MIXED METAPHORS / Yong Siew Toh Conservatory New Music Ensemble / Review

MIXED METAPHORS
Yong Siew Toh Conservatory 

New Music Ensemble
Esplanade Recital Studio
Wednesday (9 November 2011)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 11 November 2011 with the title "Moving images add suspense".

Probably the best way to approach new music is to leave all pre-conceptions and expectations at the door, and let the occasion and process of performance sweep you along. New music has had bad rep, especially when what one normally defines as music – a regulated combination of melody, harmony and rhythm - is suspended, replaced by seemingly random sounds, even noises. However, little effort is made on the part of listeners to understand the minds of composers and performers.

Performances by the Conservatory’s New Music Ensemble in Esplanade’s ground-breaking Spectrum Series have helped bridge this creator-audience divide. With the national orchestra avoiding this hazard-laden path, nobody does it better. The Singapore premieres of three landmark works, conducted by Chan Tze Law (left), could not have been more persuasively handled.

Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel (1971) is not for the impatient, as it ambles along in a static and glacial pace. When silences and pauses are as important as sounds, we begin to appreciate their true value. The sparse scoring gave much scope for Jonathan Lee’s throaty but emphatic viola to be a protagonist, alongside Yoo Seol Ah’s haunting dulcet soprano tones and serene voices from the SYC Ensemble Singers. Commissioned for a performance in a Houston (Texas) chapel adorned with Mark Rothko’s iconic paintings, its contemplative thirty minutes passed for a seemingly far shorter duration of time.

Quite the opposite was Thomas Ades’s Concerto Conciso (1997), which packed a great deal in three short movements. Pianist Thomas Hecht provided the main cut and thrust, with winds and brass gelling rhythmically like a jazz band. As if constrained by compositional form, there was a mini chaconne and a round dance (called a brawl), bringing the bustling work to an abrupt end with the piano’s lid slammed shut.

The evening’s most challenging work was Edgard Varese’s Deserts (1954), scored for winds, percussion and electronic tape. The composer’s vision was of vast wastelands of the physical and metaphorical, including solitude of the soul. Its dense swathes of sound were interpolated with taped noise of a more mechanical kind, and accompanied by Bill Viola’s more contemporary film of geographical wildernesses, lightning, fire and water.

This was the rare case of moving images accompanying music, but it added an edge of suspense and the unexpected to the proceedings. But given the committed and convincing playing of all involved, it also became an added luxury.

SPECTRUM: MUSIC AND WORDS / Conservatory New Music Ensemble / Review

SPECTRUM: MUSIC & WORDS / Conservatory New Music Ensemble

Esplanade Recital Studio / Sunday (10 April 2011)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 12 April 2011 with the title "Soaking in surprises".

With new music, one really does not know exactly what to expect. Just take each surprise as they come. The first was conductor Tony Makarome himself. More familiar as a jazz bassist, he ambled in attired like some extra on the set of Casablanca. Assuming the role of engaging introducer and stand-up comic, he looked like a cross between circus ringmaster and Uncle Peter of Babies Proms.

Breaking the ice which often frosts up concerts of contemporary music, his way was direct and unstuffy. Soon the music began, with luscious strains of America-based Indian composer Juhi Bansal’s song cycle The Lost Country of Sight, based on Neil Aitken’s words. The scoring was light and transparent, for just cello, piano and sparing percussion, enabling the words to be highlighted.

Unfortunately soprano Khor Ai Ming, audibly recovering from laryngitis and placed too posteriorly, was limited in range and projection. Struggling with the words, much of the nuances in this exotically-coloured idiom were lost in the fray. Another reading on a better day will be keenly anticipated.

No such problems existed for the programme’s main work, Morton Feldman’s Music & Words. The 1987 collaboration between the New York avant-garde composer and playwright Samuel Beckett explored an uneasy relationship between the spoken word and music, encapsulated in a radio play.

The protagonists, played by narrators Craig De Wilde and Thomas Hecht, were holed up in a mock-up of a disc-jockey’s studio, complete with illuminated “On The Air” sign, reel-to-reel tape-player and several LPs. The props did not obscure a tour de force from De Wilde, whose typical broadcaster’s drawl was as convincing as his efforts to sing like a drunkard. The droll and grizzled Hecht, enacting a godlike character called Croak, was the perfect foil. Seven musicians performed sequences in interjection, but seemed distant from where the action was, which was probably what both creators had intimated all along. While it will take some time for this Asian premiere to sink in, just sitting back to contemplate this 35-minute Godot-like effort and its inanities was reward enough.

The concert closed with Chinese composer Huang Ruo’s Chamber Symphony No.1, named after the Sung Dynasty patriot-general Yue Fei. Mostly instrumental, its blend of Chinese and Western idioms was alluring, closing with the players laying down their instruments and chanting incantations. In this case, music often better expresses feelings which elude words.