CONFLUENCE / Singapore Ruan Ensemble 10th Anniversary Concert / Review

CONFLUENCE

Singapore Ruan Ensemble

Esplanade Concert Hall

Sunday (5 July 2015)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 7 July 2015 with the title "Ruan music hits the sweet spot".

The Singapore Ruan Ensemble marked its 10th anniversary with a concert that showcased some of the finest young talents in the local Chinese instrumental community. The group founded by Singapore Chinese Orchestra principal Zhang Rong Hui began with 20 players and has now expanded to over 50 members, augmented by bowed strings, wind and percussion for this concert.

The ruan is a four-stringed plucked instrument with a round torso, which sounds similar to a lute, guitar or banjo. Performing as a group, its mellow strummed sound has a pleasant ring, filled with varied timbres from instruments of differing registers. As a solo instrument, virtuosic playing of great agility makes for breathtaking spectacles.

The first half was led by Taiwanese conductor Ku Pao-wen, opening with Wang Chen Wei's Confluence. An excellent example of Nanyang music, its themes combined Chinese, Malayan and Indian influences which the ensemble played with much gusto, culminating in a fugue (a Western contrapuntal device) where the voices were very well delineated.

Law Wai Lun's arrangement of the guqin tune Xiao Xiang Shui Yun (Clouds Over Rivers Xiao & Xiang), a landscape portrayed in music, was beautifully atmospheric with a dizi melody rising above ruan accompaniment. Zhu Lin's Song Without Words was an Italianate serenade, the piano's contribution making its sound particularly Mendelssohnian.

Enjoying the solo spotlight was 16-year-old Megan Tan, whose sparkling performance in the vigorous finale of  Liu Xing's Reminiscences of Yunnan was distinguished by sheer steadiness and personality. Twin sisters Clara and Sophy Tan (below) were zhong ruan and guzheng soloists respectively in their composition Traveller, an engaging meditation on the Silk Road, which had contemporary touches provided by Govin Tan on tabla and Dayn Ng's electronica.

Doubly delighted: Clara & Sophy Tan
(or is it Sophy and Clara?)  enjoy the applause.

Quek Ling Kiong conducted the concert's latter half, which included another arrangement by Law, of the Nanyin favourite Melody Of Peach Blossom. Here, sanxian and dizi solos came to the fore. This was followed by Tan Kah Yong's arrangement of Nikolai Budashin's Fantasy On Two Russian Folksongs, where the ruan's kinship with its Russian counterpart, the triangular balalaika, became all the more apparent.

The evening closed with Law's arrangment of the popular war classic, Xin Hu Guang's Gada Meilin, starring the Mongolian Mai La Su and his traditional horsehead fiddle. This box-shaped 2-stringed instrument is bowed like an erhu but with a deeper voice of a cello. What enthralled the audience the most was Mai's throat singing, creating bitones with each exhalation, which got them applauding even before the act was up.

Two ensemble encores, one sentimental and the other fiery, closed a most satisfying evening of exuberant and spirited music-making.        

TREASURES OF TAIWAN / Singapore Chinese Orchestra / Review

 

TREASURES OF TAIWAN

Singapore Chinese Orchestra

Singapore Conference Hall

Saturday (23 March 2013)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 25 March 2013 with the title "Cross-Straits Treasures".

Led by the young Taiwanese conductor Ku Pao-wen, the Singapore Chinese Orchestra performed a very well-conceived programme built around the theme of Taiwanese music and composers. It seems that the politics of separation has not adversely affected cross-Straits musical affairs. Chinese music has always endured, whether from the mainland or otherwise.

An case in point would be Sui Li Jun’s Guandong Overture, an effective showpiece by a mainland composer written for a Taiwanese youth orchestra. Concertmaster Li Bao Shun’s gaohu and Xu Zhong’s cello blended well for the work’s main theme, but it was the chorus of suonas, aided by dizis for an added nasal twang, that completely stole the show as the work drove to a frenzied and percussive close.

By contrast, Taiwanese composer-conductor Chung Yiu-kwong’s Erhu Concerto provided a mellowing salve. The first two movements were slow, almost elegiac, allowing soloist Tian Xiao to eloquently pour out his lament. Its long-breathed lines, sensitively supported by the orchestra, bore out the principal subject of Chung’s Beijing opera Sunlight After Snowfall. That poser was the imponderable question, “Where is one’s homeland?”

By means of contrast again, the finale was a Paganinian moto perpetuo, with Tian’s erhu the virtuoso vehicle for dazzling display. The hectic gallop rhythm, egged on by quasi-tribal drumming, brought to mind that famous showpiece Horse Racing, with soloist and orchestra rushing headlong to the finish line.

True to the pedestrian title of Scenic Taiwan, Kuan Nai-chung’s suite in three movements is a musical travelogue dressed up in the flashy orchestral colour of Respighi’s Roman Trilogy. The opening Tune of Taipei is a busy evocation of the city’s famous nightlife, with a brief gaohu and erhu duet by way of romantic interest.

The most memorable movement was the central Ku Diao (Crying Tone), with Jin Shi Yi’s suona a tour de force in expressing eternal sorrow and strife. The finale Tian Hei Hei (Darkening Sky) employed two folksongs as subjects, with effective scoring and instrumental flair being the saving graces of otherwise thin material.  

The concert concluded with Zhao Yong Shan’s orchestral adaptation of the pipa classic Ambush From All Sides, originally by Liu Wen Jin. A battle piece in the manner of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, but based on the war of 202 B.C., the programmatic music depicted the calm before the carnage, leading to a full scale assault with flying steeds and the clangourous clashing of metal.

It was all very rowdy stuff, enough to stun the living and wake the dead. More importantly, this concert showed that with well-chosen and contrasting works, the Chinese orchestra exists as a vital symphonic force, far more than just a glorified folk band.