2ND PERFORMER'S VOICE SYMPOSIUM: Lee Pei Ming on George Crumb / The Spiritual Journey of John Sharpley

 

LEE PEI MING ON GEORGE CRUMB

Sunday afternoon was the only day I could attend any of the sessions at the 2nd Performer's Voice Symposium, I did so as some of the talks were given by my musical fraternity friends or about their lives, and also for my own curiosity. Lee Pei Ming, who lectures at the Conservatory, is one of two Singaporeans who perform the music of American composer George Crumb (born 1929). The other one is, of course, Margaret Leng Tan. She had given the Singapore premiere of Crumb's Eine Kleine Mitternachtmusik (A Little Midnight Music) in 2006 at the Singapore International Piano Festival. From my memory, it was a very absorbing performance as she had worked on the work with the composer himself, besides being a virtuosic pianist herself. In this session, she talked about Crumb, the work and some performance aspects.

The first page of A Little Midnight Music.

Although the work did not require a prepared piano, Pei Ming still needed to strum, scratch and strike the insides of the piano for the required sound effects.

The work is a meditation on Thelonious Monk's 'Round Midnight, and included quotes from Debussy, Wagner and Richard Strauss. She demonstrated some of these with the help of Thomas Hecht, who depressed the lower keys for her.

THE SPIRITUAL JOURNEY OF JOHN SHARPLEY

The second talk I attended was given by Texas-born pianist Elyane Lassaude, now based in Australia, who spoke on the life and works of the American-Singaporean composer-pianist cum educator John Sharpley. She and John had known each other since young, and she had keenly followed his illustrious composing career over the years and was touched by the spirituality of his music. John is a renaissance man among musicians, and his music reflects his wide knowledge and experience of philosophy, literature and Asian cultures and religions. Yet he retains a quintessential American aesthete and all-encompassing outlook in his output. A number of pivotal works were cited, excerpts of which were heard. As it was impossible to have covered everything within 45 minutes, perhaps a separate symposium be held to discuss his music in greater detail sometime in the future. 

People who attended included students, teachers, performers, composers and writers.  

To round up the session, Elyane Laussade performed John Sharpley's Singapore Blues, a work reminiscent of Copland and Barber, but with a Malay-flavoured twist towards the end.

Hearty cheers from the composer (extreme left) himself.

BEETHOVEN PIANO CONCERTO NO.4 / Orchestra of the Music Makers / Review

BEETHOVEN PIANO CONCERTO NO.4

Orchestra of the Music Makers

Yong Siew Toh Conservatory

Sunday (28 October 2012)

 

This review was published in The Straits Times on 30 October 2012 with the title "An enjoyable musical experiment".

It all started with the idea of an experiment; a young orchestra working with an experienced professor and concert pianist in a repertoire work in which the novice players had never previously encountered. With only one prior rehearsal, and one public discussion in front of symposium delegates, a concert performance of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto was ready to go.

All this suggests sure-fire recipes of an impending disaster, but reality was kinder. Before the performance began, the Queensland-based piano pedagogue Stephen Emmerson briefly elucidated on the interpretation of the work’s second movement. Although it is Beethoven’s shortest concerto movement, it is also his most evocative.

 

The stark music was a representation of Orpheus taming the Furies on his passage to the Underworld, with singing that soothed the wounded breast. It was with this notion in mind that instructed the concerto’s opening bars, unusually played by solo piano. Emmerson entered with a rolled G major chord, a liberty taken that seems to replicate notes played on a lyre, and his brief solo was taken at a deliberate and leisurely pace.

Then the strings quietly registered in a remote B major, possibly one of Beethoven’s boldest and most inspired gambits. This sense of apparent disorientation catches the ear, but soon the orchestra settled comfortably into what is regarded his interpretatively most challenging concerto.

Unlike the Third or Fifth Concertos, the Fourth has a relatively un-showy piano part that is so well integrated with the orchestra and doubly difficult to pull off. In places, Emmerson struggled and stumbled, but the pace of the work never faltered, the orchestra expertly kept on track by conductor Chan Tze Law’s direction.

 

Comparisons will be made with The Philharmonic Orchestra’s recent Beethoven cycle, and it has to be said that Lim Yan’s technique was far more secure than this rough and ready account. Like Lim, Emmerson played his own very well written cadenzas for the outer movements. The first movement cadenza worked on decorative figures and subsidiary themes idiomatically while the finale’s was brief, cogent and attention grabbing.

Remarkable also was the seating arrangement, which had the pianist facing both conductor and audience, and surrounded by woodwinds. Given one or two to a part, the winds were in effect secondary soloists, and were accorded that distinction. They acquitted themselves well, contributing to the overall successes of the performance.

Admission was free to this Performer’s Voice Symposium concert, but the audience was in no way made to feel like guinea pigs in this musical trial. They, this listener and the young musicians mostly enjoyed themselves, suffering no side effects along the way.   

 

THE PERFORMER'S VOICE / COLIN CURRIE (Percussion) and JOE BURGSTALLER (trumpet) / Review

THE PERFORMER’S VOICE

Colin Currie (Percussion)

Joe Burgstaller (Trumpet)

Yong Siew Toh Conservatory

Saturday (27 October 2012)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 29 October 2012 with the title "Pitch-perfect percussions".

The Second Performer’s Voice Symposium at the Conservatory has sprung forth some unusual concerts and this evening’s tandem of percussion and trumpet recitals was the most wide-ranging of all. The Scotsman Colin Currie is possibly the world’s most famous solo percussionist after his compatriot Scotswoman Dame Evelyn Glennie, and is no less prodigious.

Given that percussion is history’s oldest group of musical instruments, its sound is universal and the first three works in Currie’s recital – by Elliott Carter (USA), Per Norgard (Denmark) and Toshio Hosokawa (Japan) – seemed to coalesce as one. Beginning with the mellow marimba, he soon worked his way to the brighter vibraphone and a bewildering array of unpitched percussion awaited.

His rapid-fire responses on the mallets made for an acrobatic display of adroitness which built up to massive crescendo. Returning to the marimba for Hosokawa’s Reminiscences, the low registers droned and rumbled, and one sitting close enough would have experienced the vibrations in harmony with its reassuring tones.  

Currie closed with British composer Dave Maric’s Trilogy, an eclectic three-part work of disparate inspirations with sampled percussion and amplification augmenting the live performance. The second movement Pelogy skilfully employed the Javanese pelog scale without actually sounding like a gamelan, while the eccentric minimalistic beat of Tamboo rounded off an exhilarating display of all-round virtuosity.

American trumpeter Joe Burgstaller helmed the second recital, and opened with Rafael Mendez’s arrangement of Monterde’s Virgin of the Macarena, a stunning showpiece where the technique of circular breathing to maintain implausibly long passages was employed. A former member of the legendary Canadian Brass, he relived its trademark humour as he played and spoke.

For Astor Piazzolla’s tango Oblivion, he was joined by a brass quartet formed by members from the Singapore Symphony and Malaysian Philharmonic. For once, this popular number rang out with an elegiac quality as it should, much like the Afro-American spiritual Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child, which soulfully sang the blues.

A highlight was the World Premiere (above) of Malaysian-American composer Su Lian Tan’s Ming, an evocation of Chinese brush-painted landscapes, its placid waters, gnarled trees, rugged mountains and soaring birds. Partnered by pianist Low Shao Suan, this atmospheric score ambled from impressionistic half-lights to a Messiaen-like timeless calm. Burgstaller’s part used the mute liberally, to tamper the bluesy timbre before going full voice on a song.  

For sheer variety, a Vivaldi-Bach concerto, Duke Ellington’s Echoes of Harlem and an encore where the audience provided a drone (surprisingly in tune!) to Burgstaller’s soliloquy completed the evening’s fine entertainment. 

THE MUSIC OF PICTURES / SCARLATTI-CAGE / T'ang Quartet and Melvyn Tan / Review

THE MUSIC OF PICTURES / SCARLATTI-CAGE

T’ang Quartet / Melvyn Tan

2^nd Performer’s Voice Symposium

Yong Siew Toh Conservatory

Friday (26 October 2012)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 29 October 2012 with the title "Music with Picasso's beady eyes gazing from behind". [Seriously, I do not know who comes up with such ridiculous titles to these reviews. Certainly it wasn't me.]

Concerts and recitals are part and parcel of the Performer’s Voice Symposium, organised by the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory, which delves into various perspectives of a musician and performer’s art of expression. Quite academically and prosaically, these have been referred to as Plenary Performances, but that did not prevent a fairly large turnout to witness two separate recitals by the T’ang Quartet and pianist Melvyn Tan.

The T’angs are no strangers to contemporary music and inter-disciplinary collaborations. Projected images of Pablo Picasso paintings accompanied the quartet’s performance of living American composer Ned Rorem’s Fourth String Quartet (1994). Comprising ten short movements, each dwelled on the iconic Spanish artist’s pictures, from driving ostinatos (Minotaur), tender cantabiles (Child Holding A Dove), to fast fleeting arabesques (Three Nudes).

OK, so Picasso has those beady eyes. And so what?

Their playing, incisive and vividly projected as always, would have characterised each piece sufficiently well, but the added visual dimension helped cement the multiple stimuli to the senses. For example, in the movement titled Self Portrait, Leslie Tan’s declamatory cello solo – intense yet inward-looking – took on a harder edge with Picasso’s beady eyes peering on from behind.

The quartet then played Baudime Jam’s contemporary accompaniment to the Buster Keaton 1921 silent movie The Haunted House, a slapstick comedy that had the audience mostly in stitches. The music was suitably light-hearted, played in sync throughout, with occasional in-jokes like the quote from Chopin’s Funeral March for the scene with men dressed as skeletons.

The specifications of John Cage's prepared piano for his Sonatas and Interludes.

After the interval, Melvyn Tan took to the stage with an unusual juxtaposition of Domenico Scarlatti and John Cage Sonatas. Although Scarlatti’s sonatas were originally written for the harpsichord, the piano with its sustaining pedal rendered each with a bell-like resonance and a whole plethora of new sonic textures. Tan was also unabashed in making them sound romantic and modern.

The 16 Sonatas and 4 Interludes (1946-48) by Cage were inspired by the East and scored for the prepared piano, a normal grand piano augmented with screws, wedges, plastic sheets and rubber erasers inserted between strings to transform the timbres completely. The result was a gamelan-like percussive sonority redolent of bells, gongs and drums in addition to the piano’s original sound.

Barely rising beyond pianissimo, Tan’s command of the keyboard, now a one-man-band, was a tour de force of control and restraint. Each sonata took on a life of its own, rhythmic and hypnotic in part, but always absorbing. Sonatas XIV and XV were choreographed with a balletic grace, every ping and thud from the instrument registering like dance-steps in forward motion. All that was missing were the ballerinas. The applause was long and sustained. The late John Cage, born exactly 100 years ago, must be smiling somewhere.

The insides of a prepared piano. Note the screws, rubber wedges, plastic sheets and an eraser (extreme right)!