STRINGS OF ELEGANCE II / Singapore Chinese Orchestra / Review

STRINGS OF ELEGANCE II

Singapore Chinese Orchestra

Singapore Conference Hall

Tuesday (22 June 2021)

An edited version of this review was published in The Straits Times on 30 June 2021 with the title "Night of versatile music-making".

 

As the nation gingerly eases out of heightened alert circuit breaker measures, live concerts are understandably thin on the ground. This concert, part of the Singapore Chinese Orchestra’s Music Tuesdays chamber series, was attended by an audience of fifty, but it would have been much more under normal circumstances.

 

The pairing of Li Yulong and Mu Ruixue was the star of the evening, exhibiting enormous range in their erhus and other members of huqin bowed string family. The hour-long concert opened with Liu Tianhua’s Liang Xiao (Nocturnal Peace), a work of exquisite beauty where both players alternated between melody, accompaniment and providing counterpoint. This kind of intimacy goes to the heart of traditional Chinese music.  

 

In Liu Mingyuan’s Crescent Moon Before Dawn, Li played the gaoyin banhu. Its higher range,  robust and penetrating sonority were well suited for portraying a maiden pining for her loved one by the glow of moonlight. In the same composer’s A Tune From Henan, based on Henan Quju opera, Mu’s sensuous erhu assumed the many varied inflections of the singing voice. Both works were partnered by Qu Jianqing on yangqin, a role that transcended mere accompaniment.   

 

For Yi Jianquan’s Birds Returning To The Woods, the ensemble expanded to six members, including yangqin, xiao (played by Phang Thean Siong), zhongruan (Cheng Tzu-Ting) and cello (Huang Ting-Yu). Mu now performed the yehu, a fiddle fashioned from a coconut shell, which produced a deeper and mellower sound, not unlike the viola. This lively Cantonese work depicted a flock of birds nesting at sunset, with exuberant mimicry of birdsong from yehu and xiao.

 

Few instruments can match the erhu for displaying heartwrenching emotion, as amply demonstrated by Li in the Dongbei folksong Jiang He Shui (River Of Sorrow). In this well-known melody, a woman seeks her warrior husband by the riverside, only to be met by torrents of tears. By the sense of desolation evoked in the music and the playing, there could only be one conclusion: death.

 

The concert closed on a far happier note, capped by the sheer versatility of the erhu and its exponents. Zhang Che’s famous Taiwanese song Maiden Of Alishan simply rocked in Gao Jia’s jazzy arrangement accompanied by Hu Chung-Chin on piano, one so idiomatic and dynamic that the late Russian jazzman Nikolai Kapustin would have approved. Following that, Vittorio Monti’s riproaring Czardas, a popular tribute to Hungarian gypsy fiddling, sounded almost staid by comparison.

 

The enthusiasm engendered led to an entertaining post-concert show and tell session, where requests were made and short excerpts played to all around approval. Never underestimate the size of an audience, especially when the music-making is this good.

 

This was my 2400th article for The Straits Times, a record that stretches all the way back to 1997.