NAFA CHINESE ORCHESTRA GALA CONCERT / Review

NAFA CHINESE ORCHESTRA

GALA CONCERT

Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre Auditorium

Thursday (12 April 2018)

The Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts is the premier Singaporean tertiary institution for the study of traditional Chinese instruments. Its Chinese orchestra, rightfully, is also the finest of its kind among the local educational institutions. In a concert celebrating the institution’s 80^th anniversary helmed by veteran Chinese conductor Wang Yongji, the NAFA Orchestra, with its student body augmented by alumni and Singapore Chinese Orchestra members, rose to a rarefied standard of playing that lovers of Chinese music will all be proud of.

Like the Singapore Chinese Orchestra's concert the week before, this was a programme of excellent showpieces – with no kitsch – that displayed the best of the orchestra's abilities besides highlighting solo prowess. Lady composer Wang Dan Hong's works are a case in point. Opening the concert was her Ode To The Sun, which worked from a slow opening to a rousing allegro. A winsome dizi melody accompanied by plucked strings (pipas and ruans) later soaring to a high with raucous drumming, were highlights in this music which resembled that of an epic film.

Similarly emotive was an abridged version of Wang's Ru Shi, a concerto for guzheng which featured as soloist one of NAFA's most brilliant alumni Yvonne Tay, now a principal member of Ding Yi Music Company. This concerto was derived from music from Wang's score for the film of the same title, about the legendary courtesan, her trials and tribulations. The slow to fast form was again employed, culminating in a show of digital virtuosity, one which also employed modern technical devices. There was a faux ending, which induced some premature applause, a ruse to further its narrative to a definitive but emphatic close.

Qiao Haibo, Principal dizi in the Shanghai Chinese Orchestra, played on no less than four instruments in Qu Xiaosong's Divine Melody. These included the dizi, xun (ocarina), xiao and shakuhachi, each producing a distinctively different timbre. Based on the poems of Qu Yuan, the music was atmospheric and lyrical, before following an increasingly furious martial beat to a rousing and heroic end.

In the second half, Zhou Chenglong's Nao Hua Deng (Playing Flower Lanterns) provided an imperious show for the orchestra's very impressive suona section. Theirs is a highly plangent sonority, ceremonial in intention and ritualistic in intensity. Subtler harmonies were also highlighted in the playing, that was later accompanied by an 8-member battery of percussion. It was revealed after the work that no less than four of its members were actually guzheng players standing in! Much detail of the music came through amid this racket, confirming the orchestra's mastery of this most piquant piece. 

NAFA's Head of Chinese instrumental studies, erhu player Sunny Wong Sun Tat, was the soloist in Jin Fuzai's concertante work When The Rivers Thaw In Spring. Arguably the best work of the concert, it was a rhapsodic wallow through the string instrument's extremes of registers. 

Inspired by Su Shi's poetry, it began lyrically and plotted its congenial course before arriving at an impressive cadenza. Disaster struck midway through the concerto when a string snapped. Wong coolly swapped an erhu with a front-desk member before excusing himself for two agonising minutes. Returning with an intact instrument, he blazed a path through this beautiful music to a splendidly animated close. If anything, the rupture galvanised all the players into an altogether excitable finish.

The final work was Peng Xiu Wen's arrangement of a Beijing opera favourite The Surging Of Turbulent Clouds. Highlighted in this more traditional number was solos from the sheng, suona and a centrally-placed jinghu, highest pitched member of the huqin string family. The rhythmic dance, aided by the incessant beat of a temple block made for a showy and grand close to the concert. There was also time for an encore, which was a medley which including amongst other tunes Di Tanjung Katong.

A very eventful and enjoyful concert, and one that foresees a very bright future for all these talented young musicians, and the strong case for the pursuit of great Chinese orchestral music.      

TRADITIONAL MODERNITY / NAFA Chinese Orchestra / Review

TRADITIONAL MODERNITY

Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts 

Chinese Orchestra

Lee Foundation Theatre

Thursday (7 April 2016)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 9 April 2016

The oxymoron in the title of this concert by the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts Chinese Orchestra arises from the fact that Chinese orchestras of today do not just perform the classics. They have to adapt to performing new music and non-Chinese compositions. This versatility has enabled an ancient art to survive, thrive and remain relevant to today's audiences.

The concert's first half, conducted by Moses Gay, opened with two jazzy numbers. Law Wai Lun's Old Shanghai was specially composed as the prelude to music for the 1930s silent movie The Goddess starring the tragically short-lived Ruan Lingyu. Infectiously rhythmic winds were the highlight, contrasted with the rigourous beat of percussion that dominated Law and Tan Kah Yong's more sultry arrangement of One Night in Beijing.

Three familiar American numbers allowed the orchestra to relive the “big band” era. Eric Watson's arrangement of Gershwin's Strike Up The Band unfortunately saw the melody submerged  beneath an overzealous march rhythm, but it got better for Law's arrangement of W.C.Handy's St Louis Blues with a piano part added, and the more relaxed trot of Leroy Anderson's Horse and Buggy, arranged by Sim Boon Yew.

The big work was an abridged version of Law's The Celestial Web, with confident drama students Lei Jian and Kang Ying Yu narrating poetry by Cultural Medallion recipient Tan Swie Hian, with subject matter relating to the goddesses Vasumitra and Gaia, brotherhood of man and the eternal cosmos. The recitations were crisply delivered amid celebratory music, and only non-Sinophones need fret about the absence of English translations.

The second half was conducted Quek Ling Kiong, who exuded the same exuberant energy as Yeo Puay Hian's Hard Rock 2002, which basked in a drum set and electric bass. He also introduced the familiar strains of Watson's Mahjong Kakis, a most congenial original work about friends indulging in a favourite pastime which evoked no little memories of 1980s television series themes.

Almost an overdose of nostalgia arrived in Sim's arrangement of Jim Lim's music for the short film Xiao Zhi Tiao (Little Note) by Royston Tan. The orchestra accompanied a screening of the movie about the mutual love of mother and child through the years, a tearjerker that invariably gets viewers clutching onto their Kleenex.

This concert of variety closed with Wang Dan Hong's Colours of Jiangnan, a single-movement triple concerto featuring soloists Sunny Wong (Head of Chinese Instrumental Studies, on erhu), Yu Jia (pipa) and Yin Zhi Yang (dizi). Arguably the most traditional of the works, it was veritable showcase for the varied timbres and techniques of all three instruments in solo and not too complicated polyphony.

The orchestra's accompaniment was both sensitive and non-intrusive, allowing the soloists to stand out in the limelight. Its most important achievement, however, was its mastery of different styles and genres, which will stand the players in good stead for future performing careers.

NAFA ORCHESTRA / Review

NAFA ORCHESTRA

Lee Foundation Theatre

Thursday (29 October 2015)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 31 October 2015 with the title "Two tales of Romeo And Juliet".

There is a Romeo and Juliet tragic love story in every culture, and this concert by the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts Orchestra conducted by Lim Yau brought together the Chinese version with Shakespeare's in two hours of music. It was a good example of concert programming bridging the East and the West.

Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai, better known as the “Butterfly Lovers”, is a well-loved and enduring Chinese tale. The concerto jointly composed by Chen Gang and He Zhanhao of 1959 was originally scored for violin and western symphony orchestra, but the Chinese have rightfully laid claim to their heritage by scoring it for huqin solo and Chinese instruments.

This evening's version was a composite featuring gaohu and western instruments. The soloist Sunny Wong, head of Chinese instrumental studies in NAFA, has a claim to fame. His father Wong On Yuen was the pioneer in playing the concerto on the gaohu during the 1970s. This “ownership” was immediately apparent by the way his instrument sang through the concerto.

The gaohu approximates the high human operatic voice in a way the violin cannot. The tonal inflexions, slurs and slides of Beijing opera is often elusive to non-native musicians, and here Wong made it sound totally natural. His playing alternated between moving plaintiveness, like a Chinese version of bel canto, and dazzling pyrotechnics. The use of dizi, played by Sun Rui, instead of the flute also added an element of authenticity. Wong's duet with cellist Li Jingli as the lovestruck couple met provided tender moments.   

The orchestra, whose part is unabashedly sentimental, backed this enterprise to the hilt, and there were plenty of cheers from the full-house audience after its conclusion. Very soon, the ensemble had to switch gears for 13 movements from Prokofiev's popular ballet Romeo and Juliet. These were extracted from three orchestral suites which the Russian composer had devised, and performed in the order of appearance in the ballet.

Thus the narrative of the story was not jumbled or lost, beginning with the dissonant cacophony and heavy plodding that is the feuding families Montagues And Capulets. The emotional roller-coaster provided by the sequence of scenarios and dances was well handled by the young orchestra, augmented by faculty members and guest players from Taiwan's National Dong Hwa University.

Strings were very disciplined, casting a fine sheen in sweeping lyrical moments, which were many. Brass and woodwind were somewhat exposed in the Minuet, but made up by fine showings elsewhere. As a group, the highly dramatic and violent Death Of Tybalt, contrasted with the rapturous Romeo And Juliet Before Parting became the score's emotional high points.

Even celesta and piano had their say in the gentle tinkling that was in the Aubade. With Romeo At Juliet's Grave, the final number, an hour of passion had passed by all too swiftly. The NAFA Orchestra has much to recommend, and its regular concerts – now requiring no tickets for admission – are to be keenly anticipated.