School of the Arts
SOTA Concert Hall
Tuesday (14 May 2013 )
This review was published in The Straits Times on 16 May 2013 with the title "Yellow Pages with Caribbean beat".
The
School of the Arts (SOTA) Concert Hall has truly become a boon for the
performance of chamber music within the city. Time and again, its capacious yet
intimate space allows for instrumental sounds to bloom, regardless of the size
of the performing group, as it proved in this evening’s concert of 20th
century music.
The
evening began with two works for harpsichord and small ensemble. Despite the
title, Spanish composer Manuel de Falla’s 1926 Harpsichord Concerto is a virtuoso vehicle for all six
instrumentalists, not just the keyboardist. Drawing inspiration from the
baroque as well as Stravinsky’s spiky neoclassicism, violin (played by Chan
Yoong Han), cello (Leslie Tan), flute (Roberto Alvarez), oboe (Audi Goh) and
clarinet (Li Xin) all had vital parts to play in its piquant and kinetically
charged short movements.
Project
themselves they did, however it was in the expense of Yang Tien’s soft-focused
and mellow-toned harpsichord, her complex figurations barely rising above the
busy throng. The admixture of textures was somewhat better in Samuel Adler’s Acrostics, subtitled Four Games for Six Players (1985). The four movements played on varied
timbres, colours and moods, afforded by the same combination of instruments and
fuelled by an anarchic spirit of bantering fun.
The
second movement and its direction to play “with a great deal of charm” summed
up the exercise. Pointillist and with short spurts of sound interjected at
different intervals, its laugh-a-minute atmosphere then into dissipated into a
droll, ghostly waltz. A second hearing of this unusual work could do wonders.
A
grand piano was wheeled in place of the harpsichord for the second half, and
close to perfect balance was restored. This is not a slur on the performers but
rather because the piano’s plangent sound disperses into the air better than
that of a dainty harpsichord’s.
Spaniard
Salvador Brotons’s Mixed Sextet (1992)
was as the title suggested. It pitted the sonorities of paired woodwinds with
those of paired strings, against the percussed instruments – namely Lim Yan’s
piano and Mark Suter’s marimba and three assorted drums. The music traversed a
melange of styles, including a fugue and romantic gestures before its single
movement escalated to a climatic close.
The
final work was also the most entertaining. The American Michael Torke’s brand
of minimalism in the three-movement Telephone
Book (1995) incorporated popular styles and not a little humour. How else could
his Yellow Pages be suffused with an
infectious Caribbean or Latin American beat?
Blue Pages employed a syncopated bass clarinet as
its beat, transporting listeners into a smoky Manhattan jazz club, while the perpetual motion of
White Pages revelled in a succession
of intoxicating riffs. Flashy and energetic, this clearly enthused reading from
the five performers on stage - three of whom played the entire concert - was
something to call (or text) home about.
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