NEW YEAR’S
EVE GALA CONCERT 2014
The
Philharmonic Orchestra
School of
the Arts Concert Hall
Tuesday (31 December 2013 )
This review was published in The Straits Times on 2 January 2013 with the title "Good start for music in new year".
Call it what you want, it was the last concert
of the year 2013 or the first concert of 2014. For The Philharmonic Orchestra
conducted by Lim Yau, this was its third edition of what appears to be
hopefully an enduring tradition. Vienna has its New Year’s Day Concert and
London boasts of The Last Night of the Proms, so why not a Singaporean New
Year’s Eve Concert including a countdown in the absence of Gurmit Singh?
Dvorak’s Carnival
Overture began the concert on a rousing high, enveloping the generously
filled and reverberant hall with a sonorous lustre. There was a delicious
violin solo by concertmaster Loh Jun Hong which rose magically above the hubbub
of the music’s general busyness.
There was even time to include a symphony, and
it was American Don Gillis’s Symphony
No.5 ½, or Symphony for Fun, one
stocking-filled with musical in-jokes and gags. The warm brass chorale and Veda
Lin’s lovely cor anglais solo at the beginning of the slow movement Spiritual? were an obvious dig at the Largo
The final two movements swung from serious
Italian opera to jazz (the 3rd movement was titled Scherzophrenia) in the company of
excellent clarinettist Ralph Emmanuel Lim, and the wild conclusion mashed the
gaiety of Stravinsky’s Petrushka with
a Coplandesque hoedown. Good humour went into full swing when conductor
Lim ordered the audience to get up and shake, rattle and roll to the traditional
Cuban Peanut Vendor’s Song.
Two vocal items also proved a hit, when sopranos
Yin Yue and Su Yiwen blended beautifully in the Flower Duet from Delibes’s opera Lakmé, which will forever be remembered as that British Airways
commercial. Su also warmed up to the dazzling coloratura flourishes of Johann
Strauss the Younger’s Voices Of Spring,
comfortably rising above the orchestra’s beat.
Two familiar but contrasting waltzes, Strauss’s On The Beautiful Blue Danube and
Sibelius’s bittersweet Valse Triste,
gave listeners opportunities to revel and reflect on the past year, while
looking forward to the new one. The bubbly emcee Andrew Mowatt asked audience
members for their new year resolutions, while his should be not to refer to his
employers The Philharmonic Orchestra as the Singapore Philharmonic Orchestra, a
defunct outfit from the 1970s.
The countdown played out magnificently to the
striding rhythm from Respighi’s Pines of
The Appian Way (from The Pines of
Rome), representing the inexorably march of time. Amid handshakes, hugs and
hurrahs, Strauss The Elder’s Radetzky
March accompanied a clap-along and hands were held for a nostalgic
rendering of Auld Lang Syne. All
these portend for a good year of music in 2014.
All photographs by the kind permission of The Philharmonic Orchestra.
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