CD Review (The Straits Times, August 2019)

HANDEL GOES WILD

L’Arpeggieta / CHRISTINA PLUHAR

Erato 0190295811693 / *****

The music of Georg Frideric Handel (1685-1759), like his close contemporary J.S.Bach, is ripe for improvisation, as demonstrated by Austrian baroque music specialist Christina Pluhar and her period instrument group L’Arpeggiata. This group’s use of jazz and world music techniques in Pluhar’s arrangements makes it stand out.

Handel’s operatic arias, sung in both Italian and English, are known for their purity, beauty and often treacherously virtuosic runs. Countertenor Valer Sabadus and soprano Nuria Rial sing these straight and without further embellishment, such as in Venti, Turbini and Cara Sposa (from Rinaldo) and Piangero La Sorte Mia (Giulio Cesare).

It is however in the instrumentation that the music takes on a different dimension. Listen to how Gianluigi Trovesi’s clarinet turns the Sinfonia from Alcina into a Klezmer dance. Or whoever thought that the familiar Where’er You Walk (Semele) could be made to sound like a close cousin of Gershwin’s I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’ (Porgy And Bess)?

The Arrival Of The Queen Of Sheba (Solomon) gets all jazzed up with Francesco Turrisi on piano, and in Canario, an improvisation based on Girolamo Kapsberger, percussionist Sergey Saprichev takes on the idiom of konnakol (Carnatic rhythmic scat singing) convincingly. 

To close, Ombra Mai Fu (Serse), better known as Handel’s Largo, Doron Sherwin’s cornet paves the way for Sabadus’ moving plaint. Old and new sit easily in the true spirit of the baroque within this fascinating album, all 75 minutes of it. 

LIVING WITH G.F.HANDEL / The Basso Canaries / Review

LIVING WITH G.F.HANDEL

The Basso Canaries

The Living Room @ The Arts House

Monday (6 August 2012)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 8 August 2012 with the title 'Chinese soprano upstages Singaporean baritones".

Every male who thinks he can sing fancies himself to be a tenor. Reality dictates otherwise, and it takes a rare bird to settle being a lower-voiced and less glamourous baritone. The recently-departed Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau showed that baritones could combine seriousness with an avuncular sort of glamour, and be more than a match for those egotistical and attention-hogging tenors.

Thus it is a minor triumph that two young Singaporean baritones have mustered enough guts and gumption to pair up and presenting themselves in concerts as the tongue-in-cheek named Basso Canaries. Both Xiao Chunyuan and Steven Ang are vocal students in Singapore and Taipei respectively, and their second concert together took on the lofty challenges of George Frideric Handel’s operatic music.

During his time, Handel (1685-1759) wrote some of the most florid and technically demanding arias for his Italian operas and later English oratorios. It takes a singer with enormous range, utmost flexibility and almost implausible agility to do justice to these highly theatrical numbers. It would be an understatement to say that both Basso Canaries gave their bravest and best shots within a steep learning curve.

Xiao, more heftily built, had the bigger sound that was called for in Revenge, Timotheus Cries from Alexander’s Feast. He certainly can dramatically project and vary his dynamics, but tends to swallows his words. Thus his English sometimes becomes indistinguishable from his Italian, as in the passionate aria Tu se il cor in questo core (You are the Heart of my Heart). Also that all too provincial Singaporean trait of pronouncing “their” as “diar” should be dropped for good. 

Ang, the leaner of the two, displayed no shortage of pathos in See The Flames Arise from Joshua, was able to emote and identify with the protagonist’s angst in Aure, deh, per pieta (Ye Breezes, In Pity) from Julius Caesar. His rather constricted range, wavering intonation and straining to reach higher notes were however limiting factors in this demanding repertoire.

In duets with Shandong-born soprano Elaine Su Yiwen, a student at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, the disparity became more apparent. In the final mellifluous duet of Cleopatra and Caesar, Caro, Bella, piu amabile belta, Su sounded natural and effortless while Ang struggled to hit the high spots. Su had her own aria, So Shall the Lute and the Harp Awake from Judas Maccabeus, which was thrilling as she clearly relished in the typically virtuosic Handelian runs. All three singers were ably supported by pianist Beatrice Lin.  

On this evening, two Singaporean canaries were upstaged by one Chinese nightingale.

Emma Kirkby & London Baroque / Review

EMMA KIRKBY
with London Baroque
Esplanade Concert Hall
Saturday (4 April 2009)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 6 April 2009.

The English soprano Emma Kirkby, blessed with one of the most distinctive voices in all of music, made her Singapore debut in a programme of mostly George Frideric Handel (1685-1759). To be more precise, the recital captured the years 1707 and 1708, when the young German lived in Rome as the guest of Marquis Ruspoli, the patron for whom all three varied cantatas performed were written.

This was much before Handel’s (left) fame as composer of opera and oratorios, but the seeds of future genius had already been sown. The secular cantata Notte Placida e Cheta (Calm And Quiet Night) conjured a mood of mystery, of dreams and love. Kirkby’s intimate, rosy and youthful voice, with purity of conception and crystal-clear diction, fully captured its nuances of quiet elation amidst contemplation.

The vocal range demanded in early music is seemingly narrower, but Kirkby projected an enormous range of emotions - from sorrow to joy and much in between - through subtle colouring and varying of shades. In the sacred cantata O Qualis de Coelo Sonus (What Is This Heavenly Sound?), there was even opportunity for brilliance, in its dizzying runs and the celebratory gigue-like Alleluia!

Sacred or secular, all this contrived to make music from the classical and romantic periods sound vulgar by comparison. Between cantatas and as a palate-cleanser, the immaculate London Baroque (left) – violinists Ingrid Seifert and Richard Gwilt, viol-player Charles Medlam and harspichordist Steve Devine – performed trio sonatas by Corelli, Bach and Handel.

The final cantata Tu Fedel? Tu Constante? (Are You Faithful?) was a feisty affair, with Kirkby’s protagonist in accusatory mode, questioning her lover on his fidelity. Its bustling minor key strains strengthened her steely resolve with each admonishment, before a resolution in a triumphantly major mode. The woman dumps her man for a better man and life, ending with a wry smile from the singer. Women’s lib was by no means a 20th century affair.

Two short encores in English – by Henry Purcell and Thomas Arne – brought the evening’s offerings to a sublime conclusion. Kirkby is as close to having heard the voice of an angel from heaven.