BRAWL IN THE HALL / Yong Siew Toh Conservatory Chamber Music Week

BRAWL IN THE HALL

Yong Siew Toh Conservatory 

Chamber Music Week

YST Orchestral Hall

Monday (17 March 2025), 6 pm

Rumble in the Jungle, Thrilla in Manila, Brawl in the Hall. All these rhyming titles have an element of combat in them, the first two been associated with Muhammad Ali's heavyweight title bouts. The last was the title veteran cellist Leslie Tan gave to this chamber concert featuring his gang and string students of the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory whom he tutors. 

The programme was a highly unusual one, typical of the edginess that has come to define Tan's music making over the years and what the Conservatory hopes to achieve, that is to make its students think out of the box. And how to box - fly like a butterfly, and sting like a bee - bringing chamber music to the next level. Here are some photos from the concert, a record of what young people do in Conservatory these days.

The concert opened with a rare performance of Beethoven's Grosse Fuge (Op.134), rare in Singapore that is. This is classical music's equivalent of heavy metal, the truly hardcore stuff. Gone is the congeniality and niceties associated with chamber music. What we have instead is chromaticism and dissonance dressed up in extreme counterpoint. And what a gritty performance that was, gripping the listener at the lapels and refusing to let go.

Note also that the performers, violinist Yang Shuxiang and Brenda Koh, Martin Peh and cellist Leslie Tan, have been members of Singapore's chamber music vanguard. The T'ang Quartet, Concordia Quartet, Bards of Neverland and Red Dot Baroque are all represented in this foursome.

The Brawl Quartet, for want of a better name, were joined by five Conservatory students in Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov's Last Round (1996), another boxing reference, a tribute to the great nuevo tango-meister Astor Piazzolla. Its two movements, titled Macho, Cool and Dangerous and Death of Angels say it all, a tango to end all tangos and a tango funeral march. Also notice how close the audience got to the performers, literally ringside seats.

Closing the hour-long musical showdown was Shostakovich's Two Pieces for String Octet (Op.11), essentially pitting two string quartets against each other - comprising a Prelude and Scherzo, to conclude the concert on a refreshing and invigorating high.

For the record, the students involved in the musical slugfest were: violinists Li Hao and Natalia Aureitsevich, violist Liu Xuanyu, cellist Sun Xiaoran, bassist Loewe Lim Li Tong and the Cave Quartet:  violinists Viktoria Marinova and Syu Cheng-Yi, violist Caitline Chin and cellist Ren Zhivi. You have hereby been authorised to transform and revolutionise the chamber music scene in Singapore from now on.