A LOVE OF FRENCH MUSIC
SSO Chamber Series
Victoria Concert Hall
Thursday (3 October 2024)
OF WAR AND PEACE
T’ang Quartet
The Arts House Chamber
Sunday (6 October 2024)
This review was published in The Straits Times on 8 October 2024 with the title "Rarities aired at SSO's chamber series and T'ang Quartet's concerts".
It is always refreshing to see unfamiliar works of music programmed alongside more popular numbers of the classical canon. A pair of chamber concerts demonstrated that good programming will invariably be reciprocated by very encouraging audience response.
The first concert was part of an all-French two-nighter presented by musicians of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra. Camille Saint-Saens’ Fantaisie for violin and harp in A major (Op.124) is virtually unknown outside of harp circles, a late work of melodic invention and charm.
Gulnara Mashurova’s harp was the anchor, providing steady accompaniment with the lightness and transparency of timbre that a piano could never replicate. Over this, Zhao Tian’s violin had most of the lyrical passages, later turning into outright display. In their hands, the music never descended into empty fireworks or frivolity.
Receiving a local premiere was Bernard Andres’ Chants d’arriere-saison (Songs of a Season Past), unusually scored for French horn and harp. Its seven short movements could have posed serious issues of balance, but principal hornist Austin Larson’s tonal control was exemplary.
He produced a wealth of colour and nuance, his excellent intonation also complemented by the harp’s varied textures. The music was Romantic in idiom and accessibly tonal, with autumnal and melancholic being predominant moods that was well worth listening to again.
The evening was completed by Maurice Ravel’s popular String Quartet in F major, with Zhao and Zhang Sijing on violins with violist Janice Tsai and cellist Christopher Mui. Despite the foursome playing together for the first time, the result was a taut reading which lacked nothing in poetry and rhythmic vitality.
The Scherzo with its pizzicatos and pentatonics relived the gamelan’s percussive clangour, and found a canny visual resonance with violinist Zhao’s batik outfit.
T’ang Quartet, Singapore’s longest existing professional chamber group, also presented a programme of rarities. Founding members Ng Yu Ying and Ang Chek Meng on violins were joined by two young guests players, violist Patcharaphan Khumprakob and cellist Cho Hang-oh. Both were alumni of Yong Siew Toh Conservatory where the original quartet is resident.
Alexander Borodin’s First String Quartet in A major is far less popular than its successor, but got a fresh and invigorating reading it deserved. Ng and Ang’s vast experience must have indelibly rubbed on their former students as this foursome performed like a well-seasoned outfit. The rapt slow introduction was ear-catching in its voicing and precision, then giving way to the opening movement’s flowing main theme which quoted a late Beethoven quartet.
The all-Russian evening’s gripping tour de force was Dmitri Shostakovich’s Third String Quartet in F major, composed shortly after the end of World War Two. T’ang’s forte has always been Slavic music and this was right up its alley. The first movement’s irony and mock gaiety wore a poker-face throughout, later giving way to the slashings of the second movement’s demented waltz.
Horrors and brutality of war were laid bare in the third movement, which must have given ideas to Bernard Herrmann’s film score for Psycho. A humanising voice would emerge in the slow movement’s moving passacaglia, and later in the finale’s Jewish-influenced dance. The audience held its collective breath at the work’s quiet end before erupting in vociferous applause.
Landmark: This was my 2600th article
for The Straits Times.
