MUSICAL FRONTIER
Ding Yi Music Company
with ensemble PHASE
Esplanade Recital Studio
Wednesday (1 November 2023)
This review was published in The Straits Times on 3 November 2023 with the title "Conquering musical frontier".
Ding Yi Music Company’s mission to further Chinese instrumental chamber music has often seen collaborations with musical cultures outside its sphere of influence. Its latest guests were five musicians from the Seoul-based South Korean traditional instrumental group ensemble PHASE.
Korean instruments are variants of older Chinese instruments, and while these appear similar on surface, different sound palettes are the result. The five players in stunning hanbok, who performed on piri and daegeum (wind instruments), haegeum (bowed strings), gayageum and geomungo (plucked strings), opened accounts with Korean composer Sngkn Kim’s Music For Five Instruments (Op.6-3).
This was deliberately slow music, filled with long-held notes and silences, where stillness and stasis ruled. Minimalist in extremis, one was drawn and mesmerised by its raw and unembellished sonic textures. Encapsulated within just nine hypnotic minutes, was this the primal sound of creation?
Ding Yi, led by conductor Lien Boon Hua, had a similarly spare work of its own in Liu Yuan’s Porcelain, where pointillist fragments and shards coalesced into a kinetic whole, symbolising the process of making pottery and fired earthenware. Similarities between two different but related musical cultures began to take root.
The first work combining both groups was Jon Lin Chua’s exquisitely beautiful reworking of In Search Of Plum Blossoms. The Koreans opened with the folktune Maehwa Taryeong before the general ensemble worked on the work’s torso, quoting Chinese melodies Mei Hua San Nong and Mei Hua Cao, all with floral connections. It was gratifying to see the haegeum and daegeum (similar to erhu and xiao) carrying the big tunes.
In Chow JunYi’s invigorating Riding The Winds And Waves, Kim Minju was totally captivating on the geomungo. This six-stringed zither related to the guqin was plucked, also stroked and struck with a wooden rod. Its mellow and earthy textures also possessed a percussive dimension, the vigour of which saw a supporting strut fly off its base at the exuberant close.
Ding Yi had a star of its own in Tan Jie Qing, graceful yangqin soloist in Taiwanese composer Chia-Yu Wu’s Formosan Blue Magpie. Idiomatically the lightest work on show, its film music vibe resembled the late Ryuichi Sakamoto’s music from The Last Emperor, but had florid cadenzas to showcase her virtuosity.
On the other hand, Korean Myungsun Lee’s Synergy was the most modernistic in sound, but employed its nine musicians in heterophony or playing in unison. It was thus interesting to hear violent pizzicatos on double bass replicated with a quieter intensity on the geomungo.
The final soloist was Minseop Song on piri, a double-reed bamboo oboe, in Dance of Qiuci from Zhao Jiping’s The Silk Road Fantasia Suite. The rustic Central Asian dance found a perfect voice in its folksy timbre and one did not miss the guan of the original score.
The two-hour long concert closed with both ensembles united in Gao Weijie’s Song Of Rainbow Skirts and Feather Robes, a work showcasing all instruments – Chinese and Korean – to maximally colourful and vivid effect. Ceremonial pomp soon gave way to a fast syncopated dance, bringing this successful musical experiment to a rousing conclusion.
