QIN LI-WEI PLAYS FOUR SEASONS, ALPINE SYMPHONY / Orchestra of the Music Makers / Review

QIN LI-WEI PLAYS FOUR SEASONS

ALPINE SYMPHONY

Orchestra of the Music Makers

Esplanade Concert Hall

Sunday (28 August 2022)

 

This concert by the Orchestra of the Music Makers (OMM) conducted by its Founder and Music Director Chan Tze Law was long in coming. Last year, Chinese-Australian cellist Qin Li-Wei was to have performed Astor Piazzolla’s Four Seasons of Buenos Aires with the orchestra but a change in quarantine requirement for returnees from overseas put paid to the original concert date. Restrictions to onstage ensemble size also meant that the immense forces that staged Wagner’s Die Walkure in January 2020 (remember those carefree pre-pandemic days?) could not be assembled until now. Marking a return to “normality”, this evening was to be the final event requiring the mandatory use of face masks as restrictions will be lifted on 29 August.

 

The four works of Piazzolla’s famous tango tetralogy Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas were composed as separate entities from 1965 to 1970. It was Ukrainian composer Leonid Desyatnikov’s arrangement for violin and strings which united all the seasons as a whole. Championed by Gidon Kremer and his Kremerata Baltica during the late 1990s, universal exposure was ensured. 

Piazzolla - Desyatnikov - Shin

The version for cello, arranged by young Singaporean Jonathan Shin, received its World Premiere this evening. None of the music, which begins with Verano Porteño (Summer) and ends with Primavera Porteño (Spring), is changed except that this edition now sounds more mellow and smooth-edged. The camp glissandi that used to shock listeners have been toned down, but one could always count on Li-Wei to bring out his unflappable and drop-dead stylish manner which worked well in this highly lyrical yet rhythmic music (as with very much else).

 

All the cheeky Vivaldi quotations were retained, popping out when one least expected them. This performance also included two interludes added by Shin. Last of All and First Warmth were inserted between Summer and Autumn, and Winter and Spring respectively. Both were essentially slow movements from Vivaldi’s Winter and Spring dressed up with hazy backing dissonances, making them sound like distant reminiscences. So why was Winter interloping between Summer and Autumn? It did not make sense until one realised that those hot months in Argentina (Southern Hemisphere) actually corresponded to December and snowfall months in the Northern Hemisphere. The performers’ panache was accorded a prolonged ovation, and the audience was rewarded with the most cellistic of encores: Saint-Saens’ The Swan backed by strings and harp. That was simply sublime, as expected.

 

The two-hour long concert was completed with a rare outing for Richard Strauss’ most grandiose and nearly hour-long tone poem, Eine Alpensinfonie (An Alpine Symphony). Incidentally, the last time this was played in Singapore was a concert by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra led by Lan Shui in February 2012 That concert also featured Qin Li-Wei in the first half playing Dvorak’s Cello Concerto. Scored for humongously large orchestra including over 40 Yong Siew Toh Conservatory students and off-stage brass of 16 players (including 12 French horns), this looked like the largest assemblage of musicians since Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand (also by OMM). Far outnumbering the SSO group of ten years ago, it also produced the most impressive sonic racket of them all.    

 

Following Strauss’ programme for all 22 linked sections of the symphony was the easiest part, his orchestral portrayals of sunrise, mountaineering day-trippers, alpine meadows (with seven clanging cow-bells no less), streams, glaciers and the like were brilliantly brought out by the young orchestra. Conductor Chan Tze Law’s command of the forces and overall pacing of the overlong narrative was excellent, and never was the music allowed to drag. A relative lull, somewhere between being lost in the thickets and dangerous moments before summiting, however saw some dorks in the audience applauding enthusiastically. What have they been listening to all this time, and have they not taken a climb (even up that ant-hill called Bukit Timah) before?

 

The huge climax at the Summit has to be the greatest burst of sound one has encountered in Esplanade in a long time, and to think that SSO first played this in Victoria Concert Hall back in 1994. How times have changed. And who was not waiting for the Thunderstorm (Gewitter und sturm) scene complete with wind machine (a rotating drum driving a canvas roll) and Wagner tubas at full pelt? Just as impressive was the moment when Joanna Paul’s organ entry (a rare sortie for Esplanade Concert Hall’s scandalously underused Klais organ), signalling that the hazards of mountaineering are over and all’s well with the universe (or for those climbers at the very least). Kudos go also to the lighting people whose illuminations of the orchestra faithfully followed the time of day as portrayed in the symphony, beginning with dim light, graduating to full daylight and then retreating to nightfall.    

Notice the change in ambient lighting
as nightfall looms in the Alpine Symphony.

 

OMM was made for concerts such as this, and its magnificence in bringing out the full capabilities of a modern symphony orchestra is the reason why Esplanade exists. The long and tumultuous applause it received at the concert’s conclusion remind one and all why people love music, attending concerts and sonic spectacles, and the intendent pleasures all these bring. 

Watch OMM play the Alpine Symphony here: