INTROSPECTION . REFLECTION / Guitar Ensemble of NUS / Review

INTROSPECTION / REFLECTION

Guitar Ensemble of NUS

Yong Siew Toh Conservatory Concert Hall

Sunday (24 March 2013)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 26 March 2013 with the title "Light thoughts".

The annual concert by the Guitar Ensemble of National University of Singapore (GENUS) is a popular and well-attended affair. This is after all Singapore’s premier Niibori guitar orchestra, founded by Singapore’s “Father of the Guitar” Alex Abisheganaden in 1981. The 87-year old master was himself present to witness the two-hour long concert that showcased Singaporean, Japanese and Brazilian music.

The concert’s title was somewhat misleading, because much of the music played was light-hearted, Latin-flavoured and both, not leading one to deeper thoughts or questioning the status quo. The sole exception was Singaporean Gopal Balraj’s Impatience, receiving its world premiere conducted by Robert Casteels.

Scored for massed guitars, string quartet, percussion and voice, it ran a schizophrenic 13-minute course as a sort of melodrama, with Life Sciences PhD student and soprano Lim Yan Ting supplying the voice-over and lapsing into mellifluous song, as if in a Broadway musical.

The guitars supplied a walking bass, one similar to J.S.Bach’s famous Air (from Orchestral Suite No.3), with a persistent tick-tock rhythm in the background as a reminder of the passage of time. The tempo quickened as agitation built up, with the work ending just as well before the audience and performers ran out of - as one guesses - patience.

Gopal was making a legitimate statement, as was Yuudai Hatanaka in his Michinoku Guitar Concerto (above), the other major work of the concert. Composed as a reflection on Japan’s recovery from the 2011 earthquake-tsunami-radioactive fallout disaster, its single movement was decidedly short-winded with minimal angst on display. Jonathan Chiang’s solo on prime-guitar was leisurely and casual, contrasted with Ow Leong San’s flute interjections and the occasional use of guitar as percussion.

As a salute to Abisheganaden, his brief and rhythmic Danza Flamenca was aired, which was a nice foil to the samba of Thomas Brown’s Brazilian Street Dance. Smaller groups from the ensemble also showcased their wares, in quartet  (Hirokazu Sato’s Song of Clouds), quintet (Joao Pernambuco’s Po de Mico), sextet (Paulo Bellinati’s Baio de Gude) and octet (Keigo Fujii’s Shabondama Variations), all of which impressed with their musicality.

Soprano Lim, always a sparkling presence (above), added several degrees of sultry allure in the beautiful wordless Aria from Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras No.5, and Abreu’s swinging Tico Tico no Fuba, sung in Portuguese. Not so much introspection or reflection in these numbers, but it mattered little as scholars and thinkers should be easily forgiven for being entertainers too.

Alex Abisheganaden exhorts the audience
to buy the latest GENUS recording.

CD Reviews (The Straits Times, March 2013)

Singaporean Classics

GENUS

Singapore Original Compositions

For Niibori Guitar Orchestra

NUS Centre For The Arts / ****

A Niibori guitar orchestra is an ensemble formed by nine different groups of guitars, each with specific registers of pitches, functioning like a choir of strummed sonorities. GENUS (Guitar Ensemble of the National University of Singapore) was founded in 1981 by Singapore’s “Father of the Guitar” Alex Abisheganaden and remains the nation’s premier Niibori ensemble. This disc comprises eight works representing three generations of composers associated with the group. Abisheganaden’s own Huan Yin - Vanakam and Gala Nexus (both 1995) are the most traditional and least complex. The former espouses the “Nanyang style” of composition, combining Chinese and Indian influences with its use of the erhu and sitar.

Current GENUS conductor Robert Casteels contributes the most ambitious work, the 20-minute long El Jardin de la Vita y la Muerte (The Garden of Life and Death, 2010) which combines voices, percussion, flamenco dance with the blood ritual of bullfights. Its visual spectacle is unfortunately lost in this audio recording. Taped sounds are heard in City Scape (2012, the chaos of urban construction) by Gao Yang and Casteels, and Kansalesa’s Bones (2011, a dog’s excited whimpers) by Balraj Gopal. Traditional Asian instruments also appear in Gopal’s Satyagraha (2011) and Chua Jon Lin’s Autumn Blues (2011). Finally, The Phunk Experiment (2011) by NUS students Alvin Ng and Calista Lee, a very listenable pop-inspired number with synthesisers and the disco beat, represents the future of the ensemble. Listen, and be surprised.

This recording retails at $10 and is available at the GENUS Concert on 24 March 2013. 

BOOK IT: INTROSPECTION / REFLECTION

Guitar Ensemble of NUS

Yong Siew Toh Conservatory 
24 March 2013, 7.30 pm  

Tickets at $16 

E-mail: nusguitarensemble@gmail.com 
Tel: Stephen at 9891 3312  

GREAT RUSSIAN SYMPHONIES

Naxos 8.501059 (10 CDs) / ***1/2

It looks like the major record labels have come up with the strategy of marketing multiple-disc sets, which retail at below super-budget price (at $6 per disc)  to entice the potential buyer as CD sales fall worldwide. With Naxos’s vast catalogue accrued over 25 years, it is possible to do just that. However, does one really want to hear the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra from Katowice conducted by Adrian Leaper and Antoni Wit play Tchaikovsky’s last three symphonies? The performances and recordings are more than competent but hardly world-beating. The same would apply to Prokofiev’s First and Fifth Symphonies or Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony from the national orchestras of Ukraine and Ireland respectively.

There are however exceptions, like an excellent Shostakovich Fifth Symphony, with its agonised final pages (very Russian indeed!) milked to the max from the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic conducted by the dynamic young Russian Vasily Petrenko, or Borodin’s Second Symphony from the Seattle Symphony with Gerard Schwarz. The Shostakovich Seventh Symphony “Leningrad” from the Russian Philharmonic and Dmitry Yablonsky is also highly competitive. The rarities here are little-known symphonies by Glazunov, Kalinnikov and Myaskovsky, included for good measure. Naxos provides full programme notes, which are a definite plus for the first time listener. A gauntlet has been thrown for the Universal group of labels and their big-name orchestras to beat, which should not be too difficult.

This box-set retails at $59.90 at HMV 

STRINGS OF TIME / Guitar Ensemble of NUS 30th Anniversary Concert / Review

STRINGS OF TIME

Guitar Ensemble of NUS 
Yong Siew Toh Conservatory Concert Hall 
Sunday (3 April 2011)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 5 April 2011 with the title "Guitars show versatility".

The Guitar Ensemble of University of Singapore (GENUS) celebrated its 30th anniversary in a concert that demonstrated how far the humble guitar, still widely regarded as a folk instrument, has come.

Guitar ensemble playing took root in Singapore in the mid-1980s when Alex Abisheganaden purchased a set of Niibori guitars for the University. Divided into sections according to their registers, these would function like a symphony orchestra, led by a conductor. Abisheganaden’s own Huan Ying Vannakan (1995), featuring erhu and sitar soloists, was one of the more traditional pieces performed, where Chinese and Indian melodies fused into one indivisible whole.

Electric guitars dominated their acoustic cousins for Phunk Experiments (above) by Alvin Ng and Calista Lee of NUS Electronic Music Lab. Their popular idiom contrasted wildly with Masatoshi Ishizuka’s Nagashino, a battle piece that could have been mistaken for some soundtrack for a spaghetti Western. That was until Guan Boon Cheng’s poignant shinobue (Japanese flute) solo punctuated the air before tubular bells heralded the end.

Spanish music and Flamenco dancers were the mainstay for the second half, which made music from the Disney animated movie Beauty and the Beast seem redundant. The dancers from Flamenco Sin Fronteras simply stole the show in Geronimo Gimenez’s La Boda de Luis Alonso (The Wedding, above) and Ravel’s Bolero (below), gyrating ever so gracefully to the highly rhythmic music.

The two most interesting pieces were performed last. Balraj Gopal’s Satyagraha, inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy, was a reflective look at life’s values and vicissitudes. Its blend of old and new did not go as well as planned, largely because of a malfunctioning electric guitar (or guitarist?) that either failed to cue or went off pitch. The performance was saved by Gopal’s mridangam and wonderful flute and oboe solos from Ow Leong San.

Conductor Robert Casteels’s Garden of Life and Death (above) was a full scale drama in which guitars served as evocative accompanists. Antiphonal trumpets opened the ritual of blood and death, pitting man (Chang Hsiao Min’s matador) against beast (Antonio Vargas’s bull) which played out to its inevitable conclusion. Seldom has gracefulness and brutality in scoring and choreography been juxtaposed this eloquently on the same stage. The disturbing message was this: who was the greater victim?

More importantly, whoever thought that guitars could be this versatile?