pianomania: AN ODYSSEY OF HUMANITY AND NATURE / Musicians' Initiative / Review

AN ODYSSEY OF

HUMANITY AND NATURE

Musicians’ Initiative

Victoria Concert Hall

Wednesday (16 April 2025),

This review was published in The Straits Times on 19 April 2025 with the title "Musicians' Initiative pulls off breathtakingly ambitious programme".

The thread of over-achieving young orchestras in Singapore continues with Musicians’ Initiative, formerly known as The Young Musicians Foundation Orchestra, led by its dynamic London-based music director Alvin Arumugam. In a very ambitious programme, the performances exceeded all expectations, which should not even be a surprise these days.

Alvin Arumugam addresses the audience.

The evening began with the world premiere of London-based Chilean composer Anibal Vidal’s Thus Dreamt The Anthems, a 24-minute-long tone poem that dwelled on modern-day social consciousness in an ever-volatile environment. The work was a slow boil, opening quietly and mysteriously, like a nascent dawn with otherworldly sound effects, including string harmonics and offbeat instruments like wind machine, bowed musical saw and flexatone.

From the miasma emerged a series of human rights and revolutionary anthems from around the world. Fragments of We Shall Overcome and La Marseillaise wafted in and out, but pride of place went to the Chilean song The People United Will Not Be Defeated! by Sergio Ortega and Quilapayun, which was heard almost in its entirety.

Now well-known as the subject of piano variations by American Frederic Rzewski, it made more than a subliminal impact as the music slow marched onward to a shattering climax before eventually receding to silence. This is not a work for the impatient, but for spirits who refuse to be oppressed.

Composer Anibal Vidal receives the applause.

The loudest cheers were reserved for the soloist in Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor (Op.54), former child prodigy pianist Cynthia Goh, presently a partner at law firm Rajah and Tann Asia LLP which presented the concert. Despite diffident opening pages with a minor slip, she recovered very well to make music beyond mastering the mere accuracy of notes.

The first movement’s cadenza grew in confidence and stature, and her repartee with the orchestra in the next two movements was close to pin-point. How she surmounted the treacherously tricky syncopated dance of the finale was admirable, radiating an irrepressible joie de vivre to conclude the work. The romantic romp continued in her encore of Franz Liszt’s Liebestraum No.3.

The orchestra had a showcase of its own in Richard Strauss’ tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spake Zarathustra), completing the philosophical thematic arc to the concert. One does not need to understand Friedrich Nietzsche’s Superman theories to enjoy this work, which has one of classical music’s most iconic openings.

Vibrations of the rumbling low C from Yap Wai Hoong on the hall’s Klais organ could be felt as well as heard, as trumpets broke out its unforgettable impression of Sunrise. Even after that familiar fanfare, Arumugam and his forces made sure that the eight linked movements that followed were never less than absorbing.

While winds and brass were always alert and intensely involved, it was the strings that were the body and soul, expressing longings and passions within the movements. Concertmaster Gabriel Lee’s violin also embodied the echt spirit of the waltzing Tanzlied (dance-song), as the work wound from serious thought to the pure joy of existence itself. In a word, breathtaking.