultures began to take root.

 

The first work combining both groups was Jon Lin Chua’s exquisitely beautiful reworking of In Search Of Plum Blossoms. The Koreans opened with the folktune Maehwa Taryeong before the general ensemble worked on the work’s torso, quoting Chinese melodies Mei Hua San Nong and Mei Hua Cao, all with floral connections. It was gratifying to see the haegeum and daegeum (similar to erhu and xiao) carrying the big tunes.

 

In Chow JunYi’s invigorating Riding The Winds And Waves, Kim Minju was totally captivating on the geomungo. This six-stringed zither related to the guqin was plucked, also stroked and struck with a wooden rod. Its mellow and earthy textures also possessed a percussive dimension, the vigour of which saw a supporting strut fly off its base at the exuberant close.

 

Ding Yi had a star of its own in Tan Jie Qing, graceful yangqin soloist in Taiwanese composer Chia-Yu Wu’s Formosan Blue Magpie. Idiomatically the lightest work on show, its film music vibe resembled the late Ryuichi Sakamoto’s music from The Last Emperor, but had florid cadenzas to showcase her virtuosity.

  

On the other hand, Korean Myungsun Lee’s Synergy was the most modernistic in sound, but employed its nine musicians in heterophony or playing in unison. It was thus interesting to hear violent pizzicatos on double bass replicated with a quieter intensity on the geomungo.

 

The final soloist was Minseop Song on piri, a double-reed bamboo oboe, in Dance of Qiuci from Zhao Jiping’s The Silk Road Fantasia Suite. The rustic Central Asian dance found a perfect voice in its folksy timbre and one did not miss the guan of the original score.

 

 

The two-hour long concert closed with both ensembles united in Gao Weijie’s Song Of Rainbow Skirts and Feather Robes, a work showcasing all instruments – Chinese and Korean – to maximally colourful and vivid effect. Ceremonial pomp soon gave way to a fast syncopated dance, bringing this successful musical experiment to a rousing conclusion.  

INTIMATE INTRICACIES & FOR OUR DREAMS / Ding Yi Music Company / Singapore Chinese Orchestra / Review

INTIMATE INTRICACIES

Ding Yi Music Company

Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre

Saturday (10 June 2023), 3.30pm

 

FOR OUR DREAMS:

WANG CHENWEI’S 

COMPOSITIONAL SHOWCASE

Singapore Chinese Orchestra

Saturday (10 June 2023), 7.30pm

This review was published in The Straits Times on 15 June 2023 with the title "Ding Yi and Singapore Chinese Orchestra highlight homegrown composers in two concerts". 

Two concerts featured three young Singaporean composers within the short space of a single day. It appears that Chinese instrumental ensembles are doing the heavy lifting when it comes to promoting local compositional talent.

 

The first concert conducted by Quek Ling Kiong was a project commissioned by Ding Yi Music Company, part of its “Disappearing...” series of programmes documenting the plight of Chinese cultural heritage at risk of being lost forever. In an hour-long film scripted by Jesvin Yeo and directed by Eric Wong, the subjects of giant joss stick making and Teochew embroidery were sensitively handled in the orchestral scores Scent Of Reminiscence by Liong Kit Yeng and Iridescent Threads by Ding Yi composer-in-residence Jon Lin Chua respectively.

 

The preludes, Liong’s Handicrafts and Chua’s Heartcrafts, were easily relatable and created the right mood for recounting poignant personal stories of third generation artisans Albert Tay and Jeffrey Eng. In the case of Tay’s family business (Tay Guan Heng), this narrative has come too late as secularism, anti-pollution laws and family bereavement have contrived to make his giant joss sticks craft obsolete. A rebirth is however represented by the incense recycled as incense-infused pottery by artist Oh Chai Hoo.

More fortunate were Eng’s embroidery endeavours, the comforting clatter of his trusty Singer sewing machine being skilfully dovetailed into Chua’s music with Yvonne Tay’s guzheng providing a mirror-like counterpoint. Moments like this and the optimistic end-credits titled Friendship provide hope that when people choose to remember, not all is lost.   

 

The second concert, led by conductor emeritus Yeh Tsung, featured four local premieres by Singapore Chinese Orchestra composer-in-residence Wang Chenwei. The mind boggled at how these very accessible works have never previously been heard here. For Our Dreams (2021) made for a rousing opener with a big central melody that resembled a cross between Scottish folksong O Waly, Waly and some National Day Parade crowd pleaser.

 

Wang is credited to have composed music’s first-ever virtuoso concerto for the diyin sheng, possibly the mouth organ with the world’s largest pipes. Taoyuan Wonderland (2020) featured soloist Lim Kiong Pin, who produced a deep bellowing sonority capable of an astonishing degree of agility. Its four short movements depicted picturesque scenes in Taiwan, with a recurring melody redolent of  I Saw Mummy Kissing Santa Claus.  

 

Postcards From Macao (2019) was a prime example of how to effectively write a musical travelogue. Its movements A-Ma Temple, Mount Fortress and Senado Square incorporated both Chinese idioms and Portuguese influences from the territory’s colonial history. The Portuguese term saudade, connoting nostalgic sadness and yearning, was eloquently expressed in a musical language common to both Eastern and Western viewpoints.    

 

The evening’s most impressive work was Wang’s Concerto for Chinese Percussion (2019), also titled Bronze Age Of Shang, with Benjamin Boo clearly relishing his virtuoso solo role. The three bronze objects referred to – a battle axe, wine vessel and ritual cauldron – represented the forging of a definitive Chinese identity in its first dynasty, circa 2000 BC. Boo’s mastery of a sprawling array of drums, cymbals, bells, gongs and bamboo clappers, a daunting feat of multi-tasking, brought out the longest and loudest plaudits.  

 

As the complete opposite of unfamiliarity, the upbeat encore Dauntless is likely - thanks to school competitions - the most-played Chinese orchestral work in the land. And for good reason too, as Wang’s craft of fashioning tunes and rhythms is totally infectious.

 

LIFE / Nanyang Collective / Review

LIFE

Nanyang Collective

Esplanade Recital Studio

Friday (10 February 2023)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 13 February 2023 with the title "Life is a multi-faceted musical installation".

 

Nanyang Collective was formed last year by players of Western and traditional Asian instruments,  with the vision of presenting new works by local composers which united aesthetes of diverse cultures. Fusion and crossover are much-bandied terms, but this ensemble appears much more than that.

 

Life, its latest production, was a multi-faceted musical installation rather than mere composition. The instrumental set-up, with three separate layers - grand/toy piano in front, strings, flutes, gamelan and pipa just behind, and suona, euphonium and percussion on risers – gave the myriad sonorities ample space and scope to resonate. Led by young conductor Dedric Wong De Li, the just over 40-minute concert comprising three works merged as one was both an eye and ear-opener.  

 

When does life begin, and where does it go? Is it a cycle of renewal and regeneration, or a constant series of limited terms? The reverberance of a vibrating tam tam (gong) in near total darkness, raw and raucous, from percussionist Eugene Toh seemed symbolic for the birth of time. That was how Creation by John Sharpley, Texas-born but long-time resident in Singapore, began.

 

An eruption of sound from all nine instrumentalists, including Abigail Sin striking the piano’s innards with a mallet, greeted the procession of one hunched in pain and agony. Enter the cloaked figure of actor Ora, ambling across the players before collapsing in a heap. Was this the passage of infirmity and old age, or a prelude to rebirth? After a flash of light (and short silence), there emerged a newborn’s cries, and the simple melody of a Bartok rondo played on toy piano.

 

Life then took on a more theatrical turn with protagonist Ora acting out growing pangs of a child. Where Sharpley’s Life segued into Jon Lin Chua Sisyphus’s Dilemma, the second work, was not clearly demarcated but that did not matter given the performance’s seamless flow. When does infancy end and childhood begin, or when does adulthood follow adolescence? Does anybody really care?    

 

The soundscapes had thus far been mostly atonal, but Life also afforded stretches of melody and harmony, such as jazzy riffs of ostinatos led by piano and percussion or the sheer aural beauty of Niranjan Pandian’s bansuri (Indian flute) partnered with Brian Lim’s suling (Balinese flute). These alternating episodes seemed to represent cycles of frenetic activity and temporary respite, as if one’s existence looped in endless and ever-repetitive cycles.

 

A third element of Life was the inclusion of San Zi Jing (Three Character Classic), recited ad nauseam by children in Chinese medium primary schools, as well as Ora herself. Malaysian composer Chong Kee Yong’s Destiny, the trilogy’s final part, played on that almost inescapable fact of life. One is born innocent, but eventually corrupted by merely existing.    

 

Overall, this was a thought-provoking experiment in sound and drama, with the very versatile ensemble supported by a team including stage director Lim Chin Huat, dramaturg Neo Hai Bin, lighting designer Dorothy Png and others. One can only hope for more equally challenging projects to come from Nanyang Collective.

Photographs by 

Lim Shao Yong / Nanyang Collective.