SSO Gala Concert: Sarah Chang Plays Bruch

SARAH CHANG PLAYS BRUCH
Singapore Symphony Orchestra
Esplanade Concert Hall
Friday (26 March 2010)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 29 March 2010.

For Korean-American violinist Sarah Chang’s fifth appearance in Singapore since 2002, fears of satiety by her regular visits were unfounded. Despite higher ticket prices for this Gala Concert, the hall was brimming, with gallery seats packed shoulder-to-shoulder.

Unfortunately, the former prodigy was nowhere near her peak. At best, her performance of Bruch’s First Violin Concerto (composer pictured left)ticked off the boxes with a big gestures and technique; the opening solo was long-held and close to flawless. At worst, she sounded jaded, seemingly going through the motions.

Over-familiarity with this warhorse rendered its little more than blah, so cue a less-than- vociferous audience reaction. Music took second place to Chang’s screaming outfit - cross between tinsel-laden Christmas tree and giant guppy - her onstage gavottes and wide sweeps of the bow. As if having too little to do, she also joined in the orchestra’s tutti passages.

Not all of it was disappointing, as the slow movement had genuine lyricism aided by a purity of tone. This was however marred by a finale fraying at the edges, with a tendency for rushing, as if to finish a tedious job. There was no encore, rare for a gala concert, which was just as well if she was not in the right mood.

The evening was redeemed by the Nordic works, a truer reflection of the concert’s quality. Lemminkainen’s Return, from the Four Legends of the Finnish epic Kalevela by Jean Sibelius, gave the brass a terrific workout, serving more than a warm-up. The tension built up by Music Director Shui Lan’s pacing of the work was also palpable.

Even better was Dane Carl Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony, one of the great 20th century symphonies. Over a sinister string ostinato, woodwinds in couples cast a malevolent spell, which came to fatal fruition with Jonathan Fox’s insistent snare drumbeat. A call to battle was Nielsen’s (left) musical vision of war, death and destruction.

Shui expertly kept a tight rein throughout, guiding the juggernaut through minefields of peril, not least the closing movement’s fugue, which began in a jocular manner and turned increasingly malignant. The orchestra last played this in 2003, coinciding with SARS and the Allied invasion of Iraq. While the troops are still bogged down in the Gulf, the orchestra has improved in leaps and bounds. And that is all that matters.

CD Reviews (The Straits Times, March 2010)

BRUCH Violin Concerto No.1 

BRAHMS Violin Concerto 

Sarah Chang, Violin 

Dresdner Philharmonic / Kurt Masur 

EMI Classics 9670042 / ***** 

The Korean-American Sarah Chang looks likely to be one of those violinists – like Heifetz, Oistrakh, Menuhin and Perlman before her – who is going to record every major concerto in the repertory. She is accomplishing this in a very steady manner, beginning with the Tchaikovsky concerto in 1993 (when she was just 12), and now scaling the lofty Teutonic masterpieces of Bruch and Brahms. 

This is a most logical coupling, given that both concertos were inspired by the Hungarian-born virtuoso Joseph Joachim. Both have meaty first movements, balanced by slow movements filled with tender yearnings, and closing with gypsy-like élan. It is almost a given that Chang’s versions are predictably good, a brilliant technique allied by perfect intonation and much expressiveness all round. Her German partners also provide first-rate support; this is after all their heritage. What next for young Sarah? The pinnacle of Beethoven now looks a very inviting prospect indeed.

BERNSTEIN Serenade 

BARBER Violin Concerto 

VADIM GLUZMAN, Violin 

Sao Paulo Symphony / John Neschling 

BIS SACD-1662 / ****1/2 

This sensible coupling presents two of the most popular and regularly programmed 20th century American violin concertos. Samuel Barber’s concerto (1939) is delightfully top-heavy, two lyrical slow movements followed by a brief but hellishly difficult finale. The latter was so demanding as to completely baffle its original dedicatee. 

Leonard Bernstein’s Serenade (1954), inspired by Plato’s Symposium and consisting of five conjoined movements, reveals an appealing blend of melody and rhythmic exuberance. West Side Story was to be his next work, but both share a distinct imprimatur of the same master. The Ukrainian-Israeli violinist Vadim Gluzman has both the technique and tonal allure to pull it off. The Swiss-American composer Ernest Bloch’s soulful Baal Shem (Three Pictures of Chassidic Life) in its orchestral guise, makes for a generous bonus.

SCHUBERT Winterreise 

MARK PADMORE, Tenor 

PAUL LEWIS, Piano 

Harmonia Mundi 907484 / ***** 

Franz Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise (Winter Journey), composed in 1827, just one year before his premature demise, is a bleak metaphorical journey into oblivion. Its 24 song settings of poems by Wilhelm Müller reflect Schubert’s own disappointments in life, being forever luckless in love and ravaged by syphilis. The words are chilling in any language, and the landscape described forbidding. 

To this, British tenor Mark Padmore adds a dimension of gravitas usually associated with baritones and basses. His dark gravel-like vocal textures are well suited in the portrayal of grizzled despondency. The first song Gute Nacht (Good Night) is a farewell to love, a walk into the darkness. While it retains slivers of hope, these are progressively dashed. In Die Post (The Post), the protagonist imagines a letter from his sweetheart arriving, but it is only his frenzied heart beating. 

Letzte Hoffnung (Last Hope) hangs like a withered leaf buffeted by the wind, and Im Dorfe (In The Village), growling dogs leave him sleepless with nothing to dream about. By the final song Der Leiermann (The Hurdy Gurdy Man), desolation is complete, its banal drones reduced to pitiful bleats. Has there been a more poignant representation of a slow death? Or a greater song cycle than this?

Singapore Sun Festival 2008 / Los Angeles Philharmonic: Review

SINGAPORE SUN FESTIVAL 2008
Los Angeles Philharmonic
ESA-PEKKA SALONEN, Conductor
Saturday (25 October 2008)
Esplanade Concert Hall

This review appeared in The Straits Times on 28 October 2008

The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s first concert at the Singapore Sun Festival began in a best possible way. The gorgeousness of its lush strings was immediate apparent in the subdued and hushed atmosphere of Sibelius’ Death of Melisande, with each and every member responding as one to the deftest gestures of its out-going Finnish Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen.

Its poignant portrayal of a last gasp of breath before the glowing embers of life ebbed away was awe-inspiring because of its sheer control. And it was with this intimate sound that opened Sibelius’s popular Violin Concerto, which starred the phenomenal Korean-American Sarah Chang (left). Her steely and unerring view of the warhorse combined lyricism and poetry with requisite dexterity, traversing delicate pianissimos to slashing fortissimos, with much colour and texture in between.

The orchestra, no mere accompanists, responded with an almost overpowering vigour; Sibelius was after all one of music’s great symphony writers. The ante was upped in the finale, where Chang went for broke, with all semblance of caution tossed into the Arctic winds. This seeming duel between violin and orchestra added the visceral excitement of walking a tightrope without nets.

The tour de force of the evening was surely the orchestra’s Technicolor vision of Debussy’s La Mer (The Sea), an impressionist view of the English Channel. Anchoring this dynamic, irrepressible life force laid a steady pulse helmed tautly by Salonen, adorned with splashes of aquarelles and polished to a fine sheen. No orchestral details were spared, and each of the solos came through great transparency and immediacy. This music, which bewildered early audiences (and even some today), sounded positively vital, as essential as Bach and Beethoven.

A perfect evening, to this pair of ears, would have rounded up with Ravel’s decadent La Valse. But his rhythmically strait-jacketed Bolero proved to be a crowd-pleaser, its hypnotic chant passing through various hands in an inexorable crescendo before closing with a big bang. It was hard not to applaud this act of non-music (in the composer’s own words), because its stirring effect worked charms.

The two encores further confirmed the orchestra’s virtuosity; more hushed string heaven in Sibelius’ wistful Valse Triste and a mini-blockbuster in Stravinsky’s early gem Fireworks. Orchestral pyrotechnics indeed.