CARMINA BURANA / Singapore Symphony & Melbourne Symphony Orchestras / Review

 

CARMINA BURANA 

Singapore Symphony & 

Melbourne Symphony Orchestras 

Esplanade Concert Hall 

Thursday (22 August 2024)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 24 August 2024 with the title "SSO, Melbourne Symphony team up for impressive show".

It is a rare occasion that the Singapore Symphony Orchestra (SSO) has a major collaboration with another orchestra of international stature. This first-ever partnership with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO) in two concerts at Esplanade will be reciprocated with SSO’s visit to Melbourne in its Australian tour in February 2025. 

Conducted by MSO chief conductor Jaime Martin, this was a varied and exciting programme of music influenced by folk music. The only exception was its opener, Malaysia-born Australian composer Maria Grenfell’s Fanfare for a City (2001), a 5-minute work living up to its name connoting vibrancy and frenetic activity. Opening brass gave way to a minimalist hive of orchestral textures that were pleasantly tonal but decidedly short-winded. Breathe a little, and it was over. 

What followed was music from two popular ballets commissioned by the great Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev. Manuel de Falla’s Three Dances from The Three-Cornered Hat (1919) thrived on rhythmic folk dance idioms from Andalusia, the final dance being an unbuttoned Jota of raucous exuberance. Conductor Martin, a Spaniard himself, will have vouched for its authenticity. 

Similarly, a combination of refined and robust playing defined Igor Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite (1919), a near-perfect 22-minute precis of the ballet with the boring bits left out. The Firebird’s dance pranced with coquettish charm, while the gentle Berceuse was graced by an excellent bassoon solo by MSO’s Jack Schiller. The jump scare that was King Kashchei’s Infernal Dance provided an exhilarating ride while the glorious finale had many moments to raise goosebumps. 

For the record, 39 MSO players augmented the SSO, while 58 MSO choristers joined the 147-strong Singapore Symphony Chorus, Youth Choir and Children’s Choir to fill up the gallery and organ loft for Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana (1937), the evening’s indisputable highlight. 

Its opening and closing chorus, O Fortuna, is familiar to many, but how many actually understand the contents in between? An uncensored translation of its pig Latin, ancient French and German texts makes for extremely saucy reading but it was the music’s sheer hedonism music that sealed Orff’s runaway greatest hit, even in prudish Nazi Germany where it was championed. 

The massive choir dominated the show, its sheer volume overwhelming in parts, but also impressed in the evenness of chant-like unison passages and accurate voicing of consonants. The children were a delight in the Cour d’Amours (Court of Love) segment, with their innocence hopefully intact after this outing. 

Of the soloists, baritone Christopher Tonkin brought out laughs with his uproarious portrayal of the inebriated Abbot of Cockaigne, while high tenor Andrew Goodwin’s cameo as the roasted swan was the picture of misery itself. Most impressive of all was soprano Siobhan Stagg, whose coyness in In Trutina and giving up of virginity in Dulcisimme hit all the sweet and stratospheric spots. 

The bacchanalian climax of Tempus Est Iocundum (The Season is Pleasant), with all the singers at full pelt, might just be the answer to the world’s travails. Its message of “live and be merry, for you only live once,” could not have been better conveyed.

Taking the bow are chorusmasters 
Warren Trevalyan-Jones, Eudenice Palaruan
and Wong Lai Foon together with Jaime Martin,
Andrew Goodwin, Siobhan Stagg
& Christopher Tonkin.