BEYOND COLOURS / Yong Siew Toh Conservatory New Music Ensemble / Review

BEYOND COLOURS
Yong Siew Toh Conservatory 

New Music Ensemble
Esplanade Recital Studio
Saturday (7 April 2012)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 9 April 2012 with the title "Sprouting varied but polished sounds".

There has never been a better time for the performance of new music in Singapore. That is because of Esplanade’s ongoing Spectrum series and Yong Siew Toh Conservatory’s commitment to two concerts a year from its New Music Ensemble.

Further stature is gained when these concerts are conducted by bona fide gurus of contemporary music. The French conductor Diego Masson (left), a student of the great Pierre Boulez, is one of them.Under his guidance, the young Conservatory musicians performed an 80 minute programme that showed that new music was a heterogeneous and varied entity.

Student composer Xu Wei Wei’s X Virus had the honour of opening the concert, beginning with long held single notes from the double bass, and then organically building up through a growth of ideas. The idea of a virus replicating its own genetic material within a host cell leading to an implosion, represented by a violent climax, before dissipating into its original single notes is a plausible description of the music.

Three more conventional works followed. Colin Matthews' Two Tributes (1999) contrasted the dynamism and movement of Little Continuum (dedicated to Elliott Carter) with the slow, troubled cortege of Elegeia, written in memory of the late cellist Christopher van Kampen. In the latter, brass dominated while the sole cellist took his symbolic leave from the ensemble. Toshio Hosokawa’s Interim (1994) was a Zen-like study in static shifts. The instrumentation of strings, harp, flute, clarinet and percussion re-created the serene sound world favoured by Toru Takemitsu, Japan’s most famous composer.

It was a welcome re-encounter with Singaporean Ho Chee Kong’s Shades of Oil Lamps, commissioned by the Singapore Arts Festival in 2008 and premiered by London Sinfonietta and Masson. Over a spirited counterpoint of percussion (woodblock, gong and marimba), a Chinatown storyteller spins a tantalising yarn, regales and draws his audience in before abruptly leaving it hanging as he collects hand-outs. A marvellous piece of musical characterisation that will be often heard, one hopes.

The concert closed with Greek avant-gardist Iannis Xenakis’s Thalleïn (1984), a more than worthy bookend to mirror the opening work. Both worked on the premise of germination (Thalleïn means to “sprout” or “shoot forth”), but this one began with a loud crashing chord and expanded upon its waves of repercussions. Exuberant and wide-ranging in sound and dynamics, this was the most complex score, but one delivered with much brio and immediacy.

New music, performed with polish and professionalism, looks likely to stay.

Two World Premieres by Two Singaporean Composers

TAN CHAN BOON Cherish
HO CHEE KONG Shades of Oil Lamps
Singapore Festival Orchestra 

(14 June 2008)
London Sinfonietta (21 June 2008)
Esplanade Concert Hall

Two Singaporean composers received world premieres of their commissioned orchestral works at this year’s Singapore Arts Festival.

Tan Chan Boon, 43, who teaches musical theory and composition privately, already has four full-length symphonies under his belt. None of these have been performed in their entirety in Singapore. Cherish, an 8-minute “prelude for orchestra” with an ecological message, gave a short glimpse of the enormity of his symphonic visions and cathedral-like sonorities.

Moved by mankind’s desecration of Gaia, the music opened quietly with a low heaving Wagnerian groan accompanied by eerie string glissandi. A trombone chorale perforating the calm suggested the spiritual and quasi-Oriental sound world of Armenian-American composer Alan Hovhaness. The conflict of man and Nature brought up the decibel factor briefly but resolution was to be found in a broad lingering melody which dominated the work’s latter half, reminding this listener of the Afro-American spiritual Deep River.

Tan’s Cherish isn’t just a symphonic slow movement, but a microcosm of a possible fifth symphony. The Singapore Festival Orchestra, led by Chan Tze Law, was ever sensitive to the music’s nuances and dynamics, delivering a very satisfying reading that makes one want to hear much more of Tan’s music.

Shades of Oil Lamps by Ho Chee Kong, 45, composition professor at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory, was scored for just nine musicians. Its subject is a 1960s and 70s itinerant roadside story-teller who keeps his audience entranced with his spun yarns. Ho’s music is similarly captivating with its transparency of scoring, piquant instrumental colour and sheer dynamism. Beginning with the “tick-tock” of the temple block and a sinuous flute solo that begins the tale, familiar and well-loved aromas begin to fill the senses.

Members of the London Sinfonietta conducted by veteran avant-gardist Diego Masson, all virtuoso soloists in their own right, performed one to a part. Their mastery of individual lines and as an ensemble was impeccable, delivering a performance that could scarcely be bettered. An unmistakable Oriental feel, with its scales and modes, permeated the work, which took flight into a land of fantasy and imaginary personages before its abrupt ending. Like the afore-mentioned story-teller (and Scheherazade, folklore’s most famous) who leaves his listeners dangling at the climax, one is left yearning for more.

Credit goes to National Arts Council for commissioning these memorable works, which amply demonstrate the fertile imagination of Singapore composers, mastery of their art and a burning desire to communicate. Bravissimo!