THE VIOLIN AND THE ERHU / Singapore Symphony Orchestra / Review

 

THE VIOLIN AND THE ERHU 

Singapore Symphony Orchestra 

Victoria Concert Hall 

Friday (16 August 2024)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 19 August 2024 with the title "SSO's inspiring pairing of violin and erhu concertos".

"East meets West” was a tagline marketed by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra during the early years of conductor laureate Shui Lan’s tenure during the late nineties and early noughties. This idea of juxtaposing best of Eastern and Western music cultures was relived by eminent Chinese conductor Yu Long in this concert that cannily paired concertos for the violin and erhu. 

A score that brings both violin and erhu in a same work has yet to be programmed, so the audience got to hear American composer Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto first. One of the 20th century’s most popular and often-played violin concertos, this suited Japan-born violinist Karen Gomyo to a tee. 

Her rich and generous tone provided unalloyed pleasure in the first and second movements, essentially slow movements (despite the directions of Allegro and Andante respectively) filled with lush melody and seamless lyricism. The latter had the added luxury of Rachel Walker’s sumptuous oboe solo, with obvious echoes of Brahms’ immortal Violin Concerto, just heard a fortnight ago.

Gomyo pulled out the stops in the brief but mercurial Presto in Moto Perpetuo finale, where acid wit and slick acrobatics prevailed over a hotbed of dissonance and spikiness. The concerto was preceded by Barber’s singular greatest hit, his Adagio for Strings, showcasing SSO strings at its warmest. Far from dragging, it reached an impassioned climax without too much fuss or lacrimation. 

The erhu component came in Chinese composer Chen Qigang’s La Joie de la Souffrance (The Joy of Suffering), originally conceived as a violin concerto in 2017. Chinese erhu virtuoso Lu Yiwen was the first artist to perform its edition for the erhu, which does not suffer by comparison. 

If anything, its sounds even more authentic as it is a fantasy on the ancient guqin melody Yangguan Sandie, inspired by words by Tang dynasty poet Wang Wei. The original poem recounted the parting of friends at China’s far western frontier, an occasion for sorrow, contemplation and hope, all of these well captured by the instrument. 

Lu’s masterful showing on two huqins in the 25-minute modern masterpiece, with soulful soliloquys and tricky quasi-improvisatory passages, strongly suggests this might just be the 21st century’s answer to the Butterfly Lovers Concerto. May this be more often performed, and the start of a new musical trend. 

Both soloists were afforded time for an encore each, with further impressive displays of their stupendous techniques. Gomyo in Astor Piazzolla’s Tango-Etude No.3 was nigh impossible to dance to, while Lu in Liu Tianhua’s Kong Shan Niao Yu (Birds Singing In A Tranquil Valley) was a veritable mimicry of birdsong. 

The concert closed with a bang, amply provided by Alexander Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances from his opera Prince Igor in Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s colourful orchestration. Wind solos predominated, including Walker’s oboe, Elaine Yeo’s cor anglais, Ma Yue’s clarinet and a bunch of flutes, before the six-man percussion crew took over to complete the romp. Nostalgic ears will fondly remember the melody in this lollipop as Stranger In Paradise from the musical Kismet.

A preview of this concert was published 

on www.bachtrack.com:

Waves of emotion: Yiwen Lu and the erhu | Bachtrack

SSO 2020/21 SEASON OPENING CONCERT / Review

SSO SEASON OPENING CONCERT

Singapore Symphony Orchestra

Streamed on the Internet @ SISTIC Live

Saturday 11 July 2020

This review was published in The Straits Times on 14 July 2020 with the title "Moving orchestral performance an optimistic sign of SSO's future".

In a Covid-19-free alternative universe, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra would have given its first concert under newly introduced Chief Conductor Hans Graf this evening at Esplanade Concert Hall. In reality, the opening concert of the 2020-21 season was instead a stay-at-home event under current circut-breaker and social distancing rules.

Nonetheless, electronic tickets were issued on a pay-as-you-wish basis. There was even a glossily produced digital programme booklet complete with full programme notes and all the trimmings to accompany the viewing experience.

The concert’s main event was a reliving of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony in B minor, also known as the “Pathetique”, recorded on 17 January this year. That evening was incidentally the Austrian maestro Graf’s first concert after being named as Shui Lan’s successor at the orchestra’s helm.

Despite being the Russian’s bleakest and most depressing work (premiered in 1893 just a week before his untimely death), Graf’s vision was one of clear-headedness, steering clear of a surfeit of histrionics and hysteria.

By no means undemonstrative, the opening movement’s theme of pathos from the strings came across as sufficiently weepy, and the furious fugato that interrupted the catharsis was a jolt to the senses. The slow movement’s waltz was guileless and bittersweet, with Christian Schioler’s insistent timpani taps providing hints of underlying menace to come.

The unrelenting march of the Scherzo was a crescendo of true vehemence, with an inexorability that was gripping, almost to the point of suffocation. There was a smattering of uneasy applause at its conclusion. In between movements, there were also chorus of coughs from an audience not wearing facemasks, a scenario surely to be a thing of the past.

The finale’s descending chordal strings mirrored the opening movement, but now worn down with a genuine desolation. A glimmer of hope offered by the major key in its central section was short-lived, soon descending into despair, depression and doom. This was a truly moving performance, well-captured on video by multiple camera angles with high defination visuals and realistic sound. This might well be a glimpse into the future, a brave new world of SSO music-making under Graf’s inspired direction.

Watch this video of the Pathetique 

led by Hans Graf:

TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Op. 74 "Pathétique"

There was also a delicious encore, a performance of the Largo slow movement from J.S.Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins. The soloists were the prodigious 13-year-old Singaporean violinist Chloe Chua and Japan-born, Berlin-based violinist Karen Gomyo, who was originally scheduled to perform at this opening concert. They performed most sympathetically but remotely, partnered by 24 SSO musicians and guest harpsichordist Darrell Ang, all playing from their homes.

While one longed for the real-time live concert experience, modern technology has provided a well-meaning and worthwhile but hopefully temporary surrogate.