STRUMMING HEARTSTRINGS / Singapore Chinese Orchestra / Review

STRUMMING HEARTSTRINGS

Singapore Chinese Orchestra

Singapore Conference Hall

Saturday (5 September 2015)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 7 September 2015 with the title "From joy of horror to awakening".

On an evening that saw Matthias Goerne singing Schubert's Winterreise and Stephen Hough playing Beethoven piano concertos, the Singapore Chinese Orchestra had a full-house in a blockbuster concert of its own. It shared the stage with three soloists, including pre-eminent Scottish percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie.

The concert conducted by SCO Music Director Yeh Tsung began with three works by Chinese composer Liu Chang Yuan. In the opening Carnival Dance (2013), Liu celebrated the universality of folk music through diverse sources of inspiration. The dizi and sheng melodies, in their pentatonic glory, shared something common with dances from the British Isles. The huqins then conjured a tune of Central Asian influence, while the slower central section flirted with the tango. The orchestra performed with its usual infectious enthusiasm. 

Receiving its World Premiere was Bright Moon Over The Ocean (2015), a concerto for guanzi commissioned by the SCO. An essay in nostalgia, the rhapsodic work portrayed the emotions of Chinese emigrants leaving their homeland for new pastures in Nanyang. Soloist Han Lei performed brilliantly with three instruments, traversing lament-like themes to animated dances of a more exotic kind. Somewhere he took a diversion into jazz rhythms, as if stumbling into Harlem, before returning to the more chromatic hustle-bustle of Shenton Way.

Arguably the best work of three was Dream Interpretation (2011), an erhu concerto with excellent soloist Yu Hong Mei. In ten linked sections, the erhu emoted with a panoply of moods and expressive devices. The dream began mysteriously, working its way through joy, happiness and  longing to the dissonance of fear and horror, before closing with a sublime awakening. More Straussian than Freudian, the creative metamorphosis of themes makes this work one that will bear multiple hearings.

The concert's second half was devoted to Canadian-Chinese composer Vincent Ho's The Shaman (2011), the percussion concerto that starred Glennie. Sporting waist-long silver locks, she looked the part of its eponymous title as she gracefully glided through her battery of percussion. Its three connected movements was a veritable playground for the barefoot virtuosa, with unpitched percussion (drums, cymbals, bowls and slung metallic strips) beating out complex rhythms, while vying for attention with the more intimate pitched instruments.

It was the quiet and contemplative 2^nd movement Fantasia-Nostalgia which saw the marimba and vibraphone come to the fore with much melodic interest. Rapport with the orchestra was closely-knit, and she formed a tight yet sensitive alliance with orchestral timpanist Duan Fei and  pianist Clarence Lee. Exuding sheer exuberance, she easily won over an audience supposedly shy of contemporary music. Their vociferous support earned a well-deserved encore, Ho's Nostalgia, adapted from the concerto's slow movement. Bravissima!

VIRTUOSOS OF CHINESE MUSIC / Ding Yi Music Company / Review

VIRTUOSOS OF CHINESE MUSIC

Ding Yi Music Company

Esplanade Concert Hall

Sunday (7 April 2013)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 9 April 2013 with the title "Chinese masterclass".

Ding Yi Music Company is a young local Chinese instrumental ensemble that believes in pushing the boundaries of chamber music performance, and its concerts have been without exception well-attended. This Sunday afternoon concert was special because of the visiting soloists from China, younger counterparts to the Great Masters who graced the same stage last year.

They each performed solo as well as concertante works, providing much needed contrast to the two-and-a-half hour concert. Guzheng virtuoso Wang Zhong Shan was first up with own arrangement of Beijing opera number The Deep Night, a meditative work discreetly accompanied by Derek Koh on drum. This ancient plucked instrument dating over two millennia plays both the melody and provides its own accompaniment.

There were more dynamic shifts in Zhou Yu Guo’s Robe of Clouds, a guzheng concerto, where its melancholic beginning gave way to more passionate outbursts depicting the ill-fated love between the Tang emperor and concubine Yang Guifei. In Qiao Jin Wen’s rustic Han River Melody, Wang was accompanied by Yvonne Tay and Sophie Gay on two other guzhengs. In trios like this, there was to be no doubt who the master and students were.

Dizi exponent Wang Ci Heng played on several flutes of different pitch ranges. The alto reaches was explored in his Moon over the Vast Mountain, a nocturne-like work with a quasi-New Age sensibility, at parts coloured by the trickling sound of rain sticks simulating gentle breezes. In An Eagle’s Love by Liu Wen Jin, a higher pitched piccolo-like timbre allowed the music to soar unimpeded in this ethnic-flavoured rhapsody from the Central Asian province of Xinjiang.

The popular erhu was the speciality of Yu Hong Mei, who employed a delicious vibrato for the folksong A Flower. Played at full tilt, its portamenti or slides approximated that of the soprano voice, which gave it a warm glow above Yick Jue Ru’s yangqin accompaniment. Yu also presided on two of Chinese music’s most popular melodies.

Chen Gang’s Sun Shining on Tashkurgan, originally for violin, is his second most popular work after The Butterfly Lovers. Its exotic Central Asian melody makes its Chinese music’s equivalent of Ravel’s gypsy rhapsody Tzigane. Yu applied the same gay abandon in its riff- like passages and finished off with Huang Hai Huai’s Horse-Racing, a prestissimo study that rivals Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumble Bee.

All three soloists were united like a triple concerto in Gu Guan Ren’s Charms of Jiangnan, which featured each part in turn and in ensemble with a heady mix of disparate timbres. The “virtuosos” of the concert’s title did not just apply to the threesome, but also to the larger ensemble of Ding Yi, conducted by Music Director and Cultural Medallion recipient Tay Teow Kiat (above), which did itself proud in its sympathetic and vital supporting role.