DING YI CHINESE CHAMBER MUSIC FESTIVAL 2024 / Review

 

DING YI CHINESE CHAMBER 

MUSIC FESTIVAL 2024 

Esplanade Recital Studio 

Friday & Saturday 

(13 & 14 December 2024)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 16 December 2024 with the title "A feast of traditional and avantgarde music".

One of Singapore’s best-kept musical secrets is the biennial Ding Yi Chinese Chamber Music Festival, bringing together Chinese chamber ensembles from the Asia-Pacific and the homegrown Ding Yi Music Company. Three evenings of concerts are a showcase of ensemble music more diverse than the sonatas, trios, quartets and quintets that commonly define Western chamber music. 

The first evening opened with the senior citizens of Singapore Teochew Ensemble playing traditional tunes Lamps in Thousand Homes and Reminiscence in basic unison heterophony. This is the recreational music often heard in events like weddings and communal ceremonies. 

More sophisticated were Ding Yi Music Company’s presentations, a slick huqin quartet in Yao Min’s Picking Red Water Chestnuts and a full ensemble in Zhou Jiaying’s Twinkling of Bonfire Night conducted by Dedric Wong. The latter was impressionist in colour, with a quiet introduction developing into a swift celebratory dance complete with rhythmic foot-stamping. 

There were a couple of cheesy pieces using
Western instruments including one work with a
title sounding like Angry Horse Shaking Its Balls.

Windpipe Chinese Music Ensemble (Hong Kong) was the Festival’s first invited guest, impressing with Cantonese melodies, old and new. Whether playing in unison heterophony in Yan Laolie’s United We Go, Luk Wai Chung’s Lan Kwai Tang Fong and Drunken Lady Yang at Pavilion of Hundred Flowers, or the more contemporary pop-inspired approach taken in Cantonese Medley (arranged by Wang Chenwei), the virtuosity in fast numbers was clearly evident. 

Both Ding Yi and Windpipe were united for two concertante works. Xu Qiwei’s New Rendition of Early Cantonese Music conducted by Szeto Kin featured five Hong Kong soloists which performed adroitly as a concertino group, while Wang Jianmin’s The Charm of Tianshan Mountain conducted by Festival Director Yeh Tsung had Festival Artist erhu soloist Yang Xue do the honours in a spectacular concerto with exotic Central Asian influences. 

Music of a far more intimate kind featured on the second evening, from the awkwardly named “Bows and Strings’ Dance” Erhu (Huqin) Ensemble (Beijing) comprising four members, Yang Xue and three young students. Liu Tianhua’s Nocturnal Peace was an erhu duet, displaying a similar polyphony encountered in Bela Bartok’s Duos for two violins. 

Chen Yunyun’s more sentimental Red Velvet saw two erhus (Yang and Feng Xiao) accompanied by Ding Yi’s Tan Jie Qing on yangqin. Yang’s own Play for two erhus and zhonghu was a playful showcase of rapid fire virtuosity, as was the Brazilian Zequinha Abreu’s Tico Tico No Fuba in a faithful and delightfully polyphonic arrangement by Rui Xue. 

The ensemble as a full quartet presented more substantial fare in Ho Chee Kong’s Whispers of Spring, an impressionist fantasy with a pastoral feel, distinguished by drone effects and Yang’s superb gaohu solo. Li Bo Chan’s modernistic Bows and Strings, named after the group, was a series of songs and dances, that vividly exploited all kinds of instrumental possibilities. 

Nothing could be more different when C-Camerata (Taipei), a mixed ensemble comprising Chinese and Western instruments conducted by Chen Tai-chi, took to the stage. Atonality does not respect the countenance of instruments, only their timbral potentials. 

Chian Yi-cheng’s Tok for six players belonged to the “ping qualified by a thud” aesthetic where extended techniques were applied to instruments, including prepared piano, a metal rod placed between a violin’s strings, blowing directly on the pipes of a sheng, and a most unsettling rattling sound produced by a guzheng. 

Tung Chao-ming’s Behind The Sounds III with added percussion and dizi was similarly explorative and experimental, necessitating vocalisations from the players. American composer Oren Boneh’s Sprout completed this avantgarde showcase, beginning with a palpable beat from Kuo Jing-mu’s guzheng, then progressing into a relentless ostinato crescendo reminiscent of the violence of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. It made for a deafening cacophony that will clear the sinuses.

HOMETOWN COMPANIONS. CONTEMPORARY VOICES / Ding Yi Music Company / Review

 

HOMETOWN COMPANIONS -

CONTEMPORARY VOICES

Ding Yi Music Company

Esplanade Recital Studio

Thursday (15 December 2022)

 

One of the highlights of the Chinese music calendar is the annual three-day Chinese Chamber Music Festival organised by Ding Yi Music Company, which usually showcases Chinese instrumental groups from the Asia-Pacific region. This year’s offerings were scaled down because of the Covid pandemic, but the trade-off was a chance to feature more local groups. The first evening of the festival did just that by involving musicians from three homegrown ensembles, namely the Singapore National Youth Chinese Orchestra (SNYCO), The Purple Symphony and Ding Yi Music Company itself.

 

The impressive concert opened with eight musicians from SNYCO with Ding Yi composer-in-residence Phang Kok Jun’s Storytellers on Ann Siang Road. The original version of this fusion piece scored erhu and bansuri (Indian flute) as soloists in a duel of two Asian cultures. This evening’s performance had instead two erhus playing within the ensemble, and while the Indian element was attenuated, the end result was no less lively.

 

Jiang Ying’s Dunhuang featured nine musicians, with solo dizi in lead role. The Xinjiang-inspired rhapsody, as expected, had a Central Asian flavour which worked itself from a slow plaint to a rigourous fast dance. Another colourful number, Li Bo Chun’s Tea Horse (Cha Ma) also occupied the fast lane, its dynamics portraying trains of tireless stallions plying ancient tea-trading routes.   

 

The Purple Symphony is purportedly Singapore’s largest and most inclusive musical ensemble, with members numbering into the hundreds. The acceptance of special needs, differently-abled and neuro-atypical individuals within its ranks makes this group all the more special as no concessions needed to be made for its performances. 22 players appeared from young local composer Sulwyn Lok’s Neo / Pipa Voices, a very engaging arrangement of film themes with a distinctly popular orientation. Its serene and sentimental opening featured a dizi solo before the entry of the titular pipa.

 

Phang Kok Jun’s symphonic poem Frosted Bridge (Jie Shuang Qiao) about the now-defunct Sungai Road flea market (popularly known as Thieves’ Market) was conducted by Ding Yi music director Quek Ling Kiong. This work needed a conductor as its opening chords and impressionist textures were difficult to bring out without a leader. The ensemble persevered nonetheless, with a sheng solo being the highlight before the raucous sound effects with mini-tambourines and shaken plastic nettings taking over. Despite the tendency for percussion to dominate, the work drew to a quiet close.

 

The combined ensemble of both groups joined by Ding Yi Music Company’s soloists numbered well over thirty players. Together, the orchestra (pushing the limits of a chamber group to breaking point) performed well-known Chinese composer Wang Dan Hong’s Heavenly Grassland and Zhang Yi Ma’s Delight. The former saw lovely dizi and erhu solos before erupting into an exuberant dance with much drumming and tambourine-slapping. The latter was a light-hearted, easy-going tune with the quality of a folk ballad.

 

Judging by the many happy faces among the players, and the encouragement given by conductor Quek and the audience, this was 75-minutes of feel good music well spent. Simply put, Ding Yi has enabled community music-making at its most sincere and heart-rending. Long may this continue.

All photographs by courtesy of 

Ding Yi Music Company.

DING YI CHINESE CHAMBER MUSIC FESTIVAL / Ding Yi Music Company et al / Review

DING YI CHINESE CHAMBER 
MUSIC FESTIVAL 2019
3peoplemusic / Tang Family Music Ensemble
Ding Yi Music Company
Esplanade Recital Studio
Saturday & Sunday 
(14 & 15 September 2019)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 17 September 2019 with the title "A great variety of Chinese chamber music".

Trust Ding Yi Music Company to preach the gospel of Chinese instrumental music by organising its own international chamber music festival. Now in its fourth edition, the Ding Yi Chamber Music Festival 2019 ran over three days, featuring ensembles from Canada, Taiwan and China.

The second and third evenings showcased two very different groups, confirming that traditional Chinese chamber music is more heterogeneous than one imagined. 3Peoplemusic, a Taiwanese trio of Jen Chung (dizi), Kuo Min-chin (guzheng) and Pan I-tung (zhongruan), performed original compositions and arrangements that had a popular and upbeat feel.

Dizi and xiao carried carried the melodic interest, with guzheng and zhongruan providing accompaniment and counter-melodies. The strummed ruan oftrn simulated a guitar’s rhythmic and percussive thrust. In Luxury and Dissipation, a sense of improvisation presided over a ground bass that relived happy revelry on Chinese new year’s eve.  

Popular melodies like Molihua and Jackdaws Playing In The Water were woven into the fabric of Chung’s Slowly Rowing On Jasmine Waves and Kuo’s Three Ducks Communing. The most modern piece was Pan’s Ink Immersion, where each instrument posed as actors in a play with soliloquys of their own.

Three members of Ding Yi Music Company and conductor Quek Ling Kiong joined the threesome in Chua Jon Lin’s Flowers, a brief work stringing together motifs from 15 flower-inspired songs into a garland. 3peoplemusic’s encore was Taiwanese hit Tian Hei Hei (Dark Sky), styled in its own inimitable way.  

The festival was rounded up by Shanghai’s Tang Family Music Ensemble. With a performing tradition spanning eight generations, its seven members included four siblings in their seventies and eighties. Jiangnan shizhu (silk and bamboo music), involving bowed and plucked strings (silk) and blown dizi and sheng (bamboo), was their speciality.

There is much satisfaction to be had in heterophony, with different instruments playing in unison but coloured by distinct timbres. In the traditional Fan Wan Gong and Auspicious Cloud, melodic lines stood out with clarity and vividness. In two pieces based on the classic Old Six Beats, an upping in tempo also meant more elaborate ornamentations.

Elder spokesperson of the Tang clan, Tang Liang Xing brought out a surfeit of emotions on his pipa in Thinking Of An Old Friend and Drunk. In concertante works, sheng soloist Weng Zhen Fa waxed lyrical in Yan Haideng’s Tunes Of Shanxi Opera, while dizi soloist Zhan Yong Ming was joined by his student Ng Hsien Han in the double concerto Winds Of Affinity by Wang Chenwei. These were accompanied by Ding Yi’s ensemble conducted by Quek Ling Kiong.     

Two of Jiangnan’s most famous melodies, Xing Jie (Walking The Street) and Huan Le Ge (Song Of Joy) closed the colourful evening. The ensemble was joined by guests from the visiting groups and winners of the National Chinese Music Competition. Needless to add, the response was nothing short of overwhelming.   

MODERN IMPRESSIONS / Chengdu Modern Chamber Orchestra / Review

MODERN IMPRESSIONS

Chengdu Modern Chamber Orchestra

Esplanade Recital Studio

Tuesday (8 August 2017)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 10 August 2017 with the title "A taste of Sichuan".

The final evening of the Ding Yi Chinese Chamber Music Festival 2017 was spent in the company of the Chengdu Modern Chamber Orchestra. Formed as recently as last year, the 15-member ensemble gave the audience a good overview of what is cutting edge in contemporary Chinese chamber music as well as a taste of its home province of Sichuan.

Its Principal Conductor Xiao Chao was also the composer of the first piece, Music & Joyful In Shu. Shu is the old name of Sichuan, and the work's three sections played like a precis of the region's history and culture. The meditative opening quoted local folksongs, while its middle section was a rhythmic play on operatic phrases, when every instrument turned percussion. The final section was a fast folkdance, and despite the speed, textures were lucid and clear.

Conductor Xiao Chao was an engaging host
with Ding Yi Composer-in-Residence
Phang Kok Jun as his translator.

Gao Ping's Qing Feng (Pure Wind) for smaller ensemble was an atmospheric slow movement filled with the calming mimicry of nature. A haunting dizi solo was the epitome of tranquillity before a gradual stirring of the senses as the pace picked up. If there was a motif that faintly resembled Tara's Theme from Gone With The Wind, it was most probably coincidental.

More traditional was Shu Palace Banquet, composed by a committee of three in 1981, which relived the formalities of court pageantry and music. Located in China's midwest, the influence of Central and South Asian music was inevitable, manifested by segments of syncopated rhythms, vigourous drumming and a brilliant ending.

Contemporary Western influences came to play in Zhang Zhi Liang's Legendary Bird, where muted dissonances and quiet sound effects depicted a primordial ooze from which the eponymous phoenix-like bird emerged. The propensity for avian violence ensured a thunderous middle section, before string glissandi on the huqins provided a subdued close.

Despite its innocuous title, Petals To Heaven by Guo Wen Jing was the thorniest work in the concert. Dedicated to victims of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, its movements recounted the human tragedy and its aftermath. The opening movement Zhai Nan (Disaster), described as Pendereckian, lacerated the ears with shrill, screeching and scraping tones before ebbing away.

The 4th movement was a “Dance of Death” in the repetitious minimalist vein, the demented kind more associated with horror movie music. The 6^th movement, titled Ji (Ritual) initially pitted zhonghu against double bass. With erhu and sheng joining the fray, the catharsis – filled with a pervading sense of unease - was complete. 

A far more cheerful end to the concert came with Zhao Ji Ping's Qiao's Grand Courtyard, a suite based on music written for the popular television serial of the same title. Orchestra turned choir, and conductor Xiao left the podium to play solos on erhu and jinghu. That he was as much a virtuoso as his charges spoke volumes of the ensemble's prowess, bringing the festival to a spectacular close. 

DING YI'S 10TH ANNIVERSARY CONCERT / Ding Yi Music Company / Review

DING YI'S 10TH ANNIVERSARY CONCERT

Ding Yi Music Company

Esplanade Recital Studio

Saturday (5 August 2017)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 7 August 2017 with the title "Grand celebration".

In the short ten years that Ding Yi Music Company has existed, the ever-resourceful Chinese chamber ensemble has never been content with just playing the classics. In its book, music is not a relic to be admired behind plate-glass, but rather a living and evolving organism that continues to challenge and surprise.

For its 10^th anniversary, ten new works by ten composers based in Singapore and China received  either World Premieres or first Singapore performances. Conducted by Quek Ling Kiong and Dedric Wong, the concert opened with Phoon Yew Tien's Homeward Bound, a fantasy on Zubir Said's once-popular Children's Day song Semoga Bahagia. The song was never quoted in full, but its deconstruction provided whiffs of nostalgia for the alert listener.

Several of Ding Yi's players were put under the solo spotlight, beginning with Fred Chan (huqin) and Soh Swee Kiat (sheng) in Liong Kit Yeng's Far, Far Away: Wandering Deities. This was another fantasy, one which imagined Chinese mythological gods meeting, clashing and resolving their differences to modern harmonic progressions.

Chee Jun Hong was the impressive double bass soloist in Eric Watson's Building The Rainbow Bridge, a lively depiction of the famous Qingming scroll painting of Tang Dynasty Kaifeng. His mastery included crafting deep sonorous voices, ethereal harmonics and an agile cadenza to close.      

In Sim Boon Yew's Impressions Of Xiang Tunes, melodies from Fujian operas were given a modern and Latin-flavoured update. Liu Chang's Steering Your Own Destiny made more sense in its Chinese title Chen Feng Puo Lang, which describes a ship harnessing the wind to break through the waves. It was a metaphor for Ding Yi's artistic struggle, well-portrayed in its tempestuous pages with brilliant percussion bookending a plaintive pipa solo in its central section.

The concert's second half was lighter, with works taking on more contemporary and popular slants. Liu Qing's Yarkand Over The Strings featured two percussionists Low Yik Hang and Derek Koh. Recounting Uighur Queen Amannisa's invention of the muqam musical form, it culminated with a jazzy vibraphone solo from Koh which relived the groovy Sixties.

In Wang Chenwei's Ruan Kebyar, Jonathan Ngeow's ruan was prepared so as to make its plucking sound like the clangour of gamelans, aided by a battery of similar orchestral effects. Its Balinese tune later gained in pace to become a fast minimalist pop song. Yuan Peiying's Song had Yvonne Tay's guzheng as skilful protagonist in the fanciful transmogrification of a Chopin Nocturne (Op.48 No.2).     

The variety of compositions showcased the ensemble's virtuosity and versatility, and there was never a dull moment. Even in Liew Kong Meng's Hymn Of The Spring Wind, the only slow and quiet work on show, the level of concentration never flagged. The two-hour-long concert closed with Composer-in-Residence Phang Kok Jun's Ten Years A Minute, a feel-good work that steadily built in confidence from a diffident start. Its moral was obvious: Practice makes perfect!   

ELEGANT MUSIC SOCIETY OF SHANGHAI CHINESE ORCHESTRA / Ding Yi Chinese Chamber Music Festival / Review

ELEGANT MUSIC SOCIETY OF 

SHANGHAI CHINESE ORCHESTRA

Ding Yi Chinese Chamber Music Festival

Esplanade Recital Studio

Sunday (25 October 2015)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 27 October 2015 with the title "Fine Chinese chamber music".

The Ding Yi Chinese Chamber Music Festival has become a regular annual fixture of the cultural calendar, attracting enthusiastic audiences to its concerts by international chamber groups from China and Taiwan. This year's offerings was wrapped up by the aptly named Elegant Music Society of Shanghai Chinese Orchestra, an elite chamber ensemble of the famed Chinese institution.

The five-person group specialises in the genre known as Jiangnan Shizhu, literally silk and bamboo music, which involves string and blown instruments. Typically these are the bowed erhu, plucked pipa and ruan, dizi or xiao (bamboo flutes), accompanied by the struck yangqin (Chinese dulcimer). Many consider this chamber music the true essence of Chinese music, far removed from massive Chinese symphonic orchestral forces.

Ancient tunes handed through the centuries by oral tradition featured in this concert including Blossoms On Spring Moonlit Night and Song Of The Bamboo Robes, where the melodic line is shared by Duan Ai-ai's erhu, Jin Kai's xiao (transverse flute) and Yu Bing's pipa, and mostly unadorned, with Xia Qing's ruan and Yu Xiaona's yangqin providing added textures. Heterophony (different instruments playing the same melody) rules in place of the polyphony that is sine qua non in Western chamber music.

There is much beauty in the music's simplicity and clarity of lines, which never sounds cluttered or overly busy. One of Jiangnan music's greatest hits was included in the concert: Xing Jie (Walking The Streets), which opened in an ambling pace, before taking off in quick steps for a fluid finish.

As musical traditions evolved and Chinese composers became exposed to the West, certain techniques were imbibed and assimilated. Some of these could be found in living composer Gu Guanren's rhapsodic Flavours Of Jiangnan, which sounded more contemporary in character and feel.

There was a solo segment that showcased the individual player's virtuosity. Zhao Songting's arrangement of Flying Partridges found dizi player Jin in fine fettle, luxuriating in long-held trills and fast passages of Paganinian fiendishness. Duan's solidly-honed huqin tone in blind composer Hua Yanjun's contemplative The Moon Reflected in Erquan was rare thing of beauty.

The festival's host ensemble Ding Yi Music Company added Gu Guanren's The Beautiful Jiangnan as if to highlight the differences between small and larger groups, but that was merely the prelude to the World Premiere of Lu Pei's Divertimento. Specially commissioned for this festival, the 12-part work saw players of Ding Yi joined by the Shanghai Elegants conducted by Quek Ling Kiong.

In this witty old-meets-new composition, pentatonic melodies were subjected to rapid tempo changes, the polyphony of the Javanese gamelan and the intriguing patchwork that is 20^th century minimalism. Despite its tricky idiom and technical challenges, the merry band of virtuosos pulled off its intricacies with much polish and aplomb. Whoever said that Chinese instrumental music had to be lao gudong, or antiquated? 

      

Photographs by the kind permission of Ding Yi Music Company.