NU SHU, THE SECRET SONGS OF WOMEN / Huayi Chinese Festival of Arts 2015 / Review

NU SHU

Metropolitan Festival Orchestra

conducted by TAN DUN

Huayi Chinese Festival of Arts 2015

Esplanade Concert Hall

Saturday (21 February 2015)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 23 February 2015 with the title "Secret language of women".

The Chinese composer-conductor Tan Dun is arguably the most visible ambassador of Chinese music and arts to the Western-oriented world today. As a composer of Chinese music, he is what Bartok meant for Hungarian music, Ives for Americana and Villa-Lobos for Brasileira. As China opens itself to the world, the living cultures and histories of her people become better known to outsiders, and it is not just about martial arts, Marco Polo, Shih Huangti and tea.

Of course, all those have already been covered in various well-publicised works by Tan. Nü Shu is something far more private and intimate. Subtitled The Secret Songs of Women, Symphony for 13 Microfilms, Harp and Orchestra, the 40-minute-work is a documentary about the bonds that unite women in a male-dominated culture. Mothers, daughters and sisters are the living links in a secret language transmitted via oral tradition, songs and calligraphy.

Courtesy of Esplanade Theatres by the Bay

The setting is a village in Jiangyong county in Hunan province, where this arcane language still lives, albeit tenuously. Although Chen Yuying's harp is the virtuoso protagonist, both she and the Metropolitan Festival Orchestra play counterpoint to the real heroines, eight women caught in film for this synthesis of visual and musical journalism.

A mother sings life's wisdoms to her daughter. Another woman sings about sisterhood. Four women sing as a bride is readied for her wedding. Matrimonial ritual crying and tear-soaked scarves are as much part of this culture as a woman longing for her late grandmother in her spartan abode, caught in a 360 degree pan by the camera.

Their voices and songs are recorded verbatim and unrehearsed, and in one instance The Book of Tears, octagenarian Mo Cuifeng hesitates, coughs and cries with each recounting of her fading memories. Accompanying bass clarinet, cor anglais and trombones combine to make this a poignant and unforgettable moment.

By courtesy of Esplanade Theatres by the Bay

Not every chapter is gloomy; there is a recurring theme resembling one that appears in Bruch's First Violin Concerto and Richard Strauss' Alpine Symphony. There is also an ongoing thread that involves water, in this case tears, lakes and the river as a life-sustaining source. The final apotheosis is a dreamt one, of the eight women frolicking in the river, a symbolism of hope for the future. Women are the pillars of families; their tears of sorrow and happiness will never be in vain.

The first half of the evening was a standard concert, beginning with Li Huanzhi's Spring Festival Overture. Huqin virtuoso Zhao Lei starred in Zhao Jiping's Grand Mansion Gate while guzheng exponent Yuan Li did the honours for Guan Xia's Hua Mulan. Both were offered substantial encore time to further parade their skills. Liu Yuan's Train Toccata was another showpiece for the train music collection (joining the likes of Honegger, Villa-Lobos and Johann Strauss), performed with requisite aplomb.

By courtesy of Esplanade Theatres by the Bay

As if symbolic of the emancipation of women in music, the men of the orchestra were attired in all black while the women were allowed to wear whatever they fancied. 

CD Reviews (The Straits Times, June 2014)

VADYM KHOLODENKO

Gold Medalist, 14^th Van Cliburn

International Piano Competition

Harmonia Mundi 907605 / ****1/2

In June last year, the Ukraine-born and Moscow-trained pianist Vadym Kholodenko was awarded 1^st Prize in the 2013 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. This live recording of selected preliminary and semi-final round performances demonstrates why his triumph was wholly deserving.

Although his version of Igor Stravinsky’s Three Movements From Petrushka was neither the fastest nor most accurate account in the competition, it came across as the most convincing because of the canny sense of pacing and choreographic grace. Instead of the all-too-common mad rush that passes for virtuosity, his magisterial control and narrative sweep made for a most gripping conception of the ballet’s earthy energy and neuroticism.

His audacity in programming eleven of Franz Liszt’s Twelve Transcendental Études was matched by his execution. The requisites of power, heft and endurance in Mazeppa, Wild Jagd and Étude No.10 (Allegro Agitato Molto) coexist happily with the sensitivity and finesse in Feux follets, Paysage and the rapturous Harmonies du soir. An earlier studio recording of Ricordanza was inserted to complete the set. This is what it takes to be pianistic world-beater.  

TAN DUN Concerto for Orchestra

Orchestral Theatre / Symphonic Poem

Hong Kong Philharmonic / TAN DUN

Naxos 8.570608 / ****1/2

Although the Chinese composer Tan Dun is universally known for his martial arts film scores (Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon), he remains a serious symphonist one who successfully marries the disparate worlds of Chinese music, theatre and culture with Western aesthetics. His Concerto for Orchestra (2012) was derived from his Four Secret Roads of Marco Polo commissioned by the Berlin Philharmonic. Here Tan imagines the a geographical, musical and spiritual journey taken by the Venetian adventurer-explorer as he confronts the exotic East before arriving in the Forbidden City of Kublai Khan. The Asian-ness of his soundscapes is implied in its instrumental timbres and rhythms rather than the use of actual themes.

Orchestral Theatre (1990) was one of his earliest successes, a dramatic and atonal work that relives the shamanistic rituals in his native Hunan. The Symphonic Poem on Three Notes (2012) is a fantasy on the notes A-B natural-C (La-Si-Do), which sounds like the name of its dedicatee Placido Domingo, a gift for his 70^th birthday. Listen to this most accessible work first and then move onto the picaresque scenes of the Concerto before ending with the more abstract and mystical musings in Orchestral Theatre. Tan’s mastery of orchestral textures is enthralling and exhaustive in its use of tonal colours and occasional vocal effects, and the invigorating performances he brings out from the Hong Kong Philharmonic are exemplary.

MODERN VOICES - CLASS OF 1978 / Ding Yi Music Company / Review

MODERN VOICES – CLASS OF 1978

Ding Yi Music Company

Esplanade Recital Studio

Saturday (3 August 2013)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 5 August 2013 with the title "Invigorating mix in new music".

The year 1978 was an important one for Chinese music. With Chairman Mao Zedong dead and the Cultural Revolution ended, the Central Conservatory in Beijing reopened its doors to a cohort of students whose lives had been disrupted by years of chaos, mayhem and forced labour. They would later become the voice of Musical China in the West in the 21^st century, their legacies celebrated in this two-hour-long concert by the Ding Yi Music Company directed by Lim Yau.   

The evening began with Zhou Long’s Mount A Long Wind (2004), scored for erhu, pipa, dizi, guzheng and percussion. Impressionist in colour, the work inspired by Li Bai’s Xing Lu Nan (The Hard Road) was evocative of wind, water and nature’s elements. Poetic and meditative in part, it also drew upon a raw primal energy that gave the concert a stirring opening.



Tan Dun’s Ghost Opera (1994) is one of his best known scores, almost a microcosm of his entire well-exposed output. The parts played by a western string quartet (violinists Siew Yi Li and Lim Hui, violist Mervyn Wong and cellist Lin Juan) and pipa soloist Chua Yew Kok, all of whom multi-tasked as percussionists and vocalists, were both visual and musical. The hall was cloaked in darkness, with spotlights on the soloists and glass bowls of water.

Music from a Bach Prelude merged with the Chinese folksong Xiao Bai Cai (Little Cabbage), shamanistic yelps and Shakespearean quotes, traditions representing the “past”. The sounds of water (and the effects of gongs being immersed), metal (percussion), stone (struck close to resonating open mouths) and paper (a long roll being flapped in space) were the symbols of “eternity”, played by performers of “now”.

This 40-minute theatrical experience played out as an enthralling dialogue between “ghosts” of the past and future, confronting the present. Its symbolism was not lost on the full-house audience, which greeted the convincing performance with a most stirring of ovations.

Chen Yi’s Huqin Suite (1997) was brought on tour by the Singapore Symphony to Germany in 2000. This was however the Singapore premiere of the version scored for Chinese instruments (2007), with Chin Yen Choong playing on three bowed instruments. The erhu with its mellifluous singing was contrasted with the lower and more guttural zhonghu recitations, and capped by the diminutive squeak of the gaohu in the furious final dance. 

The concert closed with Extase III (2010) by Chen Qigang, well known for having been the Music Director of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. A virtuosic score much in the tradition of Messiaen and Boulez, Veda Lin stood out for her ceaseless acrobatics and breathtaking long phrases (circular breathing being the secret) on the oboe. This fantasy on the folksong San Shi Li Pu also pitted her with Wong Deli’s suona, as the music drew to a feverish and raucous climax. Both soloist and ensemble emerged first among equals, in a concert of new music that was both invigorating and inspiring. 

Concert photographs courtesy of Ding Yi Music Company.

TAN DUN'S MARTIAL ARTS TRILOGY / Singapore Festival Orchestra / Review

TAN DUN’S MARTIAL ARTS TRILOGY
Esplanade Huayi Festival
Singapore Festival Orchestra
Esplanade Concert Hall
Friday (27 January 2012)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 30 January 2012 with the title "Tan Dun's trilogy a feast for the senses".

The one sure sign that Chinese culture has been wholly embraced by the global mainstream and consciousness was how Hollywood greeted Ang Lee’s martial arts epic movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon of 2000. Central to its phenomenal success was the Oscar-winning original score by Chinese-American composer Tan Dun, whose music has become as much a part of cinematographic lore as the scores of John Williams, Miklos Rozsa, Sergei Prokofiev and Erich Korngold before him.

The Martial Arts Trilogy presented Tan’s music from three wuxia movies for concert hall consumption in the form of three concertos, performed alongside action sequences projected on the screen. Suites would have been the more accurate description for these scores, as the music unfolded in multiple disparate movements, providing a capsule overview of the narrative.

Heard on its own, the 45-minute long Hero Concerto for violin and orchestra, written for Zhang Yimou’s film about the first emperor Shi Huangdi, might have been a tiresome prospect. However the magic about movies is the contemporary synthesis of various art forms into a glorious whole, serving present times what grand opera did for the 18th and 19th centuries.

Effectively written music makes a movie come alive by providing the story-telling an added dimension for the senses. Thus Wang Jiamin’s violin pyrotechnics, abetted by Zhao Xiaoxia’s atmospheric guqin, came to ably portray the self-sacrificing hero and heroine amid gravity-defying swordplay, intimate love scenes and breathtaking landscapes.

SSO Principal Cellist Ng Pei Sian reprised Yo-Yo Ma’s role for the Crouching Tiger Concerto, containing the most familiar music of the lot. Going beyond mere notes, his demanding part, full of sliding portamentos, violent pizzicatos and assorted effects, lived the role with absolute gusto. The Singapore Festival Orchestra, surely now the Republic’s de facto film orchestra, responded to Tan’s precise and dramatic directions with great immediacy and responsiveness, with a busy percussion section particularly relishing their parts.

The Banquet Concerto, with pianist Sun Jiayi as pugilist in a fiery red dress, had the least Chinese-sounding music. Tan cited as compositional influences Bartok and Stravinsky, for their raw percussive ostinatos, but it was the unbridled lyricism of Rachmaninov that stood out. That was perhaps the very reason, despite the death and mayhem it accompanied, that sent the full-house audience home happy and sated.

Two Maestros Meet: Tan Dun with Chan Tze Law, Music Director of the Singapore Festival Orchestra.