DECONSTRUCTED
EDQ Wind
Quintet
Esplanade
Recital Studio
Thursday (11 September 2014 )
This review was published in The Straits Times on 13 September 2014 with the title "Award-winning quintet's joyful night of new-isms".
While
violinists and pianists get the most attention by general audiences here, it
should not be forgotten that wind and brass players have made a quantum leap in
furthering their art. The award-winning EDQ wind quintet, formed in 2011, is
undoubtedly the most visible and active of professional wind chamber ensembles in
Singapore .
Its
70-minute programme of 20th and 21st century music was a
microcosm of the marathon concerts by the London Sinfonietta recently presented
at the Singapore International Festival of the Arts. Hungarian composer György
Ligeti’s Six Bagatelles (1953) were
the most familiar pieces played this evening. These were transcriptions of
piano pieces from Musica Ricercata,
each movement based on a fixed number of notes in a chromatic scale.
Rapid
reflexes were called for in the first piece, contrasted with the slickness of
articulation in the third piece where Cheryl Lim’s flute smoothly glided over a
sea of running figures. The spirit and influences of Bela Bartok hovered over
each number, the solemn fifth piece being a memorial to the composer who
regularly appended the word mesto
(sad) to his music. The set closed with humour and cheek, the wit of which was
ardently captured.
Next,
French horn player Alan Kartik gave an imperious solo display in Olivier
Messaien’s Appel Interstellaire (Interstellar Call) from the massive
12-movement symphony Des canyons aux etoiles
(From the Canyon to the Stars) of
1974. Playing in pitch darkness, the bell of the horn was directed into the
grand piano, with the resonance of its strings adding a spectral echo to the
impassioned and highly virtuosic brass soliloquy.
In
the world premiere of Singaporean Liew Kongmeng’s Partitional (2014), the five players were widely spaced apart. Oboist
Leow Rui Qing and clarinettist Benjamin Wong played from behind the audience,
creating an antiphonal effect with bassoonist Emerald Chee, Lim and Kartik on
the floor stage. Long held single notes, sometimes in unison and often with
narrow pitched intervals, permeated the air and the general mood was one of
strange calm.
In
Estonian Arvo Pärt’s Quintettino
(1964), the emphasis was on generating a range of varied tonal splashes in its
three very brief movements. Short repeated staccato bursts and slow sustained
notes coloured the first two pieces, and the rhythmic finale ended with a
musical in-joke, all the funnier when crowned with wrong closing cadences.
Guest
pianist Nicholas Loh garnered the solo spotlight in four pieces from Makrokosmos Book II (1973) by the
American George Crumb. Altering the piano’s timbre by placing paper on,
manually strumming and striking the strings was all part of the pianist’s
arsenal in a showing that would have made avant-gardist Margaret Leng Tan
proud.
As
if to repay the audience’s patience for sitting through a host of new-isms, the
final work was not just gratifyingly tonal but unabashedly populist. Dutch
composer Leo Smit’s Piano Sextet
(1932) predates the far better known Sextet
by Poulenc, but shares with it a similar warmth and congeniality. Its
insouciance and gaiety were made light work by the industrious quintet and Loh
in a performance that was lapped up by both players and audience alike. EDQ’s
next outing should be worth waiting for.
