HEALING ARTS SINGAPORE OPENING CONCERT / Photographs

This was the Opening Concert (Monday, 8 December 2025) of the 5-day symposium (8-12 December 2025) organised by Healing Arts Singapore in conjunction with the Centre of Music and Health based in Yong Siew Toh Conservatory. There was lots of music performed, and here are some of the photos from a colourfully varied concert.

Opening the evening were excerpts from
Chen Zhangyi's opera Lily, a probing work
about the ravages of dementia.

Soprano Wong Su Sun played the role of Lily,
a singing teacher alongside her son,
sung by tenor Jonathan Charles Tay.

Singapore's only hearing-impaired concert pianist
Azariah Tan related how his performance of
Beethoven roused a patient with dementia.

Here Azariah Tan performed the first movement
from Beethoven's Piano Concerto No.5 "Emperor".

It was a reading of true grandeur,
which he mastered in a matter of a few weeks!

Applause alongside YST Orchestral Institute
conductor Jason Lai.

Seeding The Floor - 
performing mindfulness of everyday
by Arts Fission

Movement and plants.

Finding beauty in the mundane.

The pastoral setting was telling:
country folks are happier people.

Musicians from Beautiful Mind Charity and
YST Orchestral Institute perform popular tunes.

Teng Ensemble joins the fray.
Young Artist Award recipient Syafiqah Sallehin
plays the accordion in Chow Junyi's Journey
with Geylang Sipaku Geylang and Rasa Sayang.

Phoon Yu's contrapuntal
Transi For The Common Man.

Western and traditional Chinese instruments
are highlighted in these works.

A rousing end to the concert
with Chow Junyi's Little White Boat.

THE SINGAPOREAN COMPOSERS SERIES / Teng Ensemble / Review

 

THE SINGAPOREAN COMPOSERS SERIES 

Teng Ensemble 

Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre 

Friday (24 May 2024) 

This review was published in The Straits Times on 27 May 2024 with the title "Audio-visual spectacle for Teng Ensemble's 20th anniversary".

For its 20th anniversary celebrations, the Teng Ensemble – renowned for its slick and funky pop concerts performed on Chinese instruments – devoted an entire concert of works by Singaporean composers. There were altogether ten pieces, each backed by the sophisticated use of audio electronics and projected moving images. All this made for an exuberant aural and visual spectacle. 

Teng Ensemble is a no-limits generator of ideas, always pushing the envelope and breaching boundaries. Whoever thought serious composers could countenance writing popular music? Or that jazz, pop and music production people would venture confidently into the classical realm? Teng Ensemble did and the results defied all expectations. 

The concert opened with Kelly Tang’s Kallang Uproar, composed for the 2010 Youth Olympics. One will not find a more upbeat work, channeling Brazilian samba and reliving Singapore’s long-gone glory days of soccer. Just five players, on pipa, sheng, cello, electric guitar and cajon (percussion), was all that was needed for just a bit of nostalgia. 

Erhu and guzheng joined in for 14-year-old composing prodigy Nathanael Koh’s Soaring, imagining an eagle’s celestial flight with the traditional sonata form coloured by a Malay kompang’s incessant beat. Just intoxicating. 

Soul Dot SG is a music production collective of three artists, whose Empowered was supposedly infused with K-pop, but sounded far more than that. Was this a fusion with Middle Eastern and Indo-Malay influences as well? 

Erhu and cello dominated the melodic lines in George Leong’s entertaining Oriental Psyche, with hip hop rhythms that radiated inner city vibes. Evan Low’s Concrete Jungle was a local variation of the traditional railway genre piece, with the rolling rhythm of MRT trains accompanied by stunning time-lapse photography. 

The concert’s third chapter entered terra incognita with the evening’s most modern sounding music. Phoon Yu’s A Transi For The Common Man opened with solo pipa, then erupting into fugue-like counterpoint (with more in common with Aaron Copland than J.S.Bach) before closing with the pipa’s return. 

Koh Cheng Jin’s A.I.Funk went even further by being an atonal passacaglia. With quasi-improvisational flourishes built on a rhythmic ground bass, it sounded surprisingly approachable. With borders between old and new, East and West, classical and pop, being irreversibly blurred, Chok Kerong’s breezy musical odyssey titled Seafarer, sandwiched between Phoon and Koh, claimed a happy middle ground. 

The final group of pieces employed the largest number of players, twelve in the case of Bang Wenfu’s The Nine Suns, a cinematic score inspired by Louis Cha’s wuxia (martial arts) novels. Heroic and pugilistic in most part, this is music of flexed muscles and stretched sinews. 

Teng’s co-founders Samuel Wong (pipa) and Yang Ji Wei (sheng) made the ensemble 14-strong, uniting three generations of musicians in Chow Junyi, Joel Nah and Wong’s Harmony. This final work shoe-horned old local and classic tunes like Jinkli Nona, Suriram, Xiao Bai Chuan (Little White Boat) and Han Tian Lei (Thunder In Drought) into a glorious symphonic summation.

For the record, the Teng Ensemble raised over 640 thousand dollars on the first evening of fund-raising. Bravissimo, and may you continue to create more Music For Good!

CD Reviews (The Straits Times, November 2016)

STORIES FROM AN ISLAND CITY

The Teng Ensemble

Cross Ratio Entertainment A21 / ****1/2

Here is a very enjoyable exercise in nostalgia as The Teng Ensemble, Singapore's hip Chinese chamber crossover ensemble, applies a new twist to the melodies we sang during our younger days. Forget those National Day Parade mash-ups; what we have instead are slicked up versions of old friends in spiffy outfits by Chow Jun Yi (composer) and Huang Peh Linde (arranger). 

The first track, Childhood, packs in four songs – Ikan Kekek, Burung Kakak Tua, Ni Wa Wa (Mud Doll) and San Lun Che (Tricycle) – while City By Moonlight is an improvisation on Tian Mi Mi, the supposedly subversive Chinese hit which originated from the Indonesian song Dayung Sampan.

The eight-member Teng Ensemble cleverly merges the sounds of electronic and acoustic instruments in a seamless manner, with melodic lines led by Samuel Wong's pipa, Yang Ji Wei's sheng, Gerald Teo's cello and Phua Ee Kia's falsetto vocals. 

Listen for some very astute juxtapositions, such as in Gratitude, with familiar songs involving mothers and fathers, or Journey which merges Geylang Sipaku Geylang with Rasa Sayang where Syafiqah Sallehin's accordion makes a cameo. This listener’s favourite tracks are Fusion (Chan Mali Chan) and Storm War (Munneru Valiba), which make this disc worth listening over and over again.     

STRAVINSKY Piano Ballets

Petrushka & The Rite Of Spring

KATYA APEKISHEVA

& CHARLES OWEN, Piano 4 Hands

Quartz 2117 / ****1/2

It was an established fact that Russian composer Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) composed at the piano. His frenetic and rhythmically complex orchestral scores were all conceived with ten or twenty fingers on a keyboard. 

While instrumental colour may be wanting, harmonic lushness and rhythmic vibrancy could still be reproduced in such piano transcriptions. Petrushka (1911) was his second ballet, making advances from the late-Romantic opulence of The Firebird, such as the introduction of his “Petrushka chord”, a classic example of polytonality. The exuberance of the Russian Dance and Shrovetide Fair sections are headily recreated with the percussive sonorities from the piano.  

His next masterpiece, The Rite Of Spring (1913), took piano textures and by extension symphonic writing to a new dimension. The ballet music heard on piano still provides an equally vivid experience, especially with the rapid-fire interplay of four hands in a very narrow space. 

The Russian Apekisheva and the Briton Owen, co-founders of the London Piano Festival, make excellent partners, complimenting each other's sensitivity with outright virtuosity, and vice versa. There are recent excellent recordings on 4 hands of The Rite Of Spring, notably by Martha Argerich and Daniel Barenboim (on Deutsche Grammophon), but the London-based duo more than holds its own.  

SU-ABODE / Teng Ensemble / Review

SU-ABODE
Teng Ensemble
Esplanade Recital Studio
Sunday (4 March 2011)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 6 March 2012 with the title "Moving tunes of home".

Funky chamber groups are now making their mark on the local musical scene. The Teng Ensemble, formed by seven musicians playing Chinese traditional and Western instruments and two composers, commands a loyal following with two sold-out concerts at the Esplanade Recital Studio as solid evidence.

Its latest concert had the idea of “abode”, a home or residence, as its underlying theme, with each short single-movement work on the programme based on a specific place or space of living and dwelling. With each engendered a sense of belonging, and often memories and nostalgia, aided by the visuals projected on the screen behind the players.

The titular Su (Abode) for the full ensemble by Wang Si opened the concert and set the tone for the 55-minute long concert. Over a recorded tape of synthesised sounds, the instruments began their individual threads beginning with the ensemble’s Artistic Director Samuel Wong’s pipa (above), and later passed on to his colleagues.

Unlike Occidental works bedecked with elaborate counterpoint, the quasi-Oriental pieces were more straight-forward in their thematic presentation, with the melodic line carried by pipa or Yang Jiwei’s sheng, elaborated by Patrick Ngo’s yangqin and Johnny Chia’s guzheng. Gerald Teo’s cello and Benjamin Lim Yi’s guitar provided the accompaniment.

Like popular songs, these pieces rise and build into brief climaxes before receding into a calming serenity. Mixed into these was counter-tenor Phua Ee Kia’s alternatingly soothing and ecstatic tones, usually in wordless melismata or in the case of Lim’s Dian (Palace), verses of Tang poetry. Heard on their own, the facility and savvy of atmospheric film music is rekindled.

It was the moving images that gave the music an extra dimension. For Wang’s Tang (Hall), black and white footage of 1950s and 60s Singapore provided a sobering reminder of what we have lost, and in the more rhythmic and vibrant Lou (Ballroom) by Lim, choreography from Thai Classical, ballet to breakdancing were the cues. In Lim’s Xiang (Village), the relationship between families, parents and children was inspired by the Hebei folksong Xiao Baicai (Little White Cabbage).

For the final number Wang’s Ju (Home), three members from Fortitude Percussion provided a ritualistic beat, one exposing bare chests and rippling muscles. An encore, He (Unity), one of the ensemble’s early pieces and in the same melodious idiom, gave the enthusiastic audience much to cheer about.

Teng Ensemble in Concert / Review

Teng Ensemble in Concert
University Cultural Centre Dance Studio
Saturday (6 March 2010)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 9 March 2010.

Attempts to marry the disparate sounds of Western and Chinese musical instruments are not new, and the results have been variable to say the least. The public début of Teng Ensemble, a self-styled Chinese instrumental collective, at the National University of Singapore’s Arts Festival was a laudable addition to this crossover phenomenon. It may be said that chamber music is the most fertile soil for such experiments to take place.

Helmed by the Beijing-trained Singaporean pipa player Samuel Wong (left), the nucleus of the group also included Yang Jiwei’s sheng, Benjamin Lim’s guitar and Gerald Teo’s cello. These were further augmented by voice, violin and piano to make up a seven-member group, which in all honesty resembled more like a garage band.

In the six pieces on show, the sheng’s penetrating timbre and Wilson Goh’s lustrous and wide-ranging vocals had the juiciest parts, carrying most of the melodic interest. There was only one work that featured all seven musicians, Dang Yuan Ren Chang Jiu by Liang Hong Zhi, with each instrumentalist taking turn in the accompaniment.

Aside from a few decorative passages, there was precious little for the sadly under-utilised violinist Chan Yoong Han. Pianist Shane Thio’s part were also often reduced to providing plodding chords and occasional arpeggios, with the exception of Justin Hegburg’s techno-inspired Confluence where he provided the main rhythmic thrust.

The music, whether Chinese (Benjamin Lim’s He), Malay (P. Ramlee’s Getaran Jiwa) or sung in Italian (Sherman Ko’s Equinox), was never less than tuneful. The opening work, resident composer and arranger Lim’s Chang Men Yuan, a lament based on a Li Bai poem, would also easily pass for an atmospheric soundtrack to a period Chinese epic.

Wong’s uninhibitedly enthusiastic introductions to an audience mostly seated on the studio floor added to the general informality of the event. Entertaining it certainly was. While some new ground is being broken in this genre, the Teng Ensemble is encouraged to scale more heights and further explore.