THE ALPHABET SERIES: R IS FOR ROSES / Sing Song Club / Review

R IS FOR ROSES

Sing Song Club

Living Room at The Arts House

Sunday (27 September 2015)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 29 September 2015 with the title "Coming up roses".

One of the best kept secrets in Singapore's musical scene has to be concerts by the Sing Song Club, the nation's premier exponent of the art song. Its annual Lieder Festival and Alphabet Series of song recitals deserve to be better attended, given the labour of love devoted to the curatorship of art songs and the actual performances.

Hundreds of origami and knitted roses greeted an audience of about 30 persons attending its latest recital in the Alphabet Series, an hour-long programme on the subject of roses. Limited to only songs in English, there was still an encyclopaedic dimension to the twenty on offer, sung by tenor Adrian Poon and soprano Rebecca Li, accompanied on piano by the ubiquitous Shane Thio.  

The art of writing songs is an elusive one, as setting the right words to the right kind of music determines whether a song is memorable or not. A lyrical quality is essential for a vocal artist to realise a song's full potential, for it to make the “popular” list. All the songs, whether by English or American composer, had been a hit sometime or another.

Benjamin Britten's unusual harmonisations add something tangible to Sweeter Than Roses by baroque composer Henry Purcell and the Irish song The Last Rose Of Summer. These make the listener more keenly receptive to the actual melodies and words. Edward MacDowell's To A Wild Rose is better known in its original piano setting, but the added words flesh out the raw emotions within otherwise not revealed.

Tenor Poon has a fresh and youthful vitality, a natural ring to his voice that does not need to over-exert in order to communicate. The swing to be found in Joe Burke's Rambling Rose, the haunting melancholy of Marc Blitzstein's The Rose Song and Christopher Irvin's rapturous A Wedding Among Roses were well-suited to his crooner's temperament.

Soprano Li is more of a stage diva, judging by her regular operatic roles, who can carry songs to shattering climaxes. She comfortably hit the lofty reaches of Haydn Wood's well-known showpiece Roses Of Picardy, oozed sentimentality in Roger Quilter's A Last Year's Rose and hammed like a Broadway showgirl for James Hanley's Second Hand Rose.

There were unfortunately no duets for the two singers, but a thematic approach that linked the songs lent much coherence to the breezy hour that passed quickly. Roses in gardens, roses in the wild, roses of love, transient and sickly roses, girls named Rose and mankind's love of roses were sub-themes within this absorbing whole. Pianist Thio was reliable as always, supporting the vocalists to the hilt.

Three more recitals beckon from 16 to 18 October at The Arts House, in a Lieder Festival dedicated wholly to songs by Singaporean composers, in celebration of the nation's 50 years. The rarity factor ensures that this is a must-attend event. You read it here first!

All photographs by the kind permission of The Sing Song Club.

THE ALPHABET SERIES: C IS FOR CHILDREN CANTILLATING / The Sing Song Club / Review

THE ALPHABET SERIES:

C IS FOR CHILDREN CANTILLATING

The Sing Song Club

The Living Room @ The Arts House

Saturday 19 January 2013

This review was published in The Straits Times on 21 January 2013 with the title "C is for charming chants".

The Sing Song Club’s ambitious 26-part Alphabet Series of art song recitals has reached the letter C. Its 90-minute recital of 20^th century song cycles inspired by the subject of childhood and extreme youth was attended by just 21 people, but that did not dampen the spirits of the performers on a dank, rainy evening. 

The group’s leader, the youthful tenor Adrian Poon, had the honour of singing two song cycles. The first was Francis Poulenc’s Quatre Chansons pour Enfants, where he negotiated its tricky and rapidly articulated French with relative ease. The playful, ironic spirit of the personalities who inhabited these songs were well characterised, lyricism and wit being the hallmark of the French composer whose 50^th death anniversary was being commemorated this year. 

The extremely versatile Richard Rodney Bennett, who died just a few weeks ago, was also remembered with his Songs Before Sleep. These six very diverse shorts, contemporary and occasionally jazz-inflected, also found a sympathetic interpreter in Poon. Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, began with the same words as the familiar version, but took on the style of a Broadway musical number.

Benjamin Britten, born exactly one century ago, had a lifelong affinity for children. His five songs in A Charm of Lullabies gave mezzo-soprano Anna Koor and pianist Shane Thio a share of dissonant moments, the melodic line often at odds with the thorny piano writing. No fault of the performers, such was Britten’s sense of aesthetics which juxtaposed A Charm with its strident declamations “Quiet! Sleep!” that would wake the dead, with the truly soothing The Nurse’s Song, which Koor delivered as well as a mother could.  

The only familiar song cycle was Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children), sung by the veteran baritone William Lim. Here is a voice that has matured over the years, such that the reflections on mortality rang out with a world-weary yet burnished poignancy that sounded heartfelt and sincere. Through the tempest of In diesem Wetter (In This Weather), Lim easily overcame the onslaught from the keyboard accompaniment.

Lim closed the evening with Singaporean Zechariah Goh Toh Chai’s Where Are You, My Little Ones?, a lament composed on the aftermath of the 2004 Asian tsunami tragedy. The words “Did you call my name? Did you say goodbye?”, spoken rather than sung, hung on like a pall through the song’s clear and unequivocal message. It was a sober and contemplative end to a concert that should have been attended by far more music-lovers.

,