MESSIAEN'S HARAWI / 10th Singapore Lieder Festival / Sing Song Club

MESSIAEN’S HARAWI

10^th Singapore Lieder Festival

Sing Song Club

Victoria Concert Hall 

Dance Studio

Wednesday (24 August 2022)

 

The Singapore Lieder Festival, named in these pages as the nation’s best kept secret, made a comeback for its 10^th edition with a single-night event. The Sing Song Club gave the Singapore premiere of twentieth-century French composer Olivier Messiaen’s song-cycle Harawi (1945), part of his love-and-death trilogy inspired by the legend of Tristan and Isolde. The two other parts include the massive Turangalila Symphony, performed by the SSO in 1994 and 2017, and the choral Cinq Rechants, which has yet to receive its premiere here.

  

 

Harawi comprises 12 songs in French (written by Messiaen himself), based on Peruvian Quetcha poetry, music and folklore on the said subject of love and death. The songs were shared by tenor Adrian Poon and soprano Jennifer Lien, partnered by Singapore’s very own Graham Johnson, the intrepid pianist Shane Thio. The music bears similarities with Turangalila albeit on a smaller scale, with its shared musical idioms of violent dissonances and paradoxically comforting harmonies, and by its use of recurring themes.

 

Birdsong abounds, notably the green dove (colombe verte) representing the forbidden love between protagonists Piroutcha and Toungou. Their eternal love can only be truly consummated in death, by the latter’s decapitation amid cosmic levels of upheavals. Erotic and gory in equal measure, this was what made Harawi the cult favourite it is. While Turangalila was the extroverted crowd pleaser, Harawi was the introverted sleeper of Messaien acolytes.

 

Both singers were excellent and well-matched in their selected songs, reflecting a kind of yin and yang in opposing yet complementary viewpoints. Poon was the grounded terrestrial spirit of sleeping cities (La ville qui dormant), mountains (Montagnes) and the realm of animals (monkeys and the ubiquitous birds) while Lien revelled in the mystic ideals, love (L’amour de Piroutcha), parting (Adieu) and celestial forces, the sun (L’escalier edit, gestes de soleil) and stars (Katchokatchi les etolies). Both conveyed the outward ruggedness and inner beauty of the music very convincingly.

Doundou tchil,
now repeat it 19 more times...

 

Besides singing in idiomatic French, repetitive onomatopoeic words also stole the show, such as the recurring doundou tchil and katchikatchi sung by Lien (representing a dance with ankle bells and grasshoppers respectively), and Poon’s shrieking cries of ahi and o (Repetition planetaire) as well as the monosyllabic pia (Syllables). Their synchronisation with Thio’s dynamic pianism in these rhythmically complex and extremely tricky numbers were a marvel to behold from start to end.

Ahi...ahi....O....
(Repetition planetaire)

 

Held in the high-ceilinged and mirrored space of Victoria Concert Hall’s Dance Studio, with its sonorous and not-too-reverberant acoustics, the performance was very well received by a small but extremely appreciative audience. The floor sprinkled with multi-coloured origami pieces (possibly celebrating the recent repeal of 377A) representing birds, grasshoppers and stars made a very nice and atmospheric touch for a landmark in Singapore music history.

 

Whence will the next performance of Harawi take place? Given that Messiaen’s Quatour pour le fin du temps and Turangalila, Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, Bernstein’s Mass, Wagner’s Walkure, and the complete melodies of Debussy, Ravel and Poulenc (thanks also to Sing Song Club) are no longer strangers to Singapore audiences, one can hazard to say that cannot be too long from now, and coming from yet another adventurous group of musicians. Yes, a revolution of sorts has begun.

POULENC'S LA VOIX HUMAINE / Review

POULENC’S LA VOIX HUMAINE

Jennifer Lien, Soprano 

Shane Thio, Piano

Ivan Heng, Director

Streamed on the Internet @ SISTIC Live

Saturday (18 July 2020)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 20 July 2020 with the title "Home-grown rendition of The Human Voice a rare gem".

Until the embargo of live concerts is lifted post-circuit breaker, music lovers will have to be content with pre-recorded digital concerts. Presented by the Singapore Symphony Group in its Victoria Concert Hall Presents series, this 2018 production of Francis Poulenc’s single-act, single-singer chamber opera La Voix Humaine (The Human Voice), first streamed last weekend, was a rare gem.

Performed before a live audience, its plot involved Elle (the generic “She” in French) in a final conversation with her former lover. Central to the 1958 opera, adapted from playwright Jean Cocteau’s 1928 script, was the telephone, a modern convenience and prop that was supposed to figure prominently throughout.

Wrong numbers, crossed connections and inept telephone operators were comedic elements in the serious melodrama. However, in director Ivan Heng’s conception, that physical means of communication was totally expunged. This allowed protagonist Elle the freedom of movement, to wander about onstage and sing without impediment.

The telephone’s only hint was a long red cord tightly wound around the grand piano on which pianist Shane Thio played. Also absent was Elle’s faithless lover, although his insidious presence might be inferred in furtive onscreen projections and Thio’s sockless red sneakers.   

Enlivening the anguished Elle was USA-based Singaporean soprano Jennifer Lien, whose monologue was a tour de force of lyrical and dramatic role-play. The former Business Times journalist turned operatic diva was fully immersed in the multi-faceted part and emoted brilliantly in idiomatic French (with the audience well served by English transliterations).

Through the opera’s compact 40 minutes, she brilliantly lived through Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief. Shifting effortlessly between denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, she often mixed these up in an intoxicating melange of fraught and barely-contained emotions. With hysterical outbursts alternating with episodes of lucidity, this was a multi-layered and grandstanding performance.

Poulenc’s music was unremittingly tonal, but liberally laced with dissonances and abrupt figurations. Lien flitted through recitative and outright song, where a penchant for sentimentality was revealed, albeit briefly. There was a short waltz-song sequence midway through, with a cascade of falling pills projected behind the performer. This was more than an allusion to a drug-induced fit of pique, also fortified by a well-placed bottle of liquor.

Whatever was Elle’s fate (suicide by overdose, gunshot or strangulation by telephone cord) became immaterial by the opera’s passionate but lyrical close. All that remained were the frenzied circumstances and states of mind that led to her fateful (and ultimately fatal) decisions. In short, The Human Voice was an in-depth treatise of the human condition, fragile psyche, warts and all. That it was captured with such trenchancy speaks volumes of all the artists involved.       

POULENC'S DIALOGUES OF THE CARMELITES / New Opera Singapore / Review

DIALOGUES OF THE CARMELITES

New Opera Singapore

Victoria Theatre

Friday (3 August 2018)

This review was published in The Straits Times (online edition) on 10 August 2018 with the title "Unconventional choice, but Dialogues of the Carmelites a landmark for New Opera Singapore".

New Opera Singapore (NOS) has done it again. By mounting the Singapore premiere of Francis Poulenc's 1957 opera Dialogues Of The Carmelites (Dialogues Des Carmelites), it defied the conventions of what operas should local companies be presenting. No Verdi, no Puccini, no Mozart, but no worries. NOS had Purcell, Britten and Monteverdi on its books, and has now added 20^th century Frenchman Francis Poulenc to its list of successes.

In reality, Carmelites should not have been a great surprise as it represented the last of last century's great tonal operas, conceived during the era when serious composers were pursuing atonalism and avant-garde agenda. Its subject, the 1794 martyrdom of the Camelite order of Compiegne during  the French Revolution's Great Terror, was also fertile for exploitation in musical drama.

Mother Superior Lidoine (Jennifer Lien)
leads the Requiem service.

Sung in English instead of French, directed by Kyongsu Kathy Han and conducted by Chan Wei Shing, this production was furthered by a very strong cast of principals as the ill-fated nuns. The protagonist Blanche (soprano Victoria Songwei Li) as aristocrat-turned-novice sparkled as she alternated between hope and fear, finally finding a resolution in extreme courage. Beside her, Sister Constance (soprano Capucine Daumas) was a light-hearted and playful presence, the perfect foil.

The Mother Superiors were well contrasted, soprano Patricia Sands as the long-suffering and terminally-ill Madame de Croissy and soprano Jennifer Lien (fresh from her leading role in the other significant Poulenc opera La Voix Humaine) as the plain-speaking and more cheery Madame Lidoine. Between them, mezzo-soprano Rebecca Chellappah was a rock-steady Mother Marie, close confidante to the beleaguered ladies. Their voices rang well over the discreet orchestral manoeuvres from the pit.

Blanche (Victoria Li) with
Mother Marie (Rebecca Chellappah)

Men had much smaller parts, including tenors Reuben Lai (Father Superior) and tenor Shaun Lee as Blanche's brother the Chevalier. The touching scene between Blanche and Chevalier came closest to a conventional operatic love duet, but had the former rebuffing the latter's pleas to flee the oncoming crisis. The men's black suits also contrasted markedly against the light pastel nuns' habits and ultimately white, symbolising innocence and purity.

The sets in all three acts by Allister Towndrow were monochrome and starkly effective, with series of screens adding layers of dimensions. The shadow of the guillotine loomed ever so ominously through the First Act, and when the heart-wrenching final scene beckoned, there were to be no falling blades.

Execution by decapitation was depicted symbolically. With the chorus of nuns (including NOS Artistic Director Jeong Ae Ree in a cameo role) singing the poignant Salve Regina and each walking through the scaffold and towards oblivion, their voices diminished and decimated until there were only two. Blanche's final act of sacrifice with her sisters in faith could not have been better depicted.

This production marked yet another important landmark in the short history of New Opera Singapore. It produces only one opera a year, but making that count is what that really matters.

The main cast (from L): Sands, Daumas, Li,
Chan, Han, Jeong, Lien & Chellappah.

Production photos by Chester Chew, applause photos by Pianomaniac.