SYC & FRIENDS: 60 YEARS YOUNG / SYC Ensemble Singers / Review

 

SYC & FRIENDS: 

60 YEARS YOUNG 

SYC Ensemble Singers 

Victoria Concert Hall 

Saturday (1 June 2024)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 3 June 2024 with the title "SYC celebrates 60th anniversary with modern music".

In a Straits Times article from 1992, the Singapore Youth Choir (SYC) was named as Singapore’s top choir. SYC, founded in 1964, appointed young choral conductor Jennifer Tham as its artistic director in 1986. As its leader ever since, SYC was renamed the SYC Ensemble Singers in 2004 to reflect its coming of age. 

This trendsetting choir has been committed to new music, its 60th anniversary concert being a showcase of 20th and 21st century works. The show opened with works by three Singaporean composers. SYC alumna Diana Soh’s Vak (2013) comprised three short pieces, some with no actual words. 

Singers strolled onstage for its Salutanya Prelude, just mouthing single syllable tones. This was followed by seemingly random tongue-twisting consonants, whistling and oral clicking in Vak (Sanskrit for the goddess of speech and utterance), before a more traditional folksong-like close in Salutanya Postlude. 

Joyce Koh’s Le or Yue (1998), after the Chinese word for happiness and music, was a wordless melisma of long-held tones. Merging and coalescing into a mirage of sound effects, its progression as a dreamy meditation of joy was punctuated by well-placed strikes of five Tibetan brass bowls. Simply mesmerising. 

Described as a contemporary madrigal, Leong Yoon Pin’s Si Nian (Nostalgia, 1988) was SYC’s first ever commission. Sung in Mandarin, this work led to SYC winning first prize at the International Music Eisteddfod in Llangollen (Wales). Full of reassuring harmonies, these were premised on the words wo de gu xiang, reflecting love for one’s homeland and a mother’s embrace. 

Joined by its youth wing, a vastly-expanded SYC offered well-known American choral composer Eric Whitacre’s The Stolen Child (2008) with words by William Butler Yeats. With verses sung by a smaller subchoir backed by a larger body of singers, its refrain Come Away, O Human Child! was a lament on lost childhood youth and innocence. 

Venezuelan composer Cristian Grases’s Lux Aeterna (Eternal Light) from Canticles Of Light (2024), in Latin as with all Roman Catholic liturgy, received its world premiere. Its cascading and echoing harmonies provided a warm homogeneous blanket of sound, serenely closing a very eclectic first half. 

The main work on show was Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s Te Deum (1984), performed by three choirs including alumni, Singapore Management University Chamber Choir and guests, backed by Wayfarer Sinfonietta’s string players and B-L Duo (Bertram Wee and Lynette Yeo) on prepared piano and windharp. 

Photo: Law Kian Yan

This Ambrosian praise hymn of 29 lines in Latin was a solid half-hour built upon the D triads (both major and minor) with drones in his trade-marked tintinnabuli style. Reliving the ethereal sound of bells, the music had a bit of everything, voices in unison and triadic harmonies, string meditations and calmly ecstatic outbursts. 

Photo: Law Kian Yan

The overall effect was a hauntingly beautiful one, so calming that it risked being soporific in parts. The music kept flowing under conductor Tham’s firm guiding hands till its conclusion of ultimate solace. For SYC’s intrepid programming and committed performances, may there be another 60 years of great music-making.