SINGAPORE-CHINA GALA SYMPHONY CONCERT / Shanghai Nine Trees Philharmonic Orchestra / Review

 

SINGAPORE-CHINA 

GALA SYMPHONY CONCERT

Shanghai Nine Trees 

Philharmonic Orchestra

Esplanade Concert Hall

Sunday (26 October 2025)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 28 October 2025 with the title "Classical collaboration marking six decades of Singapore-China ties".

Sixty years of Singapore-China diplomacy was celebrated with a concert by the Shanghai Nine Trees Philharmonic Orchestra led by the world-renowned Chinese conductor Tang Muhai. The resident orchestra of the Shanghai Nine Trees Future Art Center in Fengxian District was augmented by many local players to perform a programme of works representing both nations.

The evening opened with Singaporean Felix Phang’s Pasat Merdu (Melodious Market) which featured six musicians from The Straits Ensemble. This very accessible work skillfully combining elements of Chinese, Malay and Indian music, premiered by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra at its 2023 National Day Concert, was a microcosm of the harmonious melting pot that is our nation.

Next came the quintessential Chinese work, Chen Gang and He Zhanhao’s Butterfly Lovers Concerto, in an abridged version scored for strings and piano. Soloists representing the ill-fated pair of lovers were Singapore Symphony Orchestra associate concertmaster violinist Kong Zhaohui and Singapore Chinese Orchestra erhu prinicipal Zhu Lin. This 15-minute edition which incorporated all the work’s essential themes may be described as Butterfly Lovers for short attention spans.

The truncation was necessary to accommodate Chinese composer Danny Dong’s Dreaming of Fengpu, a half-hour four-movement programmatic symphony. Dreams and aspirations of Fengxian residents in constructing the Fengpu Bridge, which spanned the Huangpu River connecting Fengxian with central Shanghai city, were realised in this melodious work which ticked all the boxes of modern Socialist realism. This included Nie Er’s March of the Volunteers, the Chinese national anthem, quoted not once but twice.

The concert’s undoubted highlight was the performance of Frederic Chopin’s First Piano Concerto in E minor (Op.11) by Singaporean pianist William Wei, former child prodigy and recipient of the National Arts Council’s Gifted Young Musicians’ Bursary. A graduate of the Manhattan School of Music and Yale University, his very idiomatic reading seemed like a continuation of the recently-concluded Chopin International Piano Competition in Warsaw.

Those stricken with piano envy that a Malaysian pianist Vincent Ong could star in Poland’s premier event will find consolation in Wei’s artistic sensibilities which combined lyrical poetry with a strong technical arsenal. Performing on a C.Bechstein grand, he projected well in solo entries and kept the audience enraptured all through its 40-minute duration.

With the orchestra not letting up in tuttis, he surmounted the vigorous support with perfect restraint and without resorting to banging. Particularly beautiful was the opening movement’s second subject and the slow movement’s Romanze, where time stood still. This was followed by the Rondo finale’s infectious dance rhythms which literally leapt off the page. Singapore longs for a piano hero, and Wei might just be the answer.

The concert concluded with a hilarious encore for both pianist and orchestra, a medley of 17 of classical music’s most popular melodies which those with long memories will nostalgically remember as Hooked on Classics from the 1980s.

For the record, the melodies played in the slightly abridged version of Hooked on Classics were:

1. Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No.1

2. Rimsky-Korsakov Flight of the Bumble Bee

3. Mozart Symphony No.40

4. Gershwin Rhapsody in Blue

5. Sibelius Intermezzo from Karelia Suite

6. Mozart Eine Kleine Nachtmusik

7. Beethoven Ode to Joy from Symphony No.9

8. Rossini William Tell Overture

9. Grieg Piano Concerto

10. Bizet Carmen Overture

11. Jeremiah Clarke Trumpet Voluntary

12. Handel Hallelujah Chorus from Messiah

13. Beethoven Emperor Concerto

14. Brahms Hungarian Dance No.5

15. Vivaldi Spring from Four Seasons

16. Dvorak Largo from New World Symphony

17. Tchaikovsky 1812 Overture

DAZZLING STRINGS / Singapore Chinese Orchestra / Review

DAZZLING STRINGS

Singapore Chinese Orchestra

Singapore Conference Hall

Saturday (5 March 2016)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 7 March 2016 with the title "Dazzled by skilled musicians".

This concert's title did not tell the full picture of Singapore Chinese Orchestra's outing with well-known Chinese conductor Tang Muhai, once a protege of Herbert von Karajan. Although string concertos hogged the limelight, a big impression was made by the other works, beginning with Guo Wen Jing's Dianxi Folk Tunes.

Despite an unpretentious title, its three movements were ambitious in recounting the history and culture of the rugged tribes that inhabited remote mountainous regions of Yunnan. Vigorously punched-out percussion beats and strident choruses of suonas (onstage and offstage) sounded out in the opening Ava Mountain. This was contrasted with mellower marimba and xylophone textures in the gentler but animated Jino Dance, which had a trio of dongxiao (flutes) conjure up a pastoral atmosphere in its central section.

It was all thunder and bluster in the final Sacrifices.Fire.Spirits movement which had a similar raucous and primal energy as the close of Stravinsky's The Rite Of Spring. This epic score which merged ancient Chinese, modern Western and film music influences was tautly held together by Tang's magisterial control, which never flagged for a single moment.

More convivial was young composer Qi Hao Di's single-movement Dazzle Of Fantasy with SCO's Zhu Lin as erhu soloist. His concertante part was stand-out virtuosic yet allowed to blend with the orchestra's string textures. The music was impressionist in style, as if crafted by a Chinese Delius, culminating with a cadenza and an ebullient flourish to close.  

The second half began with Hongkonger Stephen Yip's Nine Actors, a winning entry in the 2011 Singapore International Competition for Chinese Orchestral Composition. The most avant-garde work on show, its expression of ceremonial and dramatic aspects of  Chinese theatre was purely musical, with a narrative flowing in seven linked sections. The work's incorporation into SCO's Nanyang music canon was by virtue of its clever use of Hokkien, Teochew and Hakka themes woven into an elaborate embroidery.

The populist element of this concert was surely Chen Gang and He Zhanhao's Butterfly Lovers Concerto, featuring the conductor's prodigious 11-year-old daughter Susan Tang. Her diminutive presence was compensated by a big and confidently projected sound, despite being placed right smack in the orchestra's ranks, between Principal Cellist Xu Zhong and harpist Ma Xiao Lan.

A distinctive advantage was to be had by her close proximity with Xu, as their duo passages were symbolic of the forbidden love between Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai. Conductor Tang  conducted from the floor, so he did not stand over his soloist, besides allowing him to walk around on stage unimpeded as he waved his baton.

The younger Tang's solo effort was an extremely promising one rather than the finished article, and she will surely blossom with time, like her former-prodigy mother, the Korean pianist Ju Hee Suh who performed the uncredited piano part.  The concert closed with the popular encore Hua Hao Yue Yuan, surely the quintessential Chinese work to represent happiness and contentment.