LIGHT TO NIGHT SINGAPORE 2026: SOME PHOTOS

 

Not so many words here. Just enjoy the photos of Singapore's Civic District in the evening during the Light To Night Singapore festival. This festival of illuminations and lighting design runs till the end of the month.

Old Parliament House
gets new licks of colour.

The Old Supreme Court Building
(now National Gallery) looking psychedelic.

Victoria Theatre & Memorial Hall
and central clock tower being illuminated.

The corpus cavernosum
of Empress Place lawn.

The accompanying piano music
was by Azariah Tan.

National Gallery blues

Light to Night Singapore 2026 | National Gallery Singapore

CULTURAL MEDALLION & YOUNG ARTIST AWARD CEREMONY 2024

It's that time of year again, when the nation awards accolades to its artists for their achievements in artistic endeavour. This time, guests got to attend the actual presentation ceremony, held at the National Gallery rather than the Istana itself. Gracing the occasion was President Tharman Shanmugaratnam who presented the awards to both of this year's Cultural Medallion recipients - Dr Ghanavenothan Retnam (Music) and Mr Siew Hock Meng (Art). There were four Young Artist Award recipients - Alan Choo (Music), Evan Low (Music), Tan Si En (Film) and Zhang Fuming (Art).

I was honoured to be the guest of violinist Alan Choo, who founded Red Dot Baroque in 2018 and has truly lit up the cause of early music and period instrument music-making in Singapore. He is a true pioneering violinist musician, following the great tradition set by the likes of Goh Soon Tioe, Alphonso Anthony, Lee Pan Hon, Kam Ning and Lynnette Seah. Here are some photos from the Ceremony and reception on Wednesday (27 November 2024).

Here are this year's Cultural Medallion recipients:

Ghanavenothan Retnam,
virtuoso of the bansuri.

Siew Hock Meng & his most famous painting,
The Dawn of an Era (2000).

Alan Choo gets his YAA award 
from MCCY Minister Alvin Tan.

The Siew family.

The Choo family.

Alan Choo, founder & leader
of Red Dot Baroque
with Dr Wong Tien Hwa,
National Arts Council board member

Dr Emily Koh (YAA 2019) with
Jeong Aeree, founder New Opera Singapore.

Dr Brett Stemple, Yong Siew Toh Conservatory
with violinist Lynnette Seah (CM 2006)

Arts impresario Dr & Mrs Robert Liew.

Mervin Beng, founder re:Sound Collective
with Prof Koh Tai Ann (Literature).

Composer Dr Eric Watson (CM 2017)
with pianist Lim Yan (YAA 2006)

The Siew sibs,
baritone Chun Yuan & violinist Yi Li,
sons of Siew Hock Meng.

Fantastic Fiddlers,
Alan Choo & Lynnette Seah.

One final photo, with composers
Dr Emily Koh, (YAA 2019),
Dr Zechariah Goh Toh Chai (YAA 2003) 
and chorusmaster Lim Ai Hooi.

ART + LIVE / RESONATES WITH LYNNETTE SEAH / Review

ART + LIVE / RESONATES WITH

LYNNETTE SEAH  Violin Recital

National Gallery Facebook Live

Saturday (29 August 2020)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 1 September with the title "Moving music matched by music". 

The National Gallery’s Art + Live series of monthly online concerts invites local performers to reflect and respond to selected art pieces with pieces of music which have resounded with and moved them. Its latest guest was Cultural Medallion recipient violinist Lynnette Seah, who retired as Co-Leader of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra earlier this year.

 

She had served the national orchestra for 41 years, from its inaugural concerts in 1979, and is a true pioneer of the Singapore professional music scene. These days, she has become renowned as a celebrity chef in fine dining circles. Like a well curated meal, her half-hour solo recital comprised varied repertoire works, served as tasty morsels on a silver platter.

 

Xu Beihong’s 1927 Portrait of Lim Loh (a pioneer architect and building contractor in colonial Singapore, also father of anti-Japanese patriot General Lim Bo Seng) was juxtaposed with the earliest music on the programme, two movements from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Unaccompanied Violin Partita No.3 in E major.

The swift and technically challenging Preludio revealed Seah’s technique to be still close to impeccable on many fronts. This was contrasted with the double-stopping (playing two notes at the same time) and singing tone in the more leisurely-paced Loure. It seemed a pity that the popular and jaunty Gavotte had not been included in this selection.

Chua Mia Tee’s Road Construction Worker (1955) was a sobering study of hard labour and resilience. Witness the emaciated figure, distended veins and withering gaze of its long-suffering subject. Seah likened this pathos-inducing visage with the outsized demands needed to master Fritz Kreisler’s Praeludium & Allegro in the Style of Pugnani. She calmly negotiated the requisite faultless intonation for the slow prelude and then steadfastly withstood the thorny prickles of the fast section, which got increasingly hair-raising as the work progressed.

With the most outwardly virtuosic part of the programme over, Seah brought out her lyrical best for two encore-like pieces, arguably the concert’s most touching moments. These were chosen as a reflection of the subject of love in Chua’s 1957 portrait of his late wife and fellow artist Lee Boon Ngan.

Although there was neither piano nor harp accompaniment to back her in Edward Elgar’s Salut d’Amor, but her gorgeous tone was more than enough to sustain the interest. Following that, Jules Massenet’s Meditation from Thaïs was delivered with a similar kind of frisson, demonstrating how a simple tune could carry such impact when played with love and dedication. Such is the measure of a true artist. 

Lynnette Seah and Chua Mia Tee,

both Cultural Medallion recipients.

ART + LIVE / RESONATES WITH ALBERT TIU / Review

ART + LIVE / 
RESONATES WITH

ALBERT TIU Piano Recital

National Gallery Facebook Live

Saturday (27 June 2020)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 30 June 2020 with the title "Sustenance for the soul delivered with deft fingerwork".

Singapore is slowly but surely coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic circuit breaker period. Live concerts with live audiences have yet to commence, so online concerts have become a godsend. The concerts presented by the National Gallery bring to mind London’s National Gallery recitals organised by Dame Myra Hess during the Blitz years. Those were a morale-boosting salve for a populace under siege, albeit of a different kind.

Singapore-based Filipino pianist Albert Tiu’s recital, dedicated to Singapore’s healthcare workers, was conceived as a response to artworks by Liu Kang and Chia Yu Chian. Playing on a Shigeru Kawai grand piano from his living room, Tiu opened with a short prelude, the Happy Birthday song in the style of a Chopin waltz.

Three of Liu Kang’s Studies Of A Nurse, simple pencil sketches, prefaced slow movements from famous piano concertos. In these he skilfully wove solo piano parts with orchestral accompaniment so as to be seamless performances. First of these came from Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.23, a melancholic aria in F sharp minor in the gentle rhythmic lilt of a sicilienne. Deeply reflective and almost tragic in countenance, the music simply tugged at the heartstrings.

The spirit of Mozart lingered in the slow movement from Frenchman Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major. It is an elegant slow waltz which one wished could go on forever. Its textures and harmonies gradually get complex to a point Tiu begins simulating three hands at play.

The right hand’s piano filigree, the left thumb’s melodic line (singing a woodwind tune) in tandem with accompanying harmonies from the other fingers was an intricate and delicate juggling act. It was also fascinating to view these sleights of hand from a video camera’s overhead perspective. Through all this he maintained utmost composure and poise, with nary a note nor beat out of place.

Packing in even more notes was the slow movement of Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto, the only major work dedicated to a psychiatrist. The Russian composer had recovered from depression and writer’s block, having been rehabilitated by hypnotherapy and auto-suggestion, and this was his unforgettable gift in return.

Chia Yu Chian’s painting The Treatment was the inspiration for this selection, which found glorious fruition in Tiu’s hands. Its brooding and slow-building passion was to culminate in a rollicking cadenza and harmonious chords, signifying that even during the darkest hours, a cure was at hand and thus the impetus to carry on living. 

The recital closed with a short encore, reveling in the ecstatic throes of the 18^th Variation from Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody On A Theme Of Paganini. Amid the ongoing debate of an artist’s value in society, one thing is certain. Artists provide beauty, nourishment and sustenance for the soul, constantly reminding us what being human is all about.    

You can view the video here:

https://youtu.be/IMPet9Sq8rI

MINIMALISM REDUX / Margaret Leng Tan / Review

MINIMALISM REDUX

Margaret Leng Tan

Singapore Courtyard, National Gallery

Wednesday (23 January 2019)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 26 January 2019 with the title "Piano minimalism wins new fans".

In conjunction with National Gallery’s exhibition Minimalism: Space.Light.Object, avant-garde pianist and Cultural Medallion recipient Margaret Leng Tan was invited to give recitals as musical reflections on the subject. The recital, which attracted a sizeable audience, was a three-hour long affair organised chronologically in three parts.

The first involved the music of pre-minimalists and pioneers, opening with John Cage’s Bacchanale (1945), his first work for prepared piano. With pieces of felt, a bolt and screws with loose nuts inserted between strings, the Steinway grand was transformed to a clangourous and rattling gamelan with drums.

One of the premises of musical minimalism was repetition of notes with gradual and minute changes with the progression of time, without particular directions in mind. That was the essence of  the earliest work, Erik Satie’s Third Gnossienne (1890), which Tan described as music that “doesn’t go anywhere”. Asian influences underpinning early minimalism was also demonstrated in Alan Hovhaness’ Jhala (1952), which resounded with hypnotic echoes and tolling of temple bells. 

The second part highlighted classic and post-minimalists, including Steve Reich’s Clapping Music (1972), performed by two pairs of bare hands. Tan was assisted by tabla virtuoso Govin Tan, with the duo clapping out a sequence in unison, then going out of phase before gloriously returning together.

The score of John Adams' China Gates,
with a personal inscription for MLT.

John Adams’ China Gates (1977) and three of William Duckworth’s Time Curve Preludes (1978) had strong melodic centres, with the added mystique of overtones colouring the sonorities. In one of the latter pieces, low keys were kept permanently depressed with cloth wedges, allowing higher tones to reflect against the lower strings.

Other than Phyllis Chen’s Wunderkammer from Curios (2015) which saw the percussionist in Tan unleashed on a smorgasbord of bells, bowls, cymbals and gongs, the Schoenhut toy piano was the star of the third part.

Banging on three cans in David Lang's Miracle Ear,
with the score seen below.

Younger exponents of minimalism were celebrated, with David Lang’s Miracle Ear (1996, three tuna cans were banged on), Joshua Fried’s You Broke It! (1989-2006, a banal tune is repeated like a broken record), Yuichi Matsumoto’s Intention (2012, with Tan reciting a text by Cage) and Milos Raickovich’s Nadja’s Kolo (2018, a dance with toy piano and grand piano played together). 

Most impressive were the three longish pieces that closed each segment. Varied in mood, texture and timbre, each resounded differently as a wall of sound and volume, but all united by Tan’s sheer passion, drive and intensity. Philip Glass’ How Now (1968), lasting some 25 minutes, was perhaps the most insistent and mind-numbing piece, but Tan had a clock to check on its excesses.

Stephen Montague's Paramell Va.

Somei Satoh’s Incarnation II (1978) suspended time for 11 minutes, with a tsunami of repeated low tones washing over a near-spiritual experience. Steven Montague’s Paramell Va (1981) opened with a succession of crossing triads (like Debussy and Villa-Lobos), punctuated with chords and clusters, before closing with a big bang. A standing ovation and most likely converts to new music were the just result.       

Truly a hard day's night for MLT!