CD Reviews (The Straits Times, July 2016)

STORYTELLERS ON ANN SIANG ROAD

Ding Yi Music Company / Tay Teow Kiat

Long Yin / ****1/2

Ding Yi Music Company is Singapore's most active professional Chinese chamber ensemble, and its concert programming over the years has been both eclectic and innovative, as its latest album testifies. In a way, the course of contemporary Chinese instrumental music has been redefined by the encompassing of Nanyang music, which includes indigenous idioms of Southeast Asian music and its composers. Two excellent examples receive world premiere recordings here.

Bho Shambo is a dance of the Hindu god Shiva, and in Phang Kok Jun's arrangement, flautists Ghanavenothan Rethnam (bansuri) and Tan Qing Lun (dizi) share the honours in a headily rhythmic work that includes chanting in Tamil. A similar tandem operates in Phang's own Storytellers On Ann Siang Road where Chin Yen Choong and Lim Kwuan Boon's erhus act out a duet-cum-duet between Chinese and Malay itinerant storytellers of old.

The balance of the disc are five Chinese works by Liu Chang, Chow Jun Yi, Joshua Chan, Cao Wen Gong  and Wang Jian Min. Conducted by its founder, Cultural Medallion recipient Tay Teow Kiat, the playing is both refined and virtuosic, and more importantly passionately charged as only young professional musicians know how. 

SIBELIUS & GLAZUNOV Violin Concertos

ESTHER YOO, Violin

Philharmonia Orchestra

Vladimir Ashkenazy (Conductor)

Deutsche Grammophon 481 215 7 / ****1/2

In 2010, the 16-year-old Korean American violinist Esther Yoo was awarded First Prize at the 10^th Sibelius International Violin Competition, the youngest-ever to be bestowed that accolade. Her debut recording of violin concertos by the Finn Jean Sibelius and Russian Alexander Glazunov commemorates the 150^th anniversary of both composers' births in 1865. Despite her youth, the technical and interpretive demands of both concertos hold no terrors for Yoo.

She brings out a warm and gorgeous tone for the lyrical Glazunov concerto, only letting rip in its festive end. For the more austere and glacial disposition of the Sibelius concerto, she offers more grit and sinew to the proceedings, holding little back in the so-called “Polonaise for polar bears” of a finale. 

The fillers are pretty enough: Sibelius' youthful Suite For Violin And Strings and Glazunov's Grand Adagio from his ballet Raymonda. The support she gets from veteran conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy and from the London-based Philharmonia Orchestra is excellent, in what can be said to be a dream debut.   

PICTURESQUE MOUNTAINS / Singapore Chinese Orchestra / Review

PICTURESQUE MOUNTAINS

Singapore Chinese Orchestra

Singapore Conference Hall

Friday (12 September 2014)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 15 September 2014 with the title "Stirring Chinese music with colourful tales".

The worlds of Chinese painting and Chinese music run close and parallel lives. While absolute music exists in Chinese compositional repertoire, programme music inspired by legends, literature, historical events and scenery are de rigueur in works performed on Chinese instruments. Traditional Chinese brush paintings are typically lyrical in their portrayal of reality, and the associated music is similarly effusive and expressive.

This premise was main thrust of the well-conceived Singapore Chinese Orchestra concert directed by veteran conductor and Cultural Medallion recipient Tay Teow Kiat. There were four Singapore premieres, beginning with three movements from Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains. Based on a famous Yuan (Mongol) dynasty painting, this is a composite work by no less than four composers.

Impressionistic might be a way to describe Flowing Waters, Drifting Clouds and Sounds of the Wind on an Intoxicating Night, which opened with soft murmurs from the winds, with a preponderance of dulcet tones from the dizi family. The mellow alto voice of the qudi provided a balm of serenity and repose in the latter movement, accompanied by harp, bird-calls, rain stick and wordless vocalisations from ladies of the orchestra. In The Mountains and Rivers as One, the suona heralded a call to arms in a crescendo which climaxed with solo voices, heroically helmed by tenor Zhuang Jie and soprano Su Yi Wen (above).

Taiwan-based Lo Leung Fai’s Beautiful Mount Chai was a erhu concerto in all but name, one which displayed the solo prowess of Wang Gui Ying. Its programme in the form of a symphonic poem allowed Wang to run the full gamut of elegiac and exultant feelings, culminating with a series of discursive yet gripping solo cadenzas.

The orchestra accompanied discreetly and sensitively, never overwhelming the lone voice, and continued in the same vein for Liu Xi Jin’s Lingering Snow on the Broken Bridge. This is the famous wintry landscape of West Lake in Hangzhou, ubiquitous in literature and lore, which got the work it deserved. The single movement concerto for dizi followed the basic ternary form, with a most glorious of melodies bookending a scherzo-like dance for the piccolo-like bangdi, with soloist Zhan Yong Ming milking the sentimentality for all its worth.

The final work, Three Friends of Winter by Gu Guan Ren was an essay on three vegetative species which thrive in winter, serving as a metaphor for virtues of the Chinese people in lean and straitened times. Stout Pine portrayed strength and resistance with its heroic, martial gestures, contrasted with Jade Bamboo, a lilting serenade which bends with the wind but maintains its resilience.

Cheerful pipas and Zhao Jianhua’s silky erhu completed the trilogy in Winter Plum, a sturdy flower which blooms and looks forward to the welcome onset of spring. Close your eyes, and the stirring music begins to tell its own stories. That, in an essence, is the joy of Chinese music.         

All photographs by the kind permission of the Singapore Chinese Orchestra.

VIRTUOSOS OF CHINESE MUSIC / Ding Yi Music Company / Review

VIRTUOSOS OF CHINESE MUSIC

Ding Yi Music Company

Esplanade Concert Hall

Saturday (19 April 2014)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 21 April 2014 with the title "Humble virtuosos, great music".

The Ding Yi Music Company’s opening concert of its annual season is an inspirational and aspirational affair. As with previous seasons, the concert brings together some of China’s top instrumentalists, whether seasoned veterans or rising young names, in a showcase event that presents them as paradigms of virtuosity, hence models to emulate.

Conducted by its Music Director Tay Teow Kiat, the young chamber group accompanied and supported the visiting soloists in a variety of concertante works.

Performing first was huqin exponent Jiang Ke Mei who played on five bowed instruments of different registers. Two versions of the banhu, covering the high treble tessitura, featured in Zhou Qi Chang and Ding Yong Sheng’s Festivities of Kunming and Zhao Guo Liang’s Henan Bang-Zi Folk Song. Their operatic voice, with a nasal and almost falsetto quality, distinguished both rousing works while easily rising above the percussive beat.

An other-worldly sonority from the diminutive jinghu was the highlight in the well-known Ye Shen Chen (The Deep Night) from Farewell My Concubine. In the patriotic martial music of Zhang Chang Cheng and Yuan Ye’s Return of the Red Army, Jiang’s erhu danced and lamented, well accompanied by Yick Jue Ru’s yangqin.  

Wang Wei on the guzheng provided some of the most evocative moments in the concert. Cheng Gong Liang’s By the Yili River was a Xinjiang serenade, a slow melody from the Silk Road with an unmistakeable Middle Eastern flavour. Zhao Deng Shan’s Jingling Eaves Of The Temple was a meditative work of exquisite beauty, where a strong vibrato applied on resonant chords simulated the distant echoes of Buddhist wind chimes and bells.

Pipa virtuoso Yang Wei may be familiar to listeners of Western classical music as he has appeared as a member of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble. With Ding Yi, he gave the World Premiere of Lin Hsin-Pin’s Formosa Rhapsody, a pleasant medley of Taiwanese folksongs incorporating some aboriginal and contemporary touches.

The out-and-out tour de force came in the ancient classic Shi Mian Mai Fu (Ambush From Ten Sides), possibly the world’s oldest piece of instrumental programme music. Re-enacting the famous battle of 202 B.C. which established the Han dynasty, he demonstrated a panoply of techniques on solo pipa depicting men, horses and wheels in conflict, with clashing metal and cannons for good measure.

The three soloists were interviewed in Chinese on their art and prowess, and invariably all demurred on being referred to as da shi or great masters. Typically self-deprecatory was the reply of Yang who conceded, “I do not know anything about being a master, I am just a musician.”

All three were united in the final work, the newly-commissioned triple concerto Cantabile by Liu Chang. The title is probably a misnomer, as the work was more like a symphonic rhapsody based on Henan Bangzi opera themes. With opportunities galore for solo display from the soloists, this brought the almost 3-hour-long concert to an impressively rowdy close.  

VIRTUOSOS OF CHINESE MUSIC / Ding Yi Music Company / Review

VIRTUOSOS OF CHINESE MUSIC

Ding Yi Music Company

Esplanade Concert Hall

Sunday (7 April 2013)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 9 April 2013 with the title "Chinese masterclass".

Ding Yi Music Company is a young local Chinese instrumental ensemble that believes in pushing the boundaries of chamber music performance, and its concerts have been without exception well-attended. This Sunday afternoon concert was special because of the visiting soloists from China, younger counterparts to the Great Masters who graced the same stage last year.

They each performed solo as well as concertante works, providing much needed contrast to the two-and-a-half hour concert. Guzheng virtuoso Wang Zhong Shan was first up with own arrangement of Beijing opera number The Deep Night, a meditative work discreetly accompanied by Derek Koh on drum. This ancient plucked instrument dating over two millennia plays both the melody and provides its own accompaniment.

There were more dynamic shifts in Zhou Yu Guo’s Robe of Clouds, a guzheng concerto, where its melancholic beginning gave way to more passionate outbursts depicting the ill-fated love between the Tang emperor and concubine Yang Guifei. In Qiao Jin Wen’s rustic Han River Melody, Wang was accompanied by Yvonne Tay and Sophie Gay on two other guzhengs. In trios like this, there was to be no doubt who the master and students were.

Dizi exponent Wang Ci Heng played on several flutes of different pitch ranges. The alto reaches was explored in his Moon over the Vast Mountain, a nocturne-like work with a quasi-New Age sensibility, at parts coloured by the trickling sound of rain sticks simulating gentle breezes. In An Eagle’s Love by Liu Wen Jin, a higher pitched piccolo-like timbre allowed the music to soar unimpeded in this ethnic-flavoured rhapsody from the Central Asian province of Xinjiang.

The popular erhu was the speciality of Yu Hong Mei, who employed a delicious vibrato for the folksong A Flower. Played at full tilt, its portamenti or slides approximated that of the soprano voice, which gave it a warm glow above Yick Jue Ru’s yangqin accompaniment. Yu also presided on two of Chinese music’s most popular melodies.

Chen Gang’s Sun Shining on Tashkurgan, originally for violin, is his second most popular work after The Butterfly Lovers. Its exotic Central Asian melody makes its Chinese music’s equivalent of Ravel’s gypsy rhapsody Tzigane. Yu applied the same gay abandon in its riff- like passages and finished off with Huang Hai Huai’s Horse-Racing, a prestissimo study that rivals Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumble Bee.

All three soloists were united like a triple concerto in Gu Guan Ren’s Charms of Jiangnan, which featured each part in turn and in ensemble with a heady mix of disparate timbres. The “virtuosos” of the concert’s title did not just apply to the threesome, but also to the larger ensemble of Ding Yi, conducted by Music Director and Cultural Medallion recipient Tay Teow Kiat (above), which did itself proud in its sympathetic and vital supporting role.      

GREAT MASTERS OF CHINESE MUSIC / Ding Yi Music Company / Review

 

GREAT MASTERS OF CHINESE MUSIC
Ding Yi Music Company
Esplanade Concert Hall
Sunday (25 March 2012)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 27 March 2012 with the title "League of extraordinary gentlemen".

Not since the coming of the Berlin Philharmonic has Esplanade Concert Hall been filled to the rafters for a classical concert. This concert by the Ding Yi Music Company, a young semi-professional group of Chinese instrumentalists, was graced by four venerable soloists from China, all of whom are legends in their own right. It was as if Chinese music’s equivalent of Menuhin, Segovia, Rostropovich and Richter had all turned up, with an audience eating off their hands.

The concert began with sanxian player Feng Shaoxian, looking dapper in a cowboy hat, playing Sui Lijun’s Song of the Black Earth. Accompanied by percussion that resembled oars and washboards, Feng’s act on the banjo-like instrument punctuated by a curious combination of song and oratory was reminiscent of a minstrel singing the blues.

Then dizi master Lu Chunling, all of 91-years, charmed with the popular Jiangnan melody Xing Jie (Walking on the Street), which ambled from a stroll to a brisk jog. His next act was a change in outfit and his own Festival Dance Song, delightfully played on a bawu, a flute-like ethnic instrument with a lower pitch and mellower timbre.

On the guqin, the most ancient of Chinese instruments, Gong Yi demonstrated a quiet authority in his arrangement of Flowing Water. Its range of tempered sonorities had the uncanny resemblance to that of a modern piano, and it is not so far-fetched to imagining both instruments to being related.

Completing the quartet of virtuosos was erhu specialist Wang Guotong (above), whose sleek sound rose above the accompaniment for the upbeat Joyous Harvesting and nostalgic Mountain Ballad, both compositions of his. The ever responsive musicians of Ding Yi were conducted by the Cultural Medallion winner Tay Teow Kiat.

All four exponents were subjected to mini-interviews on stage, helpfully translated into English, before resuming with more music. It was the animated Lu, a former rickshaw puller turned musician, expressing the greatest excitement and gratitude being on this stage, who seemed to touch the audience most. He and 16 young flautists, aged 10 to 33, closed the concert with his classic Happy News (above).

There was an impromptu encore of Guan San Yue, uniting all four masters (above) in unison for a familiar melody. That was probably the least convincing item of all, but this league of extraordinary gentlemen had already earned their deserved standing ovation.

All photos courtesy of 

Ding Yi Music Company.