TSUNG YEH AND SCO / Singapore Chinese Orchestra / Review

 

TSUNG YEH AND SCO 

Singapore Chinese Orchestra 

Singapore Conference Hall 

Saturday (17 August 2024)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 19 August 2024 with the title "SCO and suona player Liu Wenwen deliver in demanding performance".

Singapore Chinese Orchestra’s conductor emeritus Yeh Tsung returned to conduct a very demanding programme which included three Singapore premieres. Among these was Li Bochang’s Dukezhong, a memoir of a thousand-year-old ruined city in Yunnan, which opened the concert. Dances of the Naxi and Tibetan peoples were remembered, with percussion dominating the score. This culminated in principal Benjamin Boo’s imperious solo display on drums which defined the meaning of exuberance. 

Kong Zhixuan’s Tone Poem of Wuxi was a musical travelogue of the famous Jiangsu river town, with eight picture postcard-like scenes inspired by poetry performed in quick succession. Even if its opening suspiciously resembled Dawn from Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra, the play on the folksong Wuxijing (Wuxi Scenery) placed it firmly within Middle Kingdom sensibilities. 

The shortest work on show, Liu Qing’s Sha Wei, scored for a chamber-sized group of just nine players was perhaps the most unusual and interesting. Atonal for most part, the instruments including pipa, erhu, dizi, suona and guzheng supported by percussion relived various inflexions, devices and cadences from Beijing opera. After a suona tour de force from Chang Le which included mimicking of operatic characters, were fragments of melodies heard for the first time. 

Wang Danhong’s Strings on Yangko Dance was a villagers’ celebration of harvest time, the subject being the “yangge” which personalised the rigours of rural living. Suona principal Jin Shiyi’s wonderful extended solo, touched with a rustic and plaintive quality, came close to stealing the show in this spectacular piece. 

The mother of all suona displays came from guest soloist Liu Wenwen, who is a 13th generation suona player in her family and presently Artist-in-Residence of Guangdong Chinese Orchestra. Her performances in two concertante works have to be witnessed in person to be believed. Mere words simply do scant justice.

Taiwanese composer Lu Yun’s Lang Sai (Lion Dance) was no mere lunar new year dance routine but an elaborate quasi-spiritual ceremony involving six rites of passage. Liu played on two suonas of different registers like a woman possessed, involving extended techniques which bordered on the edges of believability. 

Were her seemingly interminable long-held passages a result of the art of circular breathing or some trance-like state induced by some psychoactive substance? For the sake of staying on the right side of the law, one would grant her the benefit of doubt, and an extremely healthy set of lungs and airways. 

This feat was repeated in Jia Daqun’s Rhapsody – Spirit Of The Tunes From Shaanxi Opera, this time on six suonas. This longer work, which could be a trial for both player and listener, again fully brought out the dramatic and operatic aspects to heart’s content. Suffice to say, she was still standing at the end and not blue in the face. A solo encore and orchestral encore of Hua Hao Yue Yuan yielded a standing ovation, an instant not regularly encountered at an SCO concert.