FANFARE: BRASS, PERCUSSION & CARMEN / Singapore Symphony Orchestra / Review

 

FANFARE: BRASS, 

PERCUSSION & CARMEN 

Singapore Symphony Orchestra 

Victoria Concert Hall 

Friday (28 February 2025)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 3 March 2025 with the title "Eclectic programme highlights SSO's sections at their virtuosic peak".

Following the Singapore Symphony Orchestra’s great success in its three-city concert tour of Australia, music director Hans Graf led a very interesting programme of 20th century music that highlighted the orchestra’s different sections at their virtuosic peak. 

SSO Music Director Hans Graf shares
with the audience about the unusual programme.

The brass had the entire first half to its own, opening with Frenchman Paul Dukas’ Fanfare from his 1912 ballet La Peri with stunning aplomb. Three minutes was all it took to display a warmth of tone within a wealth of harmony. 

Just slightly longer was American Samuel Barber’s Mutations from Bach (1968) which subjected the Lutheran chorale Christe, du Lamm Gottes (Christ, You Lamb of God) to gradual transformations. Seamlessly merging the harmonisations by Joachim Decker and Johann Sebastian Bach, the music was a short but spiritually moving tribute capped by a French horn recitative near the end. 

Photo: Simon Yam

Arguably the most unusual work on show was German Paul Hindemith’s Konzertmusik for piano, brass and two harps (1930), where deeply sonorous brassy timbres were balanced by the scintillating sounds of Albert Tiu’s piano and the harps of Gulnara Mashurova and Charity Kiew. 

Photo: Simon Yam

The first two movements played like an extended Bachian prelude and fugue updated to modern times. The jaunty fugal subject established on piano would be shouted out by brass interjections, which soon took over to complete the outlandish display of counterpoint. 

The slow third movement’s Variations was scored only for piano and harps, an oasis of nocturnal calm before the syncopated finale’s romp where brass returned with a vengeance and even hints of jazz. The obligatory encore came from the splendid brass, a lovely transcription by conductor Graf of the sublime final chorus from Maurice Ravel’s opera L’enfant et les sortileges (The Child and the Magic Spells). 

Living Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin’s Carmen Suite (1967), a ballet of thirteen short movements, was scored for strings and percussion using popular themes from Georges Bizet’s evergreen opera Carmen. This was performed by SSO in 2021 during the pandemic before a very small audience, and it fully deserved the near full-house this evening. 

Photo: Simon Yam

By jumbling up the original sequence of melodies, chopping and slicing popular numbers, this was like viewing an old friend through a series of distorting mirrors and prisms. Particularly intriguing was the Torero movement, where its march-like melody abruptly disappeared, leaving just the accompaniment chugging along. 

Much was left to the listeners’ imagination, with the skillfully rejigged Habanera, Flower Song and Fate theme indicating the music, despite its glitz and glamour, was focused wholly on the subject’s tragedy. This was headily accomplished by the strings and five very busy percussionists. 

This very unusual concert was dedicated to the memory of SSO’s founding patron Dr Goh Keng Swee. Given his visionary ability to look outside of the box, he would have greatly appreciated the sheer eclecticism of its programming.

THE WEST, WESTERN MUSIC & THE CHINESE COMMUNITY IN EARLY 20TH CENTURY SINGAPORE / A Talk by Phan Ming Yen

THE WEST, WESTERN MUSIC &

THE CHINESE COMMUNITY

IN EARLY 20TH CENTURY SINGAPORE

A Talk by Phan Ming Yen

Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre

Saturday (30 November 2024)

Today, we take for granted the sheer variety of Western classical music performed in Singapore by a multitude of artistic groups, both professional and amateur. However, this wonderful state of affairs had to have its origins. No, we are not referring to the "cultural desert" of 1970s Singapore, as decried by Dr Goh Keng Swee, before he famously set things right by founding the Singapore Symphony Orchestra in 1978. In this very interesting talk by former Straits Times music critic and The Arts Magazine editor, the polymath Phan Ming Yen goes way back in time where his story actually starts.

Based on old newspapers, articles and archival material, Ming Yen has painted a very vivid and not too flattering picture of colonial Singapore from the 1890s. Those were the days when Brits like William Graeme St Clair and Edward Salzmann, with important connections to the establishment and press, held sway. 

They were responsible for introducing Western classical music to the natives, quaintly referred to as Asiatics, to counter the hideous noise of the daily grind and "rudimentary Chinese music", to enrich and educate the unwashed. These came in the form of the Singapore Philharmonic Society and its children's concerts, and other activities. For his troubles, the old pipe organ of Victoria Memorial Hall was named the St Clair organ.

Racist or not?
Supremacist to say the least!

Ming Yen plays some "rudimentary" Chinese music.

The very photograph which sparked
Ming Yen's interest in this subject.

The locals were receptive, in particular the Straits-born Chinese, who were mostly English-educated, upwardly mobile and increasingly gentrified. This movement led to the first orchestra formed by non-Europeans, the Chia Keng Tai Orchestra which performed in society events, public concerts and in 1939, accompanied the Wuhan Songsters in its anti-Japanese fundraising efforts. A central figure was violinist Tay Lian Teck, also a member of the Municipal Commission of Singapore, who died in 1942 while fleeing the Japanese by ship.

Remembering Tay Lian Teck

This tapestry of histories from old Singapore is relevant because it eventually shaped the society we live in today and how we enjoy our music. Ming Yen closed his riveting 90-minute-talk with a quote from Goh Keng Swee, revealing within his mind what would eventually lead to the founding of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra in 1978. We are where we are today because we stand on the shoulders of giants. 

A meeting of old friends and historians.