LEGACY
Singapore National
Youth Chinese Orchestra
Singapore Conference Hall
Saturday (29 July 2023)
This review was published in The Straits Times on 31 July 2023 with the title "Singapore National Youth Chinese Orchestra celebrates 20th anniversary with confidence".
This year marks the 20th year that the Singapore National Youth Chinese Orchestra (SNYCO) has been managed under the auspices of the Singapore Chinese Orchestra (SCO), and what better way than to distinguish the occasion by having a joint concert celebrating both ensembles? Conducted by Moses Gay and Quek Ling Kiong, SNYCO Associate Conductor and Music Director respectively, the 100-minute long concert showcased five works without an intermission.
Wang Danhong’s Ba Yin (Eight Tones) was a evocation of folk festive and ceremonial music from Guangxi province. Opening with plangent solo suona and later prominent dizi solos, the multi-episode work revealed a mastery of orchestral colour, going through a march-like procession, an interlude of lush string passages before climaxing with a rousing close. Conductor Gay brought out the full plethora of sounds from his young charges.
Both concertante works in this concert featured SNYCO players accompanied by the SCO, and what proud moments this must have been for them. In Lu Yun’s The Lord of Western Qin, which lauds Tang dynasty Emperor Xuanzhong’s famed legacy of promoting arts, co-concertmaster Koh Yu Jie’s erhu ran the gamut of emotions from ruminative to outright ecstacy. While the work luxuriated with big and broad melodies, the erhu’s mellifluous voice confidently singing above rhythmic percussion beats was perhaps the most memorable episode.
In Wang Danhong’s Ru Si (As Thus), Sim Kee’s guzheng was similarly animated. The concerto opened with a brilliant cadenza, before orchestral forces were unleashed. Virtuosic as the work sounded, it was the deft scoring that enabled the solo instrument’s rippling and shimmering harp-like effects to shine through the tutti throng. The relentless drive to its conclusion was in a word, breathtaking.
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| Photo: Singapore Chinese Orchestra |
Both orchestras then reconvened on a very crowded stage, where the all-black attire of SCO players merged almost imperceptibly with the grey overcoats of their younger counterparts. The last two works were led by conductor Quek, beginning with Chen Si’ang’s five-movement suite Sheng Sheng Bu Xi (Endless). The first four movements were capsule portraits of endangered species, including the river dolphin, crested ibis, panda and Tibetan antelope, sounding like music of a nature documentary. The fifth was of Humankind, the endangering species, which rose to a big crescendo as a plea for conservation and saving the planet.
Peng Xiuwen’s Terracotta Warriors Fantasia was unusually nuanced for a contemporary Chinese orchestral work, not some quasi-heroic paean but about the actual lives of soldiers who served under China’s first emperor Qin Shihuang (Shih Huangdi), later immortalised in graven form in a Xi’an mausoleum. While the music dwelled on subjects of honour, duty and sacrifice of working men, its spare central movement, with its flowing melody punctuated by the desolate sound of wooden clappers, was a representation of homesickness and nostalgia.
The combined orchestra, comprising students and their teachers, gave both works the vitality and attention to detail each deserved. All evidence points to the future of Chinese instrumental music being more than assured.
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| Photo: Singapore Chinese Orchestra |
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