THE VIOLIN AND THE ERHU
Singapore Symphony Orchestra
Victoria Concert Hall
Friday (16 August 2024)
This review was published in The Straits Times on 19 August 2024 with the title "SSO's inspiring pairing of violin and erhu concertos".
"East meets West” was a tagline marketed by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra during the early years of conductor laureate Shui Lan’s tenure during the late nineties and early noughties. This idea of juxtaposing best of Eastern and Western music cultures was relived by eminent Chinese conductor Yu Long in this concert that cannily paired concertos for the violin and erhu.
A score that brings both violin and erhu in a same work has yet to be programmed, so the audience got to hear American composer Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto first. One of the 20th century’s most popular and often-played violin concertos, this suited Japan-born violinist Karen Gomyo to a tee.
Her rich and generous tone provided unalloyed pleasure in the first and second movements, essentially slow movements (despite the directions of Allegro and Andante respectively) filled with lush melody and seamless lyricism. The latter had the added luxury of Rachel Walker’s sumptuous oboe solo, with obvious echoes of Brahms’ immortal Violin Concerto, just heard a fortnight ago.
Gomyo pulled out the stops in the brief but mercurial Presto in Moto Perpetuo finale, where acid wit and slick acrobatics prevailed over a hotbed of dissonance and spikiness. The concerto was preceded by Barber’s singular greatest hit, his Adagio for Strings, showcasing SSO strings at its warmest. Far from dragging, it reached an impassioned climax without too much fuss or lacrimation.
The erhu component came in Chinese composer Chen Qigang’s La Joie de la Souffrance (The Joy of Suffering), originally conceived as a violin concerto in 2017. Chinese erhu virtuoso Lu Yiwen was the first artist to perform its edition for the erhu, which does not suffer by comparison.
If anything, its sounds even more authentic as it is a fantasy on the ancient guqin melody Yangguan Sandie, inspired by words by Tang dynasty poet Wang Wei. The original poem recounted the parting of friends at China’s far western frontier, an occasion for sorrow, contemplation and hope, all of these well captured by the instrument.
Lu’s masterful showing on two huqins in the 25-minute modern masterpiece, with soulful soliloquys and tricky quasi-improvisatory passages, strongly suggests this might just be the 21st century’s answer to the Butterfly Lovers Concerto. May this be more often performed, and the start of a new musical trend.
Both soloists were afforded time for an encore each, with further impressive displays of their stupendous techniques. Gomyo in Astor Piazzolla’s Tango-Etude No.3 was nigh impossible to dance to, while Lu in Liu Tianhua’s Kong Shan Niao Yu (Birds Singing In A Tranquil Valley) was a veritable mimicry of birdsong.
The concert closed with a bang, amply provided by Alexander Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances from his opera Prince Igor in Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s colourful orchestration. Wind solos predominated, including Walker’s oboe, Elaine Yeo’s cor anglais, Ma Yue’s clarinet and a bunch of flutes, before the six-man percussion crew took over to complete the romp. Nostalgic ears will fondly remember the melody in this lollipop as Stranger In Paradise from the musical Kismet.
A preview of this concert was published
on www.bachtrack.com:
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