SAYANG SINGAPURA! ORIGINS / Asian Contemporary Ensemble / Review

SAYANG SINGAPURA! ORIGINS

Asian Contemporary Ensemble

The Chamber, The Arts House

Saturday (14 November 2015)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 16 November 2015 with the title "Fun way to discover Singapore".

The Asian Contemporary Ensemble, founded by Singaporean conductor-composer Wong Kah Chun, seeks to preserve Asian musical aesthetics while forging new paths in expression. Its 75-minute-long concert incorporated story-telling, dance and pantomime with eight works (including three world premieres) woven into its fabric.

Aimed at young people, the story of Indian King Rajasuran and how his grandson Sang Nila Utama discovered Temasek was directed by Peggy Ferroa, narrated by Rosemarie Somaiah, choreographed and danced by members of Paragraph. The 11 members of ACE conducted by Wong performed on stage, making for a colourful affair of sound and movement.

Phoon Yew Tien's Variations On A Transfigured Theme Rasa Sayang performed on piano by Jonathan Shin opened the concert, revealing a metamorphosis of a simple song that went through a whole panoply of tonalities and modes. John Sharpley's Glissando On The Black Keys was a pentatonic fantasy that saw Shin's instrument channelling the sound world of a Chinese guzheng.

The three world premieres began with Christopher Clarke's Teeth, a concertino for saxophone accompanied by Indian percussion inspired by the merlion's dentition. Samuel Phua's dusky tone on sax was a revelation, as was Joyce Poh's dizi in Bernard Tan's Keroncong, a cheerful dance that combined Chinese and Malay influences with the Western rondo form. Poh's arrangement of the popular Jiangnan Hao saw the familiar Chinese tune on dizi accompanied by Edward Tan's violin and Dylan Lee's cello.

The musicians then congregated around a collection of gongs and metallophones for the gamelan-inspired Suite of the Thieving Sea by Anne Choo, with solo parts for bamboo flute and bowed rebab. This Javanese-styled music accompanied the dance of Sang Nila Utama surrending his crown to appease buffeting waves, before the premiere of Shin's Sang Nila Utama Meets The Mercat, which saw Li Lingzhi's clarinet, sax and dizi backed by tinkling toy piano.

The mercat is the official mascot of ACE, created by violinist Ayane Sato, and supposedly some descendant of the merlion, Pokemon and Hello Kitty. Even she has a theme of her own, composed by Wong, which combines a march, sea shanty and Anime music.

This final piece of merrymaking saw the appearance of the fluffy blue mascot, also named Ace, in the flesh, who went on to pose for photographs with National Arts Council CEO Kathy Lai and all the children in attendance. Needless to say, everyone present had a good laugh. 

Photographs by the kind permission of Asian Contemporary Ensemble.

QUE SERA SERA / re:mix / Review

QUE SERA SERA
re:mix
Esplanade Recital Studio
Sunday (27 November 2011)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 29 November 2011 with the title "Melodic mix of memories".

Five years is about the age a child begins to remember the melodies he or she has heard, sung or played by a parent, or via any other media. Childhood memories and yearning for simpler times are the premise of the 5th anniversary concert of the string ensemble re:mix, that untiring purveyor of musical nostalgia.

The supreme irony is that much of its music is played by people who were born long after the original music first came out. They were essentially playing their parents’ music. As for their children, and there were many noisy toddlers in the matinee, numbers like the titular Que Sera Sera (from Hitchcock’s 1965 movie The Man Who Knew Too Much) or any of the Beatles songs, The Yellow Submarine and Eleanor Rigby, belong in the realm of classical music.

It was nonetheless a fascinating experience to relive hoary old chestnuts distilled and re-jigged in new wineskins. Recent Cultural Medallion winner Kelly Tang (left) is a master of transcription, and his re-look at Yin Kerong’s Xiao Bai Chuan (Little White Boat) rolled back the years with pleasure.

Further arrangements by younger colleagues Wong Kah Chun and Chen Zhangyi gave new life to Dvorak’s Songs My Mother Taught Me and Chris Babida’s Xin Bu Liao Qing (New Everlasting Love) respectively, the former sung with some longing by the Singapore Lyric Opera Children’s Choir. Yet the sheer cleverness of the arrangements sometimes put the string players to a test in which they did not always emerge with flying colours.

The latter song sounded over-stretched and under-rehearsed, while the remixed Eleanor Rigby by Chen, packed in Yesterday, Hey Jude and pizzicatos in the manner of the Blues from Ravel’s Violin Sonata. Too much of a good thing, one might say. There was no denying leader Foo Say Ming’s (left) virtuosity in Vieuxtemps’s Souvenir d’Amerique, where the emergence of Yankee Doodle brought out smiles and laughs from the audience.

The theme of primary school blues replaced zoological species in a specially modified version of Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of The Animals. Narrator Rosmarie Somaiah’s very witty script entitled Something’s Happening At School is worth several reruns, as was the playing of the twin sisters Low Shao Ying and Low Shao Suan (above) on piano.

The movement Pianists saw pianists and violinists swap places, and cue total mayhem. If that reminded one of school recess periods, this conception would have succeeded beyond its wildest dreams. Happy fifth birthday, re:mix, and may you always retain that inner child in yourselves.