NAFA COMPOSITIONAL RECITAL / NAFA Chinese Chamber Ensemble / Review

NAFA COMPOSITION RECITAL

NAFA Chinese Chamber Ensemble

Lee Foundation Theatre

Thursday (13 March 2014)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 15 February 2014 with the title "Budding talent show promise".

Like the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory that trains young professional musicians to play in Singapore’s symphony orchestras, it is the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts which grooms instrumentalists for a career in ensembles like the Singapore Chinese Orchestra and Ding Yi Music Company. Similarly, the Academy also hones composers for contemporary Chinese music.

This hour-long concert mostly conducted by Quek Ling Kiong, Resident Conductor of the Singapore Chinese Orchestra, provided a brief glimpse of the budding compositional talent for Chinese instrumental music here. The future does appear promising at the very least.

It began Zhou Tie’s Act Five, a quintet for erhu, bamboo flute, pipa, ruan and percussion. Resembling an ensemble that accompanies the stage, the group’s assignment was both dramatic and atonal, employing short fragments with the economy that recalled the Second Viennese School works of Anton Webern.

Ernest Thio’s Batu Belah for four huqins (two erhus, gaohu and zhonghu) and cello was based on a familiar Malay song. Operating on a rather narrow dynamic range, the work could have benefited from an expansion or development of the thematic material, and the performance from more accurate intonation.

The title of Lim Tee Heong’s study for solo zhonghu, Long Gou Shui (or Long Kao Chui in Hokkien), sounds far more eloquent in Chinese than the cumbersome English Swirling Waters in the Drain. Soloist Shunta Goh gave a sizzling performance of a perpetual motion that hovered between the repetitious Philip Glass and Bartok’s Solo Violin Sonata.

If the pieces for small ensemble were experimental in nature, the works for the full complement of players seemed more catered towards mass appeal and the genre of film music. Ng Chee Yao’s Ode of Affection employed all sections of the orchestra and played out like a romantic interlude from a movie.

James Goh’s Rain in a Season of Drought was sumptuously orchestrated, highlighting an lovely erhu solo and later a parade of percussion heralding a welcome precipitation. A drone, insistent beats from wooden temple block and strummed ruans provided the backdrop to melodies from the sheng and woodwinds in Ernest Thio’s Prayer.

The concert closed with the Erhu Rhapsody No.1 by Wang Jian Min, head of Chinese Music at the Shanghai Conservatory. Shunta Goh on erhu provided the requisite virtuosity for a work that typically began with a slow and meditative introduction, and then sprinting off breathlessly with the orchestra keeping up neck and neck to a brilliant conclusion.

THE MUSIC, OUR WORKS / Review

THE MUSIC, OUR WORKS

The Arts House Living Room

Thursday (24 May 2012)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 26 May 2012 with the title "Young composers show promise". 

The realm where the young composers of Singapore today inhabit looks like a vibrant and thought-provoking environment to be part of. This chamber concert showcased the diverse talents of five such individuals, all alumni of the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, who are unafraid to bare their souls and express their innermost secrets.

Chinese music with a Singaporean vibe:
Ernest Thio's Poise.

The stereotype of the unapologetic Schoenbergian or Boulez-wannabe seems to be in the minority these days, with more composers re-embracing tonality and its aural comforts. Ernest Thio, whose music opened the closed the concert, has a fine ear for harmony through exotic timbres. In I Felt a Funeral in My Brain, based on Emily Dickinson poems, he skilfully blended two voices with lush piano chords in a work that saw death as a passage of solace rather than anguish.

Ernest Thio's Nian employed
an unusual quartet of Samuel King (piano),
the composer (ukulele), Dominica Chua (erhu)
and Rozie Hoong (zhonghu).

In the brief Poise, an erhu and zhonghu played out an elegy as counterpoint to the piano’s bare theme. Most memorable was Thio’s Nian for huqins, piano and ukulele, a memory of his Hokkien-speaking grandmother who lived in a Buddhist temple which used a chant as its subject. Thio’s part on the Hawaiian guitar simulated that of a strummed Chinese instrument. This is a reminiscence of Chinese music, viewed through Singaporean lenses.

The ensemble for Luo Enning's My One True Love:
the composer (piano), Yap Pheck Chuan (violin),
Doreen Yeo (clarinet) and Bernard Yong (glockenspiel).

Luo Enning’s My One True Love was even more unusual, a 21^st century work that completely avoided dissonances and even minor chords. Scored for violin, clarinet, glockenspiel and piano, its vision of eros resembled the quasi-jazzy and deliberately simplistic dance music of Shostakovich, but minus the irony and guile.

Lu Heng's Blues of the Day was played
by the composer (piano), Christoven Tan (viola),
Clarence Chung (electric guitar)
and Shaun Soh (drums).

In Lu Heng’s Blues of the Day, a spirit of improvisation came to the fore. The electric guitar and drum-set made it sound more like a rock band rather than jazz combo. Rhythmic from start to end, one would not have been too surprised had the riffs of Lalo Schifrin’s Mission Impossible Theme burst out with guns blazing.

And then there were two solo works that showed that atonality was not completely dead. Alicia De Silva’s 12-minute-long Cadenza (from Suite for Viola), played by Christoven Tan, was almost a suite in itself as it explored a myriad of moods and responses, from its ruminative beginning to Schnittke-like pages of seething violence.

Christoven Tan (Viola) and Gabriel Lee (Violin)

Similarly, Bernard Lee Kah Hong’s And it Happens to Drop from Beneath, the work that won the 2011 National Violin Competition composition award, truly tested violinist Gabriel Lee’s mettle. Operating at a narrower range of dynamics, its understated virtuosity nevertheless probed varying degrees of psychological disquiet.     

This 70-minute snapshot of our nation’s varied compositional landscape was both an invigorating and encouraging signpost of how and where our music is heading to.

The composers' circle (from L to R):
Ernest Thio, Lu Heng, Alicia De Silva,
Donna Koh (Moderator), Bernard Lee Kah Hong
and Luo Enning.