SSO NATIONAL DAY CONCERT 2026 / FROM MY LIFE / Singapore Symphony Orchestra & Lynnette Seah & Friends / Review

 

NATIONAL DAY CONCERT 2026

Singapore Symphony Orchestra

Esplanade Concert Hall

Saturday (15 August 2026)

FROM MY LIFE

Lynnette Seah (Violin) & Friends

Esplanade Recital Studio

Wednesday (19 August 2026)

This review was published by The Straits Times on 20 August 2026 with the title "Home-grown talent command stage at SSO National Day Concert & Lynnette Seah solo".

Singapore Symphony Orchestra’s annual National Day Concert has over the years become a true showcase of Singaporean composing talent. Led by Lien Boon Hua, its latest edition included five world premieres in an exceptionally well-balanced programme of original music

Low Peng Guan’s A Singapore Suite opened the show, a short overture taking listeners on a musical tour of Gardens By The Bay, Chinatown, Little India and Singapore River, skillfully blending orchestral colour and imagery with ethnic musical styles.

Sulwyn Lok’s Three Dancers, a double concerto for guitar and zhongruan, united Kevin Loh and Jonathan Ngeow from different musical traditions in a happy marriage of plucked strings. Both soloists traded solo and accompaniment roles in a virtuosic work that contrasted meditative movements with throes of ecstasy.

Wong Cheow Cai’s The Plains: Echoes, celebrating the Padang’s legacy, struck more serious notes with stirring string-writing, punctuated by percussion and Pan Yun’s plaintive oboe solo. Eruption of tense music, depicting cruel years of Japanese Occupation, eventually gave way to a calm but guarded close, with Singapore’s realisation of independence.

Kelly Tang’s Three Symphonic Movements retold different periods of Singapore history with projected images from the National Archives. A busy freeport established by Stamford Raffles was edgily described in Colony, while an idyllic Legend spun apocryphal stories of Sang Nila Utama and the founding of Temasek. Finally, a vibrant Metropolis closed the suite on an optimistic high.

Cultural Medallion recipient Edwin Thumboo’s poem Renovation was the inspiration for Germaine Goh’s Five Beginnings, its verses sung by singer-songwriter Linying with a vocoder, which augmented lines with added harmonies. This beautifully euphonious mini cantata deserves many listens.

The evening closed with The Republic, melodious finale from Singapore – Symphonic Suite by Tsao Chieh (1953-1996), late composer, engineer, defence scientist and local Internet pioneer. His clever polyphonic working of Xiao Bai Chuan, Rasa Sayang and the appearance of Majulah Singapura at its close still raises goosebumps like its 1986 Singapore Arts Festival premiere.

A performance of the National Anthem.

Photographic evidence I was at the concert.

Speaking of national treasures, Cultural Medallion recipient Lynnette Seah gave her first solo concert since retiring as SSO co-leader seven years ago. In a very demanding programme of classical and jazz works, she showed the chops that defined her illustrious career of four decades.

In Cesar Franck’s Violin Sonata in A major, a sweet but resolute tone held sway, alternating lyricism with passion through its four movements. The finale’s canon has one of classical music’s best melodies, milked for all its worth with pianist Albert Tiu who had the more technically difficult part.

They were joined by SSO principal horn Austin Larson for a second performance of Johannes Brahms’ Horn Trio in E flat major (Op.40) heard in Singapore within eleven days. Larson reprised his virtuoso role with absolute aplomb, and the very busy threesome showed what give-and-take in chamber music was about.

The other classical works, also accompanied by Tiu, included Joachim Raff’s heartrending Cavatina and the premiere of young local composer Ong Lin Wei’s With Love, a melodious outpouring with a gospel vibe about it.

Jazz legend Jeremy Monteiro took over the keyboard for the rest of the show. Jazz singer Alemay Fernandez alternated melodies with Seah in Germaine Goh’s arrangement of Irish tune Londonderry Air (Danny Boy). SSO principal cellist Ng Pei-Sian and drummer Hong Chanutr Techatananan made a foursome for Monteiro’s romantic Soul Mates and virile train piece From Paris to Segré.

That the Who’s Who of Singapore’s classical and jazz spheres all joined hands in tribute to Lynnette Seah speaks volumes of their great esteem for her.

NATIONAL DAY CONCERT 2022 / Singapore Symphony Orchestra / Review

NATIONAL DAY CONCERT 2022

Singapore Symphony Orchestra

Esplanade Concert Hall

Saturday (13 August 2022)

This review was first published in Bachtrack on 15 August 2022 with the title "What is Singapore music? Singapore Symphony’s National Day Concert provides the clues."

 

Ever since 2018, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra’s National Day Concert has become the showcase of music by Singaporean composers. The sixty-four million dollar question inevitably arises: What is Singapore music? This leads to further questions: Who composes Singapore music? What does it sound like?   

 

Antonin Dvorak posed similar questions about American music more than a century ago, sparking a musical revolution that inspired composers like Ives, Gershwin, Copland, Barber, Bernstein and Florence Price. Singapore’s first major post-Colonial post-Independence composer was Leong Yoon Pin (1931-2011), notably a student of Nadia Boulanger. Although Leong’s original music did not feature in this year’s concert, newer generations of composers represented may be considered his spiritual descendants. Led by Grammy-nominated Singaporean conductor Darrell Ang, himself a former student of Leong’s, the music performed was a veritable melting pot of the myriad cultures that make up Singapore society.

Photo: Nathaniel Lim

 

The concert opened with three World Premieres of new commissioned works. Wang Chenwei’s short symphonic poem Thaipusam was inspired by the Tamil (South Indian) Hindu festival day of penitence in honour of deity Lord Murugan. Playing on complex metres and rhythms from Carnatic music, evocative solos for viola and violin lead into a vibrant but sanitised view of the hot and sweaty procession characterised by self-mortification. John Adams goes to Serangoon Road (in Singapore’s Little India) might be an apt description.

Photo: Nathaniel Lim

 

More eclectic was David Loke’s 3 Sketches of Singapore, a modern concerto grosso with the Lorong Boys (“back street boys” in Malay) quintet as soloists. Comprising violinists Gabriel Lee and the composer himself, flautist Rit Xu, percussionist Joachim Lim and pianist Jonathan Shin, this “garage band” of ex-Yong Siew Toh Conservatory students had made its name busking in subway trains. Almost recounting Singapore’s history, its movements include a stormy sea shanty (the nation’s modern founder Stamford Raffles came from the Sceptred Isles, after all), an elegy with a solo from Loke a la John Williams’ Schindler’s List (remembering the genocide of ethnic Chinese perpetrated by the Japanese during WWII) and use of rattling angklungs (bamboo idiophones), before closing with a lively jazz-inflected Raindance.

Lorong Boys take a bow.

 

Niranjan Pandian on the bansuri.

Alicia de Silva’s Echoes of the Woods was the antithesis of Debussy’s Prelude to Afternoon of the Fawn. She painted a balmy night soundscape, resembling Vaughan Williams at his moodiest, before the emergence of Niranjan Pandian’s bansuri (North Indian bamboo flute). Mellow and haunting, its mystique is heightened with cellist Ng Pei Sian’s plaint, the duo completing what was the evening’s most poignant work. The oldest work was Stasis (1988) by the late Tsao Chieh (1953-1996), who made a living as an engineer and defence scientist. Its minimalism was founded on an A minor triad, a gradual crescendo of extreme calm and serenity broken by Evgueni Brokmiller’s flute (resembling the Balinese suling) and concertmaster Kong Zhao Hui’s closing violin solo reminiscent of Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending. The serendipitous symmetry provided by both these two works could not have been more striking.  

Photo: Nathaniel Lim

 

A combined chorus of over a hundred singers from the Singapore Symphony Choruses joined the orchestra for three popular National Day Songs: Lee Chin Sin’s Up (orchestrated by Jaffar Sidek), Benjamin Lim’s Little Big Things (combining two songs, sung in English and Chinese) and Dick Lee’s Home (arranged by Wong Lai Foon, orchestrated by Dax Wilson Liang), the last a sentimental favourite so beloved as to have become a second national anthem. Closing with the national anthem Majulah Singapura (Onward Singapore) by Zubir Said (orchestrated by Leong Yoon Pin) sung in Malay, it felt almost like the Last Night of the Proms, but without the jingoism.

Chorus masters Wong Lai Foon and
Eudenice Palaruan sing the National Anthem.

 

Star Rating: ****

You can watch this concert in its entirety here:

Temasek Foundation SSO National Day Concert 2022 - YouTube

All the performers meet
Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat

The Lorong Boys
with the Loke clan. 

SSO NATIONAL DAY CONCERT / Singapore Symphony Orchestra / Review

SSO NATIONAL DAY CONCERT (ONLINE)

Singapore Symphony Orchestra

Sistic Live, from Sunday (29 August 2021)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 1 September 2021 with the title "New local commissions shine in SSO National Day Concert".

 

Singapore Symphony Orchestra’s annual National Day Concert has become the marquee event when Singaporean composers get new works commissioned and performed by the national orchestra. Local works ideally deserve to be heard alongside the likes of Beethoven and Brahms in subscription concerts, but one should nonetheless be grateful for an evening that featured no less than five world premieres.

 

Entitled New Music, New Hopes and hosted by Jason Lai, the orchestra conducted by Joshua Tan opened with Syafiqah ‘Adha Sallehin’s Dengan Semangat Yang Baru (In A New Spirit). With its title coming from Zubir Said’s National Anthem, recognisable motifs from Majulah Singapura and original melodies coalesced into a gratifyingly tonal whole. Its gentle pastoral feel and absence of dissonances or harmonic tensions was telling, as if describing an utopia without personal or societal strife.

 

Jonathan Shin’s Folk Games played on three familiar songs - Rasa Sayang, Singapura and Chan Mali Chan - by finding contrapuntal possibilities and cleverly dressing them in the string garb of Bartok, Shostakovich and the Second Viennese School.  

 

The most modern-sounding work was Koh Cheng Jin’s Luciola singapura, named after a rediscovered local species of firefly. Ingeniously scored by including yangqin, harp, piano, trumpet and multiple percussion instruments, its short duration was made up by a vivid portrayal of bioluminescence, filled with brilliant scintillation and ebullient scherzo-like effects.

 

Yong Kailin was violin soloist in his Raising The Life, a concertante work with cadenza inspired by a haiku he wrote years ago about taking care of one’s roots and later flourishing as a result. The heady music combined multifarious influences, from Chinese, Carnatic, Middle Eastern, American bluegrass, pop and Paganini, reflecting a cosmopolitanism that Singaporeans aspire to.  

 

Film and television composer Jessica Tam’s A Little Trip Down Memory Lane mixed Xinyao songs, Singapore Pie, Moments Of Magic and Singapore Town (with its calypso beat), into a well-tossed rojak. The colourful score not just evoked nostalgia, but also certain pride. The same may also be said about Dick Lee’s iconic song Home, now heard in the orchestrations by Kelly Tang and Bertram Wee.

No National Day event would be complete without it, and coming to the home stretch, Tony Makarome’s Sing Singapore Medley relived best-loved National Day Songs including Stand Up For Singapore, We Are Singapore and Count On Me, Singapore. The last of these achieved certain notoriety after a recent case of intellectual property theft. Face it, these songs are simply irresistible.

 

The obligatory Zubir Said Majulah Singapura received a spiffy new arrangement by Ho Chee Kong. After which, Tanya Chua’s Where I Belong (2001 NDP theme song), arranged by Avik Chari, was performed with vocalists Syakirah Noble and Umar Sirhan, violinist Chloe Chua and the Singapore Symphony Youth Choir, and filmed at iconic locations on the island. Guaranteed to tug on all heart-strings, there will hardly be any dry eyes among the viewers. 

SSO NATIONAL DAY CONCERT / Singapore Symphony Orchestra / Review

SSO NATIONAL DAY CONCERT

Singapore Symphony Orchestra

Esplanade Concert Hall

Saturday (10 August 2019)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 12 August 2019 with the title "Waving national flags with pride to national songs".

What is Singaporean music? Another facet of this conundrum was revealed in the second of National Day Concerts by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra. Conducted by SSO Associate Conductor Joshua Tan, our music had to do with myriad cultural influences and the creation of “national songs”.

The concert’s first half dealt with Western influences, opening with the world premiere of A.Dietz’s Raffles March, as orchestrated by Bertram Wee. Composed in 1915 and first performed by the Raffles Hotel orchestra in 1922, it was named after the establishment rather than the man who appropriated Singapore for the British crown.

Pompous and blustery, this version with lots of winds and brass is perfectly suited for a grenadier guards band rather than palm court orchestra. Its local counterpart was Tsao Chieh’s March (Colonial Days), the 2^nd movement from his Singapore Suite. The Elgarian intent to evoke once-glorious days of the British Raj was deliberate, but the themes Tsao used were wholly his own.

Kelly Tang’s Montage was a 2010 piano concerto dedicated to and premiered by Singapore’s “King of Swing”, jazz pianist Jeremy Monteiro. Originally for Chinese instruments, this edition for symphony orchestra is Singapore’s answer to Gershwin’s Concerto In F. With plenty of spots to extemporise, Monteiro commanded the keyboard with exuberant sweeps and dizzying fingerwork. Better with every listen, the work also afforded dazzling improvisations for Christy Smith (bass) and Tamagoh (drum), and a plum solo for young saxophonist Samuel Phua.

The second half paid tribute to Singapore’s ethnic diversity and the forging of a national identity. Tony Makarome’s Jewel Of Srivijaya, a double concerto for mridangam (with VM Sai Akileshwar) and tabla (Nawaz Mirajkar), received its world premiere.

The legacy of Temasek, part of the ancient Srivijayan empire through its “discovery” by Sang Nila Utama, was celebrated with a convincing fusion of Indian music (both Carnatic and Hindustani traditions) and Western orchestration. Without missing a beat, complex drumming rhythms were taken in their stride by both soloists, and the orchestra ably kept up through conductor Tan’s animated and tireless direction. 

Master of Ceremonies Khairudin Saharom speaks
with Tony Makarome and his student Lee Jinjun.

Young composer Lee Jinjun was rewarded with two world premieres. The first was Kampong Overture, which cleverly incorporated three Malay songs – Geylang Sipaku Geylang, Lenggang Kangkung and Suriram – in a very effective concert piece written in the style of Dvorak’s symphonic movements and Slavonic Dances. Even a quote from the Largo of Dvorak’s New World Symphony made brief cameo.

His second coup was Our Singapore Dream, a mash-up of National Day Parade Songs – We Are Singapore, Count On Me Singapore, One People. One Nation. One Singapore. – featuring the Singapore Symphony Chorus (Eudenice Palaruan, Chorus Master) and crafted in the English choral tradition of Elgar and Vaughan Williams. Once suspects these two works will be heard rather often from now on.

Conductor Joshua Tan got his national pride from
his grandfather, now 102 years old, who once
volunteered to do National Service at the age of 60!

Nostalgia reigned in Lam Chao Phang’s The Awakening and Tan Kian Chin / Bok Sek Yieng’s Voices From The Heart, theme music both from very popular Chinese television series of the 1980s, and Phoon Yew Tien’s March On, which rehashed National Service songs. By the time the patriotic Believe In Me, Singapore (in Mandarin) was sung, national flags were emerging from the audience’s pockets and waved with unfettered fervour.

It was left to Dick Lee’s ubiquitous Home and Iskandar Ismail’s arrangement of Majulah Singapura, both with jazz singer Joanna Dong at the fore, to elicit an obligatory standing ovation and the communal shedding of tears.

Relive this memorable concert here:

Livestream: Singapore Symphony Orchestra National Day Concert 2019 - YouTube