THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS / Metropolitan Festival Orchestra / Review

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: 

THE TWO TOWERS

Metropolitan Festival Orchestra

The Star Theatre

Friday (6 June 2014)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 9 June 2014

It was Richard Wagner who first conceived his operas as gesamtkunstwerk, German for “works of complete art”, a form that unites every facet of art and aesthetics into an exhaustive and all-consuming whole. The Ring Of The Nibelung cycle remains his ultimate achievement, a saga of four operas that runs over four evenings, spanning almost fourteen hours of drama and music.

The present-day analogy might be The Lord of the Rings, the three blockbuster movies directed by Peter Jackson, based on J.R.R.Tolkien’s epic novels on Hobbits and the war between good and evil set in Middle-earth. Its feat of story-telling would have been diminished without the expansive music of Howard Shore which accompanied about nine hours of non-stop action.

The Metropolitan Festival Orchestra (with the technical team from CAMI Music) performed the soundtrack to The Fellowship of the Ring, the first movie of the cycle, to critical acclaim in June last year. The second movie The Two Towers continued in similar vein, and three shows at the 5000-seat hall of The Star Theatre suggests there is a local market here for movies accompanied by live music.

Did the audience come for a movie or for a concert? The 80-member orchestra and 170-singer Vocal Associates Festival Chorus (including 50 children) were the centrepiece on stage. They were greeted with applause when conductor Justin Freer stepped on the podium. The film then rolled on the screen like in a cinema, except the performers were visible and illuminated throughout the show.

Unlike the Cineplex experience, there was to be no food or drinks and the movie’s expert pacing was suspended for a 20-minute intermission for the orchestra and choir to take a breather. Honestly this viewer could have easily forgone a toilet break for the sake of maintaining continuity. Another bugbear was the amplified orchestral sound mostly came through the venue’s speaker system rather than heard directly from the stage. Thus would one have preferred hearing an invisible London Symphony Orchestra of the original soundtrack rather than the live equivalent in the MFO? 

At any rate, the MFO performed creditably well, sustaining the tension through the climaxes without skipping a beat, and the choir with boy soprano Samuel Yuen prepared by Khor Ai Ming (sadly under-acknowledged during the curtain calls) sang with great purpose. Soprano Rosalind Waters, used for the flashback sequences involving Aragorn and Arwen, was sufficiently evocative but sounded dull and wobbly during the end credits.

This brings one back to the purpose of this exercise. Does live music enhance a movie experience compared with its canned alternative? In the case of Eisenstein’s war movie Alexander Nevsky with Prokofiev’s unforgettable sound track, modern orchestral accompaniment is certainly preferable to the wretched 1930s monaural recorded sound. For The Lord of the Rings, the answer is less clear.

Even as one looks forward to The Return of the King from the same forces in the near future, these same considerations should be taken into account. In the meantime, the trusty Blu-Ray DVD viewed on the widest plasma screen (with the mandatory popcorn) would be a more than satisfactory option. 

Photographs by courtesy of chrisppics+ and the Metropolitan Festival Orchestra.

THE PIANO GUYS LIVE IN SINGAPORE / Review

THE PIANO GUYS

LIVE IN SINGAPORE

The Star Theatre

Monday (2 September 2013)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 4 September 2013 with the title "Pachelbel? It's Rock-abel Canon".

Two nights ago, a cello and piano duo played to an audience of close to five thousand at The Star. They were neither Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax, nor Steven and Stephen (Isserlis and Hough), but Steven Sharp Nelson and Jon Schmidt. Who? They are the improbably named The Piano Guys, two married men pushing middle age who looked more at home in a human genome lab or FedEx office than onstage.

It all started when pianist Schmidt walked into a piano shop in Utah to practise, and its owner Paul Anderson started making videos of him and cellist Nelson which went viral on a YouTube channel. They were called The Piano Guys in order to promote the piano shop. A quarter of a billion hits later, the duo has become a legitimate phenomenon and bestseller in the crossover genre.

Purists will not deem them a classical act, but who cares? They modus operandi is simple: adapt a popular classical melody, do a cover of Adele, One Direction or U2, sometimes combine thematic elements of a number of songs in a “mash-up”, throw in comedic schtick, perform with passion and panache, and there you have it.

Hits from their channel and first album were relived, such as Titanium (which uses Faure’s Pavane), Bourne Vivaldi (adapting a double cello concerto by the Italian), Michael Meets Mozart (two Michael Jackson songs modified as to be almost unrocognisable) and one marrying Dvorak’s Largo (Going Home) and Phillip Phillips’s Home. It is said that “great artists steal”, but these were no mere copycats but intelligent re-creations of the friendly and familiar.

Nelson performed on three cellos: a classic named Boris, a carbon-fibre model that doubled as percussion instrument, and a skeletal electric called Bruce Lee which had the nifty ability to record and overdub. This enabled multiple layers of cello playing to be heard simultaneously, essential a virtual cello orchestra.

He was heard solo in Beethoven’s 5 Secrets, a play on themes from old Ludwig’s Fifth Symphony, partly accompanied by violinists from the United World College. Pianist Schmidt also had his own solo, an original composition Waterfall, with constant crossing of hands which resembled an updated Scarlatti sonata. That was “how ugly piano playing guys won the chicks,” he jested.

Pachelbel’s Canon, the “most boring work for cellists” (as they play the same eight bars ad infinitum) was transformed to a Rock-abel Canon complete with blazing Latin beat. There was also a video Cello Wars, where two Stevens duelled with bows-turned-light sabres to music from John Williams’s music of Star Wars. The gags and geeky in-jokes flowed unabated, and the audience got a glimpse of mash-ups that will end on the cutting-room floor, including one bringing together Orphan Annie’s song and Darth Vader’s Imperial March.

Two and a half hours passed all too quickly, and two encores - Bring Him Home from Les Miserables and Elvis’s Can’t Help Falling In Love - brought about a standing ovation. If you did not smile, laugh, cry, clap in rhythm or throw up your hands in pure pleasure, thy name is Ebenezer Scrooge.   

Professional Photographs from THE PIANO GUYS LIVE IN SINGAPORE

Here are some seriously good photographs of The Piano Guys, courtesy of Aloysius Lim and LAMC, from their concert at The Star Theatre (Singapore) on Monday 2 September 2013. This is The Piano Guys' first visit to Asia, and only their third tour outside of the USA. They had previously performed in Mexico and Germany (Berlin). Judging by the reception they got, this will certainly not be their last.

If any child wishes to learn the piano or cello (or accordion) after seeing these guys perform, it will be a darned good thing. 

  

Pianist Jon Schmidt introduces Steven Sharp Nelson
as the coolest cellist in the world.
Mischa Maisky might beg to differ.

Steve performs with violinists from the United World College
in Beethoven 5 Secrets.

Here are the rest of The Piano Guys, Jon and Steven with
Al van der Beek and the piano shop guy Paul Anderson.

This is what a standing ovation at The Star looks like.