AN EVENING OF CHINESE TIMELESS CLASSICS / NAFA Chinese Orchestra / Review

 

AN EVENING OF 

CHINESE TIMELESS CLASSICS

NAFA Chinese Orchestra

Singapore Conference Hall

Sunday (28 September 2025)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 30 September 2025 with the title "Spirited performance of classic works by young talent of NAFA Chinese Orchestra".

If one wondered how professional Chinese musical ensembles like the Singapore Chinese Orchestra or Ding Yi Music Company get its members, just take a look at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts’ (NAFA) Chinese Instrumental Studies degree programme. Now part of the University of the Arts Singapore (UAS), this is the very reason why we have the highest levels of Chinese musical performances here today.

In the final concert of the 2025 Singapore Chinese Music Festival, the NAFA Chinese Orchestra led by Lim Yau provided a showcase that stands the test of time. The concert opened with the popular Dance of the Yao People by Liu Tieshan and Mao Yuan, originally conceived for western orchestra but orchestrated by Peng Xiuwen for Chinese instruments.

The music sourced from the ethnic minorities of southwest China rhapsodised with much feeling and fervour, with concertmaster Koh Yu Jie’s gaohu confidently singing its principal theme. Picking up speed, momentum and without looking back, the work made for a rousing curtain-raiser.

What followed were concertante works featuring four NAFA faculty members, two of whom are principals in the Singapore Chinese Orchestra. The old Cantonese tune Zhaojun’s Lament was elegiac in nature, wholly suited for Qu Jian Qing’s eloquent and mellow musings on the yangqin. Temperance ruled, and the orchestra piped down for the understated angsty emotions on show.

Quite different was the more demonstrative Ballade of Lan Huahua by Guan Ming, arranged as a dizi concerto by Zhan Yong Ming and Lu Chunlin, with Zhan as spirited soloist. Here, the sense of tragedy was more palpable, with the bamboo flute’s plangent tones searing a path through the dramatics. The trill-filled cadenzas made for moments for contemplation and reflection before closing on a subdued note.

The longest and arguably most virtuosic piece was Heroic Sisters of the Grassland composed by the committee of Wu Zhuqiang, Wang Yanjiao and Liu Dehai, and arranged by Peng. This work’s claim to fame was having been recorded by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Seiji Ozawa in 1979 with the gradual opening of communist China to the West.

Yu Jia, resplendent in a stunning red outfit, was the spectacular pipa soloist who caught no breaks in its 20-minute playtime. This work of programme music recounted the escapades of two young sisters in Inner Mongolia who braved a blizzard to protect their flock of sheep. Through storms and squalls of orchestral textures, it was Yu who held firm from its pastoral opening to brilliant conclusion.

Photo: Chew Kai Xin

One often needs to separate the Socialist Realist claptrap of many Chinese works of the period from the true quality of the music. This however did not apply to Liu Wenjin’s Ballad from Northern Henan, another folk rhapsody, with Sunny Wong Sun Tat, head of NAFA’s Chinese music department, on his trusty erhu.

This was celebratory music one need not apologise for, and his excellence of execution and the orchestra’s spirited contribution were emblematic of the very bright future ahead for Chinese instrumental music in Singapore.

PICTURESQUE MOUNTAINS / Singapore Chinese Orchestra / Review

PICTURESQUE MOUNTAINS

Singapore Chinese Orchestra

Singapore Conference Hall

Friday (12 September 2014)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 15 September 2014 with the title "Stirring Chinese music with colourful tales".

The worlds of Chinese painting and Chinese music run close and parallel lives. While absolute music exists in Chinese compositional repertoire, programme music inspired by legends, literature, historical events and scenery are de rigueur in works performed on Chinese instruments. Traditional Chinese brush paintings are typically lyrical in their portrayal of reality, and the associated music is similarly effusive and expressive.

This premise was main thrust of the well-conceived Singapore Chinese Orchestra concert directed by veteran conductor and Cultural Medallion recipient Tay Teow Kiat. There were four Singapore premieres, beginning with three movements from Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains. Based on a famous Yuan (Mongol) dynasty painting, this is a composite work by no less than four composers.

Impressionistic might be a way to describe Flowing Waters, Drifting Clouds and Sounds of the Wind on an Intoxicating Night, which opened with soft murmurs from the winds, with a preponderance of dulcet tones from the dizi family. The mellow alto voice of the qudi provided a balm of serenity and repose in the latter movement, accompanied by harp, bird-calls, rain stick and wordless vocalisations from ladies of the orchestra. In The Mountains and Rivers as One, the suona heralded a call to arms in a crescendo which climaxed with solo voices, heroically helmed by tenor Zhuang Jie and soprano Su Yi Wen (above).

Taiwan-based Lo Leung Fai’s Beautiful Mount Chai was a erhu concerto in all but name, one which displayed the solo prowess of Wang Gui Ying. Its programme in the form of a symphonic poem allowed Wang to run the full gamut of elegiac and exultant feelings, culminating with a series of discursive yet gripping solo cadenzas.

The orchestra accompanied discreetly and sensitively, never overwhelming the lone voice, and continued in the same vein for Liu Xi Jin’s Lingering Snow on the Broken Bridge. This is the famous wintry landscape of West Lake in Hangzhou, ubiquitous in literature and lore, which got the work it deserved. The single movement concerto for dizi followed the basic ternary form, with a most glorious of melodies bookending a scherzo-like dance for the piccolo-like bangdi, with soloist Zhan Yong Ming milking the sentimentality for all its worth.

The final work, Three Friends of Winter by Gu Guan Ren was an essay on three vegetative species which thrive in winter, serving as a metaphor for virtues of the Chinese people in lean and straitened times. Stout Pine portrayed strength and resistance with its heroic, martial gestures, contrasted with Jade Bamboo, a lilting serenade which bends with the wind but maintains its resilience.

Cheerful pipas and Zhao Jianhua’s silky erhu completed the trilogy in Winter Plum, a sturdy flower which blooms and looks forward to the welcome onset of spring. Close your eyes, and the stirring music begins to tell its own stories. That, in an essence, is the joy of Chinese music.         

All photographs by the kind permission of the Singapore Chinese Orchestra.

EIGHT TONES UNINTERRUPTED / Singapore Chinese Orchestra / Review

EIGHT TONES UNINTERRUPTED
Singapore Chinese Orchestra
Singapore Conference Hall
Friday (17 February 2012)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 20 February 2012 with the title "An Asian feast for all".

This concert, part of the island-wide musical marathon in conjunction with the Singapore Chinese Orchestra’s 15th anniversary, showed how much Chinese instrumental music has evolved. The long-held notion of small chamber groups playing ancient Chinese melodies in strict unison has given way to a diversity that is rapidly expanding.

The concert began with Wang Dan Hong’s rhapsodic Eight Tones, with the solo suona boldly opening accounts. Raw and earthy, the motto theme based on Zhuang ethnic music was subjected to a series ceremonial fanfares and elaborations before erupting into a full-blown dance procession.

Moving southerly was Sabah-native Simon Kong’s Izpirazione II, which won 2nd Prize in the International Chinese Orchestral Composition Competition in 2006. The two movements performed, Rambutan and Tarap (a jackfruit’s relative, above), attempted to infuse Southeast Asian elements into what is now known as Nanyang music.

The former was a rhythmic scherzo-like movement with strong presence of tuned percussion, while the latter revelled in Borneo aboriginal rhythms and conductor Quek Ling Kiong’s ad libitum grunts and chants. Audience participation was included, with synchronised foot-stomping and rhythmic clapping.

When it came to Zhang Xiao Feng’s Nong Yu Sheng, a three-movement virtuoso concerto for sheng and orchestra, the idioms were so removed from Chinese sources as to sound positively occidental. What were Zhang’s inspirations? French, Russian or Bernstein’s Americana? It was hard to tell from the first movement’s lilting serenade, or the slow movement’s atmospherics which lightly balanced muted strings with Guo Chang Suo’s sensuously beautiful solo, or the busy toccata-like figurations of the furious finale. Suffice to say, it was a surprising and original departure from the norm, and a quite brilliant one at that.

As if to appease more conservative tastes, the second half was more traditional with Yang Chun Lin and Zhan Yong Ming’s Never-Ending Resentment, a concerto about the ill-fated romance of the Tang Emperor and concubine Yang Gui Fei. Originally scored for two erhus, this version showcased Zhan’s amazing range on a composite flute that combined both registers of bangdi and qudi. Lovers of the Butterfly Lovers Concerto would have warmed up to this.

To close was A Trip To Lhasa by Kuan Nai-Chung, a picture postcard suite with its programmatic depictions of the Potala (solemn and sacred), the Yalu Tsangpo River (flowingly lyrical), a sky burial (eerie and macabre) and the Vanquishing Demons dance (noisily joyous). it was a raucous close to a concert with something for everybody.