BACH CONCERTOS EXTRAVAGANZA / Red Dot Baroque / Review

 

BACH CONCERTOS EXTRAVAGANZA!

Red Dot Baroque

Victoria Concert Hall

Sunday (7 September 2025)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 10 September 2025 with the title "Celebrating 60 years of Singapore-Germany diplomacy with Bach extravaganza".

Red Dot Baroque (RDB), led by violinist and Young Artist Award recipient Alan Choo, is Singapore’s only professional group playing period instruments. In 2023, it performed all six of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos in a single sitting. Its latest concert, celebrating SG60 and marking sixty years of Singapore-Germany diplomacy, saw four favourite concertos of the German baroque master aired.

Photo: Yong Junyi

Opening the show was the Concerto for violin and oboe in C minor (BWV.1060) with soloists Placido Ho (violin) and Veda Lin (oboe). Both played as members of the general ensemble before assuming their solo parts and standing out with piquant tones. There were few moments as beautiful as the slow central movement’s duet, before a flurry of counterpoint completed the fast finale.

The title of Orchestral Suite No.2 in B minor (BWV.1067) may seem a misnomer as there were just six players partnering Rachel Ho on traverso (baroque flute) for the set in seven movements. Partita or Overture might have been more apt titles for this, but Ho’s lovely tone presided over dances including a Rondeau, Sarabande, Bourree, Polonaise and Menuet.

Photo: Yong Junyi

The audience’s erratic response of applauding between some movements may have distracted the ensemble, leading to a false start for the Badinerie. However, playful bantering between players was the idea of this mercurial finale, closing the work on an irrepressible high.

Photo: Yong Junyi

After the interval, a rare performance of the Harpsichord Concerto in A major (BWV.1055) featured Mervyn Lee as soloist. His understated but crystal-clear articulation was the highlight in this forerunner of the piano concerto, with brooding and emoting in the Larghetto slow movement, before breaking free of fetters in the fast outer movements.

Photo: Yong Junyi

Closing the matinee was the popular Concerto for two violins in D minor (BWV.1043) with leader Choo and Gabriel Lee in the spotlight. The unspoken chemistry between two founding members shone through despite having quite different stage demeanours, Choo’s animated movements versus Lee’s steadfast stance. The performance, true to form, exuded joy from every pore.

Inserted between the concertos in each half was the Asian premiere of Rainforest Refrains (2025), composed for RDB’s Italian tour earlier this year by Young Artist Award recipient Chen Zhangyi. This is a modern update of the multi-movement baroque suite or partita. With narration and delightful singing by soprano Teng Xiang Ting, this could also pass off as a neo-baroque cantata.

Photo: Yong Junyi

Tropical flora and fauna were the subjects in its nine movements. Burung Hamba Kera (The Monkey’s Servant Bird), a reimagination of the Malay song Burung Kakak Tua contrasted with Pangolin Passacaglia, a doleful lament. The lively finale became a play on the Chinese words “liu lian”, which was to linger besides being the name of a thorny but aromatic fruit.

Composer Chen Zhangyi
acknowledges the applause.

The encore of Phang Kok Jun’s A Barojak Suite (2020) comprised four dance movements which were settings of local songs in the form of antique dances: the allemande, corrente, sarabande and gigue. Commissioned out of pure fun, one has not lived without having heard Munnaeru Vaalibaa or Jinkli Nona played on baroque instruments.

OF MUSIC AND SOUND / Ding Yi Music Company / Review

OF MUSIC AND SOUND

Ding Yi Music Company

Esplanade Recital Studio

Sunday 13 December 2020

 

Chinese instrumental music has from time immemorial been associated with programmatic music. The music performed always tells a story, describes a scene or depicts some drama. The notion of absolute music, such as encountered in Western music (symphonies, concertos, sonatas and the like), is a relatively new phenomenon in Chinese music, and this World Premiere by Ding Yi Music Company was to be no exception.

 

Of Music And Sound, was an hour-long work comprising an introduction and five connected movements. Composed by Composer-in-Residence Phang Kok Jun and augmented with sound engineering/design by Zai Tang, the music followed the course of a single day in the tropics (presumably Singapore), from a nascent dawn to the rising sun of the next day. Unlike previous concept concerts, there were neither projected visuals nor verbal commentary, and the audience was invited to use just their ears and imbibe whatever transpired.

 

Ambient sounds of nature – exotic birdsong, amphibious croaks, whirring insects - ushered in the Introduction as musicians and conductor Quek Ling Kiong took to their places onstage. Near total darkness gradually gave way to light in the first movement Dawn, which quoted the Chinese song Gao Shan Liu Shui (Mountains and Flowing Water). The erhu sang, followed by sheng, pipa and dizi, as the day awakened. The music is serene and atmospheric, then segueing seamlessly into a more animated second movement Rain, a study on different kinds of precipitation. A storm erupted with suona in full tilt before calm was restored with a big tune.

 

The third and central movement Dusk was a kind of reverse John Cage 4’33”, as the entire orchestra downed instruments and donned eye-shades. This was a mirror of the audience which had already been primed, both masked and “blinded”. For the next few minutes, and in the dimmest of lighting (if one chose to peek), Zai’s vividly recorded soundscapes, collected from MacRitchie Reservoir, Bukit Brown cemetery and the rail corridor, took centrestage. Claustrophobia might have been an outcome if not for the hypnotic effect provided by Nature. So this is what the Gaia sounds like when all homo sapien activity has passed, temporarily or for all eternity.

 

The fourth movement Night was a scherzo of sorts, alive and buzzing with energy. Its exuberance almost suggested some of the land’s more risque nightspots, Geylang anybody? Darkness descended again, as sure as night followed day. But there was no silence, a solo erhu’s lament punctured the air before a New Dawn, the finale arrived. There was another big melody, an apotheosis, before the sound melted away. So did the musicians, as the ranks depopulated like in Haydn’s Farewell Symphony, leaving only Yvonne Tay and her guzheng the sole presence on stage.

     

In On Music and Sound, young Singaporean composer Phang Kok Jun had created his own personal version of the Pastoral Symphony. Given that this month marks the 250^th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth (16 December to be precise), this act of homage could not have been more apt.   

CD Reviews (The Straits Times, July 2016)

STORYTELLERS ON ANN SIANG ROAD

Ding Yi Music Company / Tay Teow Kiat

Long Yin / ****1/2

Ding Yi Music Company is Singapore's most active professional Chinese chamber ensemble, and its concert programming over the years has been both eclectic and innovative, as its latest album testifies. In a way, the course of contemporary Chinese instrumental music has been redefined by the encompassing of Nanyang music, which includes indigenous idioms of Southeast Asian music and its composers. Two excellent examples receive world premiere recordings here.

Bho Shambo is a dance of the Hindu god Shiva, and in Phang Kok Jun's arrangement, flautists Ghanavenothan Rethnam (bansuri) and Tan Qing Lun (dizi) share the honours in a headily rhythmic work that includes chanting in Tamil. A similar tandem operates in Phang's own Storytellers On Ann Siang Road where Chin Yen Choong and Lim Kwuan Boon's erhus act out a duet-cum-duet between Chinese and Malay itinerant storytellers of old.

The balance of the disc are five Chinese works by Liu Chang, Chow Jun Yi, Joshua Chan, Cao Wen Gong  and Wang Jian Min. Conducted by its founder, Cultural Medallion recipient Tay Teow Kiat, the playing is both refined and virtuosic, and more importantly passionately charged as only young professional musicians know how. 

SIBELIUS & GLAZUNOV Violin Concertos

ESTHER YOO, Violin

Philharmonia Orchestra

Vladimir Ashkenazy (Conductor)

Deutsche Grammophon 481 215 7 / ****1/2

In 2010, the 16-year-old Korean American violinist Esther Yoo was awarded First Prize at the 10^th Sibelius International Violin Competition, the youngest-ever to be bestowed that accolade. Her debut recording of violin concertos by the Finn Jean Sibelius and Russian Alexander Glazunov commemorates the 150^th anniversary of both composers' births in 1865. Despite her youth, the technical and interpretive demands of both concertos hold no terrors for Yoo.

She brings out a warm and gorgeous tone for the lyrical Glazunov concerto, only letting rip in its festive end. For the more austere and glacial disposition of the Sibelius concerto, she offers more grit and sinew to the proceedings, holding little back in the so-called “Polonaise for polar bears” of a finale. 

The fillers are pretty enough: Sibelius' youthful Suite For Violin And Strings and Glazunov's Grand Adagio from his ballet Raymonda. The support she gets from veteran conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy and from the London-based Philharmonia Orchestra is excellent, in what can be said to be a dream debut.   

HOMECOMING II / Singapore Chinese Orchestra / Review

HOMECOMING II

Singapore Chinese Orchestra

Esplanade Concert Hall

Saturday (4 June 2016)

An edited version of this review was published in The Straits Times on 6 June 2016 with the title "Happy stirring of East and West".

There were four World Premieres at this concert that also featured the debuts of T'ang Quartet and pianist Melvyn Tan with the Singapore Chinese Orchestra. Conducted by Music Director Yeh Tsung, there was a theme of nature and musical impressionism running through its programme.

The concert began with Phang Kok Jun's arrangement of Ho Chee Kong's Garden Veils, a serene evocation of Singapore's self-professed reputation as the “Garden City”. The mellow song of cellos opened, soon replaced by erhus accompanied by the gentlest of pizzicatos. The voice of nature soon bloomed, showing that Chinese huqins and Western strings could happily co-exist in a musical ecosphere. A short and retiring guanzi solo at its close was also a nice atmospheric touch.

The T'ang Quartet, comprising violinists Ng Yu Ying and Ang Chek Meng, violist Lionel Tan and cellist Leslie Tan, performed in two concertante works. Zhu Lin's Pastorale in Five Episodes scored for string quartet, winds and percussion was a fantasy built upon Jimbo's Lullaby from Debussy's Children's Corner Suite. Why not, since that pentatonic melody was laden with myriad possibilities.

The quartet presented the theme and its fragments, colourfully traversing a farmyard scene, festive dance and funeral procession before closing quietly with dizi and marimba in support. Here was a toy elephant's cradle song transformed into a gentle reverie for suckling piglets.

Totally contrasting in timbral sonorities was Gao Wei Jie's Fantastic Landscape of Rainforest for string quartet, plucked strings and percussion. More austere and dissonant, the idiom was pointillist and modernistic, with Bartokian ostinatos providing the driving impetus. There were moments for repose when Leslie Tan's cello sang unabated, before an abrupt and animated end.  

Also heard for the first time was John Sharpley's Stirrings: Scenes from a Rainforest, a suite of six short and varied movements. His exploitation of tonal colour was a treat, whether the subject was a tropical squall, the awakening of dawn or raging fire. In Song of the Rainforest, Li Baoshun's gaohu was the soulful protagonist while Huang Gui Fang's sanxian delightfully lit up the somewhat tipsy Dance of Oneness including Some Rice Wine. In the final Canopy Dreams, birdsong from winds and percussion provided a mysterious close that recalled Messiaen's spirituality.

Melvyn Tan rounded up the concert as soloist in Maurice Ravel's Piano Concerto in G major. His nimble fingers served the trickily syncopated piano part well, fluid and limpid in turn, and crisp and percussive when needed. This version with Chinese instruments however proved problematic as the very specific sound which the Frenchman had sought was subverted at every turn. And it did not help when the opening crack of the whip (by snapping two pieces of wood together) arrived fractionally late.

Rubato was served up in spades for the Mozartian slow movement, a liberty which could pass in a live concert, but the sheng as surrogate for cor anglais was straining credibility a little too far. The Presto finale proved a mess for a number of solo winds who found hard to keep up, an uncharacteristic blip in an otherwise technically impressive concert. Tan performed two solo encores, Chopin's Fantasie-Impromptu and Liszt's Un Sospiro, which garnered the most enthusiastic applause.  

OF MUSIC AND DANCE / Ding Yi Music Company / Review

OF MUSIC AND DANCE

Ding Yi Music Company

Esplanade Recital Studio

Sunday (27 December 2015)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 29 December 2015 with the title "Bold experiment with Tang poem".

Marrying the genres of music, voice and dance into a coherent whole is a difficult proposition and local Chinese chamber music ensemble Ding Yi Music Company should be lauded for attempting this bold experiment. Of Music And Dance is a modern interpretation of Tang Dynasty poet Bai Juyi's epic poem Pipa Xing, titled in this production as Song Of The Pipa Player.

Lasting an hour and cast in five movements with an overture, the poet (and disgraced government official) is captivated by a pipa player, whose similar fall from grace he finds common ground and a spiritual bond. The music, jointly composed by Singaporean Phang Kok Jun and Taiwanese Hsu Tzu-Chin, found a happy medium with traditional Chinese music and Western compositional techniques.

The main ensemble comprised formidable young pipa soloist Chua Yew Kok accompanied by five players on stage, who were in turn augmented by eight offstage musicians placed behind the audience, all led by conductor Wang Ya Hui. The illumination provided in the contemplative Overture was striking, with all musicians in immaculate white, and the soloist faceless, silhouetted behind a tall screen.

The 1st movement Under Moonlit Skies introduced tenor Isaac Ho and soprano Ng Jing Yun,  the latter making a first appearance as a slender shadowy form on the screen. Their voices meet but their eyes do not, and this distance and separation were not just physical but also symbolic. They sang selected passages from the 44-verse poem in Mandarin, repeating certain sentences as a form of emphasis.

The verses were not projected, and while the tiny print on the programme booklet was a strain on the eyes, the audience was guided with brief synopses onscreen. This affected the appreciation of the recitations, which came across as a relative weakness in the production. Should these have been read instead of being sung? Several Chinese scholars in the audience pointed to unidiomatic settings of the words, and one might defer to their collective wisdom.

The dancers, four from the Re:Dance Theatre in choreography by Albert Tiong, arrived in the pacy 2nd Movement, Fretful Strokes In Wistful Thoughts, which provided a needed change in dynamics. Their movements were vigorous and earthy, accompanied by insistent percussion. Unfortunately another form of choreography saw latecomers being allowed to fumble their way to empty seats, which provided an unwanted sideshow.

The 3^rd and 4^th movements constituted the heart of the work, with both pipa player and poet bringing forth their plights. The Song Of The Pipa Player featured just soprano, pipa and one dancer, whose movements were now more graceful and retiring. In the Song Of The Poet, the protagonist realises their common destiny and commiserates accordingly. The mood was one of underlying sadness and resignation.     

The Finale united all the performers and the music was both optimistic and uplifting, with voices in purposeful unison. As with all things in life, this brief sense of euphoria was shortlived. The closing sight and sound of Chua's sole pipa gently weeping in solitude and enveloping darkness was surely one for the ages.    

Photographs by the kind courtesy and permission of Ding Yi Music Company.

SINGAPORE SOUNDS / Review

SINGAPORE SOUNDS GALA CONCERT

Singapore Sounds

Yong Siew Toh Conservatory

Sunday (20 September 2015)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 22 September 2015 with the title "Fresh take on the Singaporean sound".

As Singapore celebrates its 50^th year of nationhood, one is constantly posed with the question, “What is the Singaporean identity?” Along the same lines, one also asks, “What is Singaporean music?” Singapore Sounds, a new orchestra founded by young conductor Adrian Chiang (left) dedicated to performing Singaporean music, gave its debut and provided some of the answers to that poser.

Examples in history from Russian, Czech, Hungarian, English and American music all point to the vernacular, folk music and popular sources as the basis of national music traditions. So Singaporean music must at one point derive from the grassroots; folksongs in native languages, popular music and nationalistic jingles (yes, those NDP songs) all form the rich fabric from which real Singaporean music evolves.

This landmark 150-minute-long Gala Concert conducted by Chiang provided many examples of these in various guises. Arrangements of songs were the most recognisable ones, with the composers doing their best to dress them up in discernible forms for concert performance.

Young composer Phoon Yu's version of  the familiar Tamil song Munneru Valiba was a colourful set of variations, the melody first heard on sitar accompanied by piano and harp. Dick Lee's evergreen Home was worked by Phoon into a concertante work for violin, with SSO Co-Leader Lynnette Seah negotiating through multiple cadenzas in the Romantic style, playing on a specially crafted SG50 bow by Paul Goh.   

Syafiqah 'Adha's Singapura Medley made use of popular Malay dance forms including the asli, inang, joget, canggung and zapin for its four songs, beginning with Di Tanjong Katong with the melody first heard on the accordion, played by the composer herself. This exuberant showing was only matched by Zaidi Sabtu-Ramli's arrangement of Shabir Tabare Alam's Singai Naadu (Lion Country), a rousing tune originally in Tamil, now almost totally transformed. 

Other than a rather forgettable Count On Me Singapore, Lee Jinjun's arrangements took on a life of their own. His Chan Mali Chan Variations with Kang Chun Meng on euphonium was a virtuoso showstopper with many original ideas, while Fantasia On Rasa Sayang became a neo-baroque invention, include a chaconne, fugue and brass chorale dressed in dissonant harmonies.

This concert also recognised the contributions of foreign-born composers now living in Singapore. Briton Eric Watson's Constellations received its World Premiere, a meditation on the five stars and crescent moon of the national flag, represented by six traditional instruments (erhu, ruan, sitar, tabla, gambus and rebana) performing solos as if in a concerto grosso. His highly accessible tonal style, while not quoting local tunes, was redolent of film music.

More modernistic was Belgium-born Robert Casteels's Travelogue, conducted by the composer and now adapted for a larger orchestra with traditional instruments. A satire on Singapore in the year 2065, the protagonist, acted and sung by the irrepressible tenor Leslie Tay, was a Singaporean exile returning from Mars to find a homeland he does not really recognise. The use of colloquialisms, localities present and past and Singlish made this work undeniably Singaporean.

The concert concluded with Phang Kok Jun's lively Xinyao Medley, with Liang Wern Fook's Mandarin ballads from the 1980s best typified by Xi Shui Chang Liu (Friendship Forever). The encore Cheng Li De Yue Guang (Moonlight In The City), by Chen Jia Ming, sent the audience home humming its tune. Chinese, Malay or Indian, classical, folk or popular, these are our songs which nobody can take away from us.

PASSION & POETRY: Photographs from CLARENCE LEE Piano Recital

On Saturday 2 May 2015, Singaporean pianist Clarence Lee gave a piano recital entitled Passion & Poetry at Victoria Concert Hall. This was a revival of the Young Virtuoso Recital series that highlighted young Singaporean pianists which was founded in 2005. Incidentally, Clarence Lee is the first Singaporean pianist to give a full-length recital at the newly refurbished Victoria Concert Hall.

In the recital, Clarence Lee performed the works
of Rachmaninov & Liszt.

He also gave the World Premiere of
Waves by Singaporean composer Phang Kok Jun.

Clarence gets a standing ovation after a stupendous
performance of Liszt's Reminiscences de Don Juan.

Encore time: Yue Liang Dai Biao Wo De Xin
and Grünfeld's Die Fledermaus.


 
Phang Kok Jun acknowledges
Clarence Lee's awesomeness!