TRAVERSING
Ding Yi Music Company
Victoria Concert Hall
Friday (15 March 2024)
QU CHUNQUAN & SCO
Singapore Chinese Orchestra
Singapore Conference Hall
Saturday (16 March 2024)
This review was published in The Straits Times on 18 March 2024 with the title "Retired SCO conductors Yeh Tsung and Qu Chunquan take centre stage".
For senior conductors, there is life after the Singapore Chinese Orchestra. Yeh Tsung, who retired from the helm of SCO in end-2022 and became its Conductor Emeritus, was back on the podium to lead Ding Yi Music Company’s opening concert of its 2024-25 season. The very eclectic programme was an excellent showcase of contemporary music for Chinese instruments that fused Chinese and Western sensibilities.
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| Photo: Andrew Bi Photography |
Pride of place were two concertos for cello that featured Singapore Symphony Orchestra principal Ng Pei-Sian as soloist. Chen Yi’s very substantial Sound of the Five was a prime example of this perfect synthesis. Its four movements exploited myriad sonorities that result by pitting the cello’s lower-pitched and deeply-breathed voice with the higher-pitched and variable sliding tones of Chinese instruments.
Echoes of the Set Bells had pitched percussion – xylophone and vibraphone – simulate the tintinnabulation over the cello’s song, which came to the fore with heartrending lyricism in Romance of Hsiao and Chin. The pinpoint precision struck between cello and orchestra in the final Flower Drums in Dance with an incessant beat brought the work to a breathtaking close.
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| Photo: Andrew Bi Photography |
The irrepressible Yeh also directed in Mo Fan’s Oasis, a fantasy for Ng Hsien Han’s virtuosic dizi draped in indelible Central Asian colours, and Koh Cheng Jin’s Nanyang-styled symphonic poem Legend of Badang, delighting in the rhythms of the Indo-Malayan archipelago.
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| Photo: Andrew Bi Photography |
Yeh shared the concert with Ding Yi Resident Conductor Dedric Wong De Li, a former protege of his. Wong led in Jonathan Shin’s excellent single-movement cello concerto Good Hunting (Ng Pei-Sian as soloist again) and Chen Xinruo’s Sejuteng, a speculative modern interpretation of Tang dynasty music.
Qu Chunquan was a conductor associated with Singapore Chinese Orchestra’s early years during the 1980s to 90s, when it was the People’s Association Chinese Orchestra. His return to lead the orchestra was commendable but a programme entirely devoted to his compositions was questionable.
His music has a populist feel but are blighted by banalities. Shanghai Capriccio so blatantly ripped off Gershwin’s An American in Paris that it might as well have been titled George Gershwin in Shanghai. Arguably worse was the supposedly patriotic work called Reverie at the Statue of Sir Stamford Raffles, which appropriated tropes from Tchaikovsky’s Capriccio Italien. The rousing apotheosis, which had NDP song Singapura, Sunny Island blaring out, might have also suggested he mistook the word reverie for revelry.
From the SCO, one got nothing less than totally committed performances. As for Music and Dance of the Silk Road, a Central Asian-flavoured fantasy, and the martial arts-inspired Shaolin Wand, Qu showed he was capable of colourful and evocative orchestrations.
The concert’s high points were provided by SCO’s own players as soloists in concertante works. Sheng player Yang Hsin-Yu gave a breathtaking account of The Myth of Paiwan, three movements which drew inspiration from Taiwan’s indigenous people. Even if the central movement resembled a Neapolitan dance and the finale an outtake from Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian’s copybook, the lively readings carried the work.
SCO zhonghu principal Lin Gao was a dazzling presence in Variations on a Theme of Rely, showcasing a deep and throaty string sonority. The individual variations with Yu Jia’s pipa and Fontane Liang’s harp in accompaniment were very well crafted.
Without any prompting, two light encores – a Socialist Realist-style march and a tango a la Gerardo Matos Rodriguez’s La Cumparsita – were offered by Qu and the band at the concert’s end, with the enthused audience lapping it all up.
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