CHASING LIGHT: DING YI X DICK LEE 70 / Ding Yi Music Company / Review

CHASING LIGHT

DING YI  X  DICK LEE 70

Ding Yi Music Company

Esplanade Concert Hall

Saturday (26 July 2026)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 28 July 2026 with the title "Ding Yi celebrates Dick Lee's wide-ranging musical legacy in birthday tribute".

National Day is around the corner, and one is guaranteed to hear more than a few performances of Home (1998) in its various versions. However, did one know that its composer singer-songwriter Dick Lee wrote far more than that, besides his iconic musicals in English, Beauty World (1988), Fried Rice Paradise (1991) and Forbidden City (2002)?

This special concert by Ding Yi Music Company conducted by Dedric Wong celebrated Lee’s 70th birthday with a programme wholly dedicated to his songs in Cantonese and Mandarin. Many of these do not even have English titles. Arrangements for Chinese instrumental ensemble by eight composers from Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong and China were songs “reimagined”, and have never been previously heard by Lee himself.

Photo: Ding Yi Music Company

Concert director Jet Ho’s conception of the evening was a chronological one, built around a sequence of filmed interviews with Lee, detailing a life story when he began writing songs in Chinese. His 1990 relocation to Japan was pivotal, as he was soon ushered into the world of Hong Kong Cantopop by Sandy Lam. He was introduced to the “Four Heavenly Kings” - Jacky Cheung, Andy Lau, Aaron Kwok and Leon Lai – and he composed songs for all of them.

Dick Lee with Sandy Lam, 1991

Attended by a full-house of mostly the boomer demographic, this was more than an evening of nostalgia. It was a journey through the “Golden Age of Cantopop”, before the British colony’s handover to mainland China, and viewing the genre through new lenses.

Jessie Yeong & Skye Sirena
Photo: Ding Yi Music Company

The concert was fronted by four singers, Jessie Yeong (from Malaysia), Lennerd Lim (Malaysia), Skye Sirena (Singapore), Wysom Wong (Singapore), each bringing their own style to the songs. Yeong exuded sensuality in songs sang by Sandy Lam, Dawn and Ye Hua (Night Flower). Skye shined in Anita Mui’s slow ballad Ru Yue (Like Night) and Kit Chan’s Den Le You Den (Still Waiting).

Lennerd Lim & Wysom Wong
Photo: Ding Yi Music Company

Lim exuded “pretty boy” vibes as he roused the audience in Jeff Chang’s Mandopop Duo Xiang (Longing). It was Wong’s crooning and more leisurely manner in Andy Lau’s Jue Dui Zhai Hu Ni (Absolutely Care For You), however, that gained the most traction. Together, the two men courted and rocked the house in Love Is Cha Cha Cha.

Photo: Ding Yi Music Company

Besides accompanying, there were ample opportunities for Ding Yi’s musicians to shine as soloists. In Tracy Huang’s Everything I Know, Koh Yu Jie (erhu) and Yvonne Tay (guzheng) stole the show with purely instrumentals, while Lyu Sih-Ying’s dizi was always on hand to lend soloistic colour to the songs.

Photo: Ding Yi Music Company

After the Snow.Wolf.Lake Medley, it was the man of the hour Dick Lee himself who came forward to sing and tickle the ivories, In Jacky Cheung’s Love Is Eternal and Leslie Cheung’s Zhui (Chase), he exhibited a voice still in full fettle and an irrepressible presence. An encore of the ubiquitous Home, sung by all the singers and the audience, closed the evening on a nationalistic high.

Dick Lee is Singapore’s Paul McCartney, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Elton John all rolled into one.

Photos: Ding Yi Music Company

Happy Three Score and Ten,
Dick Lee!

SING60: VOICES OF THE NATIONAL GALA CONCERT / Voices of Singapore / Review

 

SING60: VOICES OF A NATION 

GALA CONCERT

Voices of Singapore

Esplanade Concert Hall

Wednesday (8 October 2025)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 10 October 2025 with the title "Voices of Singapore celebrates sixth anniversary with pleasurable concert".

There is no vehicle of musical expression as personal as one’s voice, and music-making becomes pleasure multiplied manifold when people sing together. That is the credo of Voices of Singapore (VOS), the nation’s largest singing organisation, with more than 2000 members in 30 separate choirs.

VOS, founded by choral conductor and composer Darius Lim, celebrated its 6th anniversary with an enjoyable mega-concert showcasing over 400 voices led by nine different choral conductors. While diversity, equity and inclusivity (DEI) has become divisive in certain nations, these are the very qualities that hold Singapore together, evident by variety of musical items on show.

The evening kicked off with VOS Children’s Choir (led by Lim Jing Xuan) singing Liong Kit Yeng’s Little Red Dot, a fun piece that recounted what makes Singapore unique – local food and the MRT. Nostalgia reigned when VOS Ladies Choir (Stephenie Lee) with Jeremy Wong on pipa took on a Mandarin medley of Xinyao by Liang Wern Fook, Tan Kian Chin and Bok Sek Ying, Shi Shui Chang Liu (细水长流) and Xiao Ren Wu De Xin Sheng (小人物的心声), songs which ruled the waves during the 1980s.

School children of a certain age will remember the Malay words to Zubir Said’s Semoga Bahagia, but with VOS City Chorus (Chong Wai Lun) and soloist Syakirah Noble, the unusually harmonised song took on jazzy vibes that were unthinkable years ago. Similarly, Malay song Dayung Sampan sung by VOS Men (Justin Goh) and accompanied by Artusik Multiethnic Ensemble had an unexpected martial edge. These fresh twists brought a new gloss to these old favourites.

Arguably the evening’s most entertaining item was the VOS Youth Choir (Vicknesvari Vadivalagan) and soloist Thirupurasundari S in Tamil songs Munnaeru Vaalibaa and Balleilakka. Backed by the Singapore Indian Orchestra and Choir, and three sari-clad dancers, this came close to a full-blown Kollywood scene at its most melodramatic. VOS Children’s Choir returned in Darius Lim’s Dragon Dance of Shang, a song with a strong film music feel accompanied by projected cartoon animations.

The second half, accompanied by SING60 Band, featured all of VOS’s community choirs, including VOS Starlight Voices (Tham Pei Wen) featuring special needs children in Lim’s touching Our Story. VOS Silver Voices (Sean Foo) rolled back the decades with Chen Gexin’s Rose, Rose I Love You while the unauditioned VOS Chorus of the People (Lim) were empowered by the words of The Power of the Dream and We Will Get There. Purely a cappella was Eric Whitacre’s Sleep, beautifully sung by VOS State Choirs (Lim) while chilling by the glow of candlelight.

There was also an audience sing-along led by Voices of COMO Lifestyle Group, National Kidney Foundation and Coronation Singers (Gerald Tan) in If We Hold On Together, You Raise Me Up and Dancing Queen.

For the grand finale, all the VOS Choirs came together for what must be Singapore’s second national anthem: Home. The biggest surprise was the unscripted appearance by the man himself, Dick Lee in the flesh, singing his perennial classic. The abiding take-home of the evening: a people that sings together stays together.

A FOLKLORIC JOURNEY: MELODIES OF THE HOMELAND / Donald Law, Gabriel Lee & Zoi Yeh / Review

 

A FOLKLORIC JOURNEY: 

MELODIES OF THE HOMELAND 

Gabriel Lee (Violin) 

Zoi Yeh (Cello) & 

Donald Law (Piano) 

Esplanade Recital Studio 

Thursday (31 October 2024)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 4 November 2024 with the title "Chamber concert an enjoyable study of musical nationalism".

The idea of home and homesickness in music mostly came about during the Romantic era, largely due to composers traveling away from their lands of birth and the rise of nationalism. This chamber concert was an enjoyable study of musical nationalism and how composers poured their hearts out when reminded of their origins. 

The evening opened with pianist Donald Law performing Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Dumka (Op.59) for solo piano. While he was considered too Western in style and taste by the “Mighty Handful” of Russian nationalist composers, Tchaikovsky nevertheless carved out a virtuoso showpiece from its brooding subject (Dumka comes from the Ukrainian word duma, which is a “lament”). 

Law coped well with its series of short variations and mastered its dizzying cadenza with aplomb, with its brusque concluding C minor chords echoed in the next work, Taiwanese composer Tyzen Hsiao’s Capriccio In Hakka Melody. Taiwanese cellist Zoi Tzu-Jou Yeh, who is Hakka herself, recalled hearing this tune being sung in market places during her youth. Like the earlier Tchaikovsky, its heart-rending melody, performed with much warmth and feeling, evoked genuine nostalgia. 

For solo cello was young London-based Singaporean composer Toh Yen Ee’s Ode To The Sun (2022), inspired by a painting (of the same title) and violin work (Kuang Xiang Qu) by Cultural Medallion recipient Kam Kee Yong. Its all-too-short depiction of sunrise, midday and sunset received a luminous reading from Yeh. 

Violinist Gabriel Lee accounted for two popular violin works, opening with the second piece from Bohemian composer Bedrich Smetana’s From The Homeland. Alternating between G minor and major keys, its Slavonic dance rhythms found sympathetic advocates in Lee and Law, who completed the concert’s first half with Hungarian composer Bela Bartok’s Romanian Folkdances. In the third dance (Pe Loc or On The Spot), Lee eschewed its stratospheric harmonics for an earthier sound more closely resembling Romanian gypsy fiddling. 

The concert’s major work was Smetana’s Piano Trio in G minor (Op.15), which occupied the whole second half. If one found the first half a tad polite and restrained, all three musicians went for broke in this passionate work which hit the evening’s highest points. Huge fortissimo chords on the piano were balanced by the cello’s rich expressiveness and violin’s virtuosic turns of phrase. 

The central movement delighted in syncopations and the quaint folksiness found in ethnic dances, while the finale’s rapid fire was guaranteed to send pulses racing. Smetana still had one big tune up his sleeve, which was first lovingly heard on cello, and finally milked for all its worth for a spectacular close. 

As an encore, the trio performed what could now be considered a Singaporean folksong - Dick Lee’s Home. Arranged in G major by Sulwyn Lok, any fuzzy and warm feelings engendered should not be considered embarrassing. It just means one is a dyed-in-the-wool local!