pianomania: THE PLANETS. RITE OF SPRING / Orchestra of the Music Makers / Review

THE PLANETS. RITE OF SPRING

Orchestra of the Music Makers

Esplanade Concert Hall

Friday (11 July 2025)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 14 July 2025 with the title "OMM raises roof with Holst and Stravinsky".

When it comes to orchestral blockbusters, it is hard to beat the Orchestra of the Music Makers (OMM). The Singapore Symphony plays monumental works too, but these are spread over the course of a full year. OMM has just four to five concerts annually, thus offering super-sized meals to digest at each sitting. From past experiences with works by Gustav Mahler, Richard Wagner and Leonard Bernstein, local listeners have been totally up for it.

Photo: Yong Junyi

Its latest concert, led by American conductor by Tito Munoz, recent music director of the Phoenix Symphony Orchestra (Arizona), featured two great and influential classics of the early 20th century. English composer Gustav Holst’s The Planets (1917), which has greatly impacted modern movie scores, opened the show.

There is hardly music as loud as its opening movement, Mars The Bringer of War, hammered home with a vehemence which defined the rest of the evening. Venus The Bringer of Peace and Saturn The Bringer of Old Age showed the orchestra equally adept in slower and less blustery music, bringing out instrumental detail before building up to concentrated climaxes.

Photo: Yong Junyi

Mercury The Winged Messenger revelled in quicksilver playing, highlighting high registers of silky strings, celesta and a pair of harps. Uranus The Magician had a spirit of jocularity, musical sorcery at its most canny. The suite’s most famous movement, Jupiter The Bringer of Jollity, with its grandstanding central hymn later set to I Vow To Thee, My Country, was milked for all its worth.

Photo: Yong Junyi

The most moving moments came in the still and quiet finale, Neptune The Mystic, a nebulous depiction of cosmic dust giving way to the offstage siren call from the 42 women of the Voices of Singapore Ladies Choir (Darius Lim, Chorusmaster). It was hauntingly ethereal, raising many a goosebump before wafting into the nether reaches

Earth was not one of Holst’s celestial bodies, but the subject of Russian composer Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913), which occupied the concert’s second half. Also conducted from memory and without baton by Munoz, this was arguably the better of two superb performances, as the orchestra had more than warmed up.

Photo: Yong Junyi

Guo Siping’s excellent bassoon solo clung on thin air for what seemed like an eternity, before woodwinds and brass jostled for dominance in the introduction of Adoration of the Earth. Pizzicato strings entered and ushered in the infamous pounding rhythm of Augurs of Spring, beginning of the mayhem which brought on the riotous fisticuffs at its Paris premiere.

Photo: Yong Junyi

Admiration arises when one peruses the score and learn how technically and rhythmically complex the score is, and to see and hear over a hundred musicians with their thorny individual parts and rise with fearless abandon to the challenge together.

To nitpick for rough spots in a performance of a work that is classical music’s greatest rough spot is plain futile. To witness The Sacrificial Dance, of the chosen one in throes of terminal convulsions, is to experience the most thrilling of musical rides. OMM has done it again.