SCHUBERT'S DIE SCHÖNE MÜLLERIN / Alan Bennett and Choi Hye-Seon / Review

DIE SCHÖNE MÜLLERIN

ALAN BENNETT, Tenor

CHOI HYE-SEON, Piano

SOTA Concert Hall

Friday (14 February 2014)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 17 February 2014 with the title "Conveying unrequited love exquisitely".

How did you spend your Valentine’s Day evening? Was it an expensive restaurant and overpriced roses with someone you were hoping to impress, or in the company of the music of Franz Schubert? The Austrian composer was one of the great Romantics, for whom Fate dealt a bad hand in a tragically short life. His Lieder and song cycles dwelled on love, but he was not to enjoy its fruits.

His 1823 cycle Die Schöne Müllerin (The Fair Maid Of The Mill) of 20 songs after poetry by Wilhelm Müller was about young love, unrequited and rebuffed, leading ultimately to despair and suicide. Not quite the stuff for courting couples, but given the chemistry between the husband and wife team of tenor Alan Bennett and pianist Choi Hye-Seon, one could be easily persuaded.

The concert began with two solo Impromptus (from Op.90) performed by Choi. The rippling right hand figurations over which lyricism ruled supreme provided a prelude to the exquisite hour and a bit to follow, besides allowing late-comers to settle in their seats.

Bennett possesses an unusually bright and youthful voice, one with a clear ring in the topmost registers, belying his hefty physical stature. Singing completely from memory and not fettered with a score, he was able to convey a myriad of moods and emotions by communicating directly at the audience.

From the unabashed optimism of Das Wandern (Wandering) and Wohin? (Whither) to hesitant uncertainty of Der Neugierige (Curiosity) and Ungeduld (Impatience), one could readily follow the young miller’s descent into emotional turmoil. This was aided by a booklet with the German texts and translations, but the downside was the rustling caused by hundreds of leaves being noisily turned. At least people were paying attention.

It was a testament to Bennett’s art and endurance that each song sounded freshly minted, and there was little or no evidence of strain as he progressed. The 14^th and 15^th songs Der Jäger (The Huntsman) and Eifersucht und Stolz (Jealousy and Pride), with indignant words spat out at a furious pace, were accomplished with relative ease and facility. His partner Choi was sensitive and supportive throughout.

The cycle’s last three songs, also its most famous, were wonderfully portrayed. The bleakness of Tröckne Blumen (Wilted Flowers), synonymous with love snuffed out, and the dirge-like rhythm of Der Müller und Der Bach (The Miller and The Brook) were allusions of death itself. The final Des Baches Wiegenlied (The Brook’s Lullaby) provided an uneasy balm of terminal repose, with its waters obliviously washing over hope and life itself.    

The encore demanded by the audience was a teaser for the next song cycle to come, Winterreise (Winter Journey). A warm reception for Bennett and Choi awaits.

BRAHMS & RACHMANINOV / Orchestra of the Music Makers / Review

BRAHMS & RACHMANINOV

Orchestra of the Music Makers

School of the Arts Concert Hall

Friday (3 January 2014)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 6 January 2014 with the title "Stirring end by young musicians".

A concert programme of Brahms’s Violin Concerto and Rachmaninov’s Third Symphony may be staples in a professional symphony orchestra’s season, but for a youth orchestra which has just celebrated its fifth anniversary, it is more like a dream. But dreams are what the young musicians of the Orchestra of the Music Makers (OMM) live on and thrive in.

The orchestra even has its own Principal Guest Conductor, the highly experienced British maestro Christopher Adey, who led this latest concert. One might not have guessed they were playing these works for the first time, for the maturity displayed spoke volumes.

Even if the opening to the Brahms sounded tentative, it was a matter of time before the orchestral tutti exerted itself and blossomed. Then it was left to young French violinist Amaury Coeyteux, Concertmaster of the Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra, to arrestingly enter the spotlight.

He exuded a sleek and refined tone, robust yet not roughly-hewn, and incisive to make its indelible mark on the score. While exhibiting a wide range of dynamics, it was the sweetness in the singing passages that impressed most. This was capped by a sizzling laser-lit cadenza by Hungarian virtuoso Joseph Joachim to further his credentials.

Tay Kai Tze’s lovely oboe solo in the slow movement proved an equal partner, and the gypsy abandon displayed by soloist and all in Rondo finale brought the work to a rousing conclusion. Coeytaux’s blistering encore of The Furies from Ysaye’s Second Sonata was well chosen, as the medieval chant Dies Irae it obsesses upon was a prelude for things to come.

Rachmaninov’s last symphony, composed in exile, was a nostalgic throwback to the gushy emotions of the Romantic era. In that respect, the first movement’s big melody, first heard on the cellos, was disappointingly muted. The tempos adopted by conductor Adey were also too leisurely. While more experienced ensembles might have sustained the pace better, the overall effect was one of drag, which even the climactic development could not really overcome.

Things got much better in the central movement, when the brisk march-like interlude that takes place of a scherzo pepped things up considerably. There were also excellent solo-playing by concertmaster Edward Tan, flautist Cheryl Lim and Lee Chun Howe on cor anglais.

The finale, arguably the symphony’s weakest movement, arrived on a full head of steam. As if running out of ideas, a furious fugato was furnished, and this challenge was taken up by the orchestra with great fervour and relish. With the Dies Irae chant strongly hinted but not fully quoted, the work rode on its Russian roots to a stirring close. This highly demanding concert (more for its players than the audience) could not have had a better ending. 

   
Concert photographs by the kind permission of the Orchestra of the Music Makers.

NEW YEAR'S EVE GALA CONCERT / The Philharmonic Orchestra / Review

NEW YEAR’S EVE GALA CONCERT 2014

The Philharmonic Orchestra

School of the Arts Concert Hall

Tuesday (31 December 2013)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 2 January 2013 with the title "Good start for music in new year".

Call it what you want, it was the last concert of the year 2013 or the first concert of 2014. For The Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Lim Yau, this was its third edition of what appears to be hopefully an enduring tradition. Vienna has its New Year’s Day Concert and London boasts of The Last Night of the Proms, so why not a Singaporean New Year’s Eve Concert including a countdown in the absence of Gurmit Singh?

Dvorak’s Carnival Overture began the concert on a rousing high, enveloping the generously filled and reverberant hall with a sonorous lustre. There was a delicious violin solo by concertmaster Loh Jun Hong which rose magically above the hubbub of the music’s general busyness.

There was even time to include a symphony, and it was American Don Gillis’s Symphony No.5 ½, or Symphony for Fun, one stocking-filled with musical in-jokes and gags. The warm brass chorale and Veda Lin’s lovely cor anglais solo at the beginning of the slow movement Spiritual? were an obvious dig at the Largo from Dvorak’s New World Symphony.  

The final two movements swung from serious Italian opera to jazz (the 3^rd movement was titled Scherzophrenia) in the company of excellent clarinettist Ralph Emmanuel Lim, and the wild conclusion mashed the gaiety of Stravinsky’s Petrushka with a Coplandesque hoedown. Good humour went into full swing when conductor Lim ordered the audience to get up and shake, rattle and roll to the traditional Cuban Peanut Vendor’s Song.   

Two vocal items also proved a hit, when sopranos Yin Yue and Su Yiwen blended beautifully in the Flower Duet from Delibes’s opera Lakmé, which will forever be remembered as that British Airways commercial. Su also warmed up to the dazzling coloratura flourishes of Johann Strauss the Younger’s Voices Of Spring, comfortably rising above the orchestra’s beat.

Two familiar but contrasting waltzes, Strauss’s On The Beautiful Blue Danube and Sibelius’s bittersweet Valse Triste, gave listeners opportunities to revel and reflect on the past year, while looking forward to the new one. The bubbly emcee Andrew Mowatt asked audience members for their new year resolutions, while his should be not to refer to his employers The Philharmonic Orchestra as the Singapore Philharmonic Orchestra, a defunct outfit from the 1970s.

The countdown played out magnificently to the striding rhythm from Respighi’s Pines of The Appian Way (from The Pines of Rome), representing the inexorably march of time. Amid handshakes, hugs and hurrahs, Strauss The Elder’s Radetzky March accompanied a clap-along and hands were held for a nostalgic rendering of Auld Lang Syne. All these portend for a good year of music in 2014.

    

All photographs by the kind permission of The Philharmonic Orchestra.