PURGATORY / L'arietta / Review

Namiko Chan Takahashi's portrait of
Reuben Lai as The Old Man
formed the cover of this production

PURGATORY

L'arietta

54 Waterloo Street

Tuesday (31 October 2017)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 2 November 2017 with the title "Creepy enough for Halloween".

Halloween night was an apt occasion to witness local opera company L'arietta's production of Gordon Crosse's one-act opera Purgatory (1966), a musical setting to W.B.Yeats' disturbing play of the same title from 1938. Unlike last year's macabre barrel of laughs that was Operacalypse Now!, Purgatory was deadly serious, but made topical by director Eleanor Tan's transforming an Irish saga of familial decline and degeneration into a Peranakan one. 

The hour-long opera benefitted from the “immersive experience” offered to its audience, by means of acting, dance and portraiture in addition to purely musical values. Before the actual opera began, listeners were ushered into a Straits Chinese decorated ante-room where the back-story was played out. Well-heeled Nonya girl has an affair with a lowly commoner, but dies after giving birth to a son, who grows up to become the troubled Old Man in the opera. 

Singaporean tenor Reuben Lai must have gained a headful of white hair singing the Old Man, for this was the most exacting and convincing portrays of descent into psychosis even winessed on the local operatic stage. Jack Nicholson in Kubrick's cult horror movie The Shining readily comes to mind.

Opposite him, Malaysian tenor Peter Ong was the blase and not-so-innocent Boy, whose Oedipal antagonism with his father was clearly palpable. This uneasy chemistry between both stage veterans was excellent. The only female presence was provided by a 6-member women's chorus, representing the Old Man's dead mother and spirits of the dead who observed, reacted and commented on goings-on like some spectral Greek chorus.

Crosse's music was tonal but dissonant, much in the manner of Benjamin Britten. The chamber orchestra led by Aloysius Foong comprised cello, flute, keyboards and percussion, the latter providing ominous hoof-beats which spelt doom besides ratcheting up the ante to heart-stopping highs.

The set design by Grace Lin was darkly evocative, dominated by an arc of wooden slats from a burnt-down house under the shade of a haunted banyan tree, which revealed a hung skeleton during the latter stages. Only the taped Balinese music that accompanied random village scenes before the opera came across as misplaced.

It is said that the sins of the father are visited upon the children, and it was the premise of the Old Man (who as a 16-year-old had killed his own father) to stop that endless cycle of death and free his mother's soul from purgatory. The purging of his emotions and downward spiral, so vividly played by Lai, would lead to another death in his hand, but could two wrongs ever make a right?

Short as this opera was, there was no shortage of dramatic tension and one was led on a noose to its bitter denouement. This was so effective that one individual in the front row was seen to make convulsive stabbing motions all through to the end. If that does not give one the Halloween creeps, nothing else will.  

Purgatory plays till Sunday 

at 54 Waterloo Street. 

SONGS TO THE DIVINE / 4th Singapore Lieder Festival / Review

SONGS TO THE DIVINE

4^th Singapore Lieder Festival

The Living Room @ The Arts House

Thursday (2 October 2014)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 4 October 2014 with the title "Wealth of talented voices".

The Singapore Lieder Festival appears to be the best kept secret in the land’s musical calendar. Now in its fourth year, its curatorial approach to programming art songs by the Sing Song Club is astonishingly exhaustive as it is unprecedented. This year’s theme is 100 English Composers, featuring 120 songs in English over six evenings, involving six singers and two pianists.

Subjects like English gardens, the pastoral life, London, Shakespeare, popular culture, entertainment, humour and romance are covered, and composers from Henry Purcell to Andrew Lloyd Webber have been included. This evening’s theme was on songs of a sacred, spiritual and biblical bent, which proved to be more interesting than the notion suggests. The beneficiaries were just 15 people in the audience, five less than the number of songs sung.

The three singers on show presented a wealth of talent and their very different voices were well suited for the repertoire. Mezzo-soprano Joanna Paul, who is better known as an organist and choral conductor, possesses a radiant ring in her registers, capable of instilling awe in Thomas Dunhill’s To the Queen of Heaven, yet soothing in two lullabies, Herbert Fryer’s The Virgin’s Cradle Hymn and Arnold Bax’s Cradle Song.  

Both her intonation and pronunciation were impeccable, as was that of Kuala Lumpur-based tenor Peter Ong. He had the task of bringing to life five baroque songs, by Pelham Humphrey, John Blow, Henry Purcell, Jeremiah Clarke and William Croft, in very demanding realisations by Benjamin Britten. Their rather serious content and sombre nature could have cast a pall over the proceedings, but Ong’s enormous emotional range and expressive power ensured that the message was not lost.

Pianist Shane Thio was his usual unflustered self, coping well with the multitudes of notes and sometimes even dominating the narrative while supporting the singers to the hilt. His appearance in five of the six concerts (100 songs in total) is a testament to his astounding ability to master new music in a very short span of time.

His co-director at the Sing Song Club, tenor Adrian Poon, had the most varied plate of the evening. His six songs sung in succession included a psalm (Edmund Rubbra), a prayer (Cyril Rootham), a hymn (Clive Clarey), a popular song (John Rutter), culminating with the concert’s longest item, Benjamin Britten’s First Canticle, My Beloved is Mine. Its intimations of love were whole-hearted and dramatic, yet comforted with a serene ending.  

The songs by women composers, Caroline Maude and Rebecca Clarke, were sung by Paul, and it was with typical Victorian pomp that she closed the concert with Arthur Sullivan’s The Lost Chord, with its harmonious cadences and that life-affirming final Amen. The last concert of the 4^th Singapore Lieder Festival, with 20 love songs, takes place on Sunday. Be sure not to miss it. 

Photos by the kind permission of the Sing Song Club.

2ND SINGAPORE LIEDER FESTIVAL / Review

2^ND SINGAPORE LIEDER FESTIVAL

The Sing Song Club

The Living Room @ The Arts House

Friday (7 September 2012)

A slightly edited version of this review was published in The Straits Times on 10 September 2012 with the title "Splendid singers for festival".

Those who have been closely following these pages would have noticed a resurgence of vocal events in recent years, in the form of operas and performance of art songs. The latter, in particular, has been in large part through the efforts of the Sing Song Club, a collective of singers and pianist Shane Thio, responsible for founding the annual Singapore Lieder Festival and Alphabet Series of recitals.

This year’s Lieder Festival ran for just two evenings, a reduction from last year’s ambitious six nights of Schubert and Schumann song cycles. The German art song was again the focus, now broadened to include Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Wolf, Strauss and the Second Viennese School. Disappointingly not more than 30 people turned up to witness the first evening’s hour-long concert by four very different but splendid singers.

A pleasing symmetry was offered by the sets of Hugo Wolf songs that opened and closed the recital, a case of thoughtful programming. Soprano Rebecca Li ran the full gamut of emotions - of love gained and loved – in Die Spröde and Die Bekehrte, a pair of contrasting pastoral reflections. A more poignant rendition of Das Verlassene Magdlein (The Forsaken Maiden) would have been hard to find from this petite but deceptively powerful presence, who sang completely from memory.

The Verona-based bass-baritone Martin Ng lent an animated and highly dramatic edge to five Brahms songs, his big burnished voice filled the breadth and depth of the human experience within. In the hymn-like Erinnerung (Reminiscences), there was reassuring warmth which turned dark and smouldering for O wusst Ich doch den weg zuruck (O That I Knew The Way Back).    

There was some familiarity to the four Richard Strauss songs of Op.27, a wedding gift to his wife, sung by veteran baritone William Lim. His booming voice was one tempered with fine control; sombre in Ruhe, Mein Seele (Rest, My Soul), passionate in Cacilie, equally rapturous in Heimliche Aufforderung (Secret Invitation) and finally sensitive in Morgen! (Tomorrow). The exquisite piano parts found an equal in master collaborator Shane Thio.  

Malaysian tenor Peter Ong closed accounts with Wolf’s two Pelegrina lieder and the prayer-like Gebet, impressing with his enormous range and depth of feeling. The final number Abschied (Farewell) was no Mahlerian tear-jerker between departing lovers but a final riposte by adversaries, with an uproarious send-up to the Viennese waltz. Both singer and pianist hammed it up for an upbeat and spirited close.

Next year’s Lieder Festival goes French, with the complete chansons of Francis Poulenc. A curious and receptive audience is urgently invited!