TRAVERSING / Ding Yi Music Company / Review

 

TRAVERSING

Ding Yi Music Company

Victoria Concert Hall

Saturday (11 April 2026)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 13 April 2026 with the title "Eclectic programme allows musicians to shine in Ding Yi concert".

The title of Ding Yi Music Company’s first evening of its concert season had to do with eclecticism and transcending geographical and cultural boundaries. Led by its chief artistic mentor Tsung Yeh, who regularly helmed similar programmes with the Singapore Chinese Orchestra, the concert was greater than the sum of its parts.

Tsung Yeh is the Conductor Emeritus
of the Singapore Chinese Orchestra
Photo: Ding Yi Music Company

Opening was the world premiere of Su Xiao’s short tone poem Sing A Pura. Beginning quietly with an air of mystery, the dizi gently rose above the percussion’s rhythmic accompaniment. The lilting dance that came after summed up the Chinese composer’s impressions of the city-state – lively, urbane and somewhat exotic.

More substantial was New York-based Singaporean composer Koh Cheng Jin’s Tang - Moonlight Fragrance, a single-movement concerto for orchestra inspired by Tang poetry. Huang Hsu-Lei’s long and impassioned dizi solo set the mood of contemplation. The demanding obbligato piano part with Ning An initially began as part of the general ensemble but soon grew in stature as the work picked up in tempo and volume.

Replacing guzheng and yangqin for creating specific sound textures, the part also included scraping the insides of the Steinway grand. Its percussive effects and virtuoso figurations also fueled the ethnic dance as the music lurched to a vigorous and wild close.

Photo: Ding Yi Music Company

The most demanding solo of the evening was by Yvonne Tay, whose guzheng worked overtime in Tang Jian Ping’s concerto Goddess of the Luo River. In a variegated score of multiple scenes, she cast a spellbinding thrall, from the gentlest of plinks to sweeping swathes of sound that rose above the orchestral throng. She literally personified the work’s subject, a figure of feminine grace and fearless self-empowerment.

Photo: Ding Yi Music Company

After a first half which did not pander to popular tastes, the concert’s latter half was to be much lighter. Bohemian cellist-composer David Popper’s Hungarian Rhapsody Op.68, arranged by Jon Lin Chua, was the virtuoso vehicle for Ding Yi’s Uzbek cellist Bekhzod Oblayorov. If the music sounded familiar, that was because it used the same Magyar folk sources as a number of Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies. As with those florid piano fantasies, the cello was obliged to jump through many hoops for an enjoyable romp.

Eric Watson’s Celtic Knots, receiving its world premiere, was an engaging succession of Scottish, Irish and Welsh melodies. Given the modal nature of the songs, among them Suo Gan (heard in Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun), these translated very well for Chinese instrumental treatment. And one has not lived without hearing the suona imitating bagpipes or Londonderry Air played on pipa.

Photo: Ding Yi Music Company

Closing the evening was the 1950s Chinese Socialist-Realist and populist Youth Piano Concerto, concocted by a committee of composers including Liu Shikun, Sun Yilin, Huang Xiaofei and Pan Yiming. Ning An returned as the brilliant soloist in three movements influenced by Russians Dmitri Kabalevsky and Sergei Rachmaninov but with Chinese characteristics. It was so well received that its final four minutes had to be encored.

Photo: Ding Yi Music Company

ECONCERT / Ding Yi Music Company / Review

 

ECONCERT 

Ding Yi Music Company 

Esplanade Recital Music 

Wednesday (23 October 2024)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 25 October 2024 with the title "Eco-themed concert a wake-up call about waste".

Some of Ding Yi Music Company’s most interesting concerts over the years have focused on Singapore’s history and disappearing local culture, but more recently the ensemble has turned to highlighting environmental issues. 

The second of its ECOncerts, directed by resident conductor Dedric Wong De Li, was about the high toll exacted by the generation of waste. Stage-directed by Ang Xiao Ting, with music composed by Malaysian Yii Kah Hoe and Singaporean Avik Chari, the 75-minute concert was inspired by the documentary feature Wasted (www.wasted.film) by Eco-Business which highlighted a modern-day dilemma resulting from rampant consumerism. 

Much of the concert’s first third was devoted to accompanying film excerpts featuring vast vistas and mountains of garbage from rising Asian economies, including Vietnam, South Korea and India. “Nature creates no waste. Waste is a human invention” was the overriding message, and so was, “What we throw away doesn’t go away”. The music was dissonant, depicting a bleak landscape with ultimate despair being the foreseeable future. 

The chamber ensemble of Chinese instruments performed within an arts installation created by Alecia Neo, which include an amorphous pile of plastic flakes and fake rocks, and a barren tree in the foreground, a la Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot. The play of darkness and light, representing futility and hope, by lighting designer Liu Yong Huay also provided a suitable ambience for the action to take place. 

Some hard truths about recycling were presented, including the stark statistic that less than ten percent of waste discarded in recycle bins was actually recyclable. Depressing. The concert’s second third had no projected visuals, instead allowing more of the music to be better appreciated. 

In Nature’s Realm – Sounds Of Waste, Chin Yen Choong’s jinghu and Tan Yong Yaw’s yangqin was heard over a cacophonous counterpoint provided by rustling of bags and wrappings, banging of bottles and crushing of cups, all plastic, of course. 

Symbolism was also strong, with composer Yii emerging from within the audience to rake the plastic flakes, forming a Zen sand garden in the process, and playing tunes on the xiao (vertical flute, crafted from bamboo) before disappearing offstage. All this while accompanied by zhongruan and bowed strings, most likely a sign of regeneration. 

In Humans Produce Waste: Recycling Concerto came the concert’s much-awaited climax, with Bekhzod Oblayorov and Wong Wai Kit playing on a sustainable cello and zhongruan respectively. These instruments were created from recycled cardboard, designed by the team of Alvin Chea Hong Shen and Chea Wei Xian from Trio Packaging. While not quite as sonorous as originals of wood, these were obviously works in progress. 

As the score moved ever so gradually from discordance to concordance, from dark desolation to bright illumination, its denouement was an optimistic but guarded conclusion. As long as we pay heed to our environment and better manage our resources, the wake-up call provided by this thought-provoking concert should not go to waste.