BACH CONCERTOS EXTRAVAGANZA / Red Dot Baroque / Review

 

BACH CONCERTOS EXTRAVAGANZA!

Red Dot Baroque

Victoria Concert Hall

Sunday (7 September 2025)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 10 September 2025 with the title "Celebrating 60 years of Singapore-Germany diplomacy with Bach extravaganza".

Red Dot Baroque (RDB), led by violinist and Young Artist Award recipient Alan Choo, is Singapore’s only professional group playing period instruments. In 2023, it performed all six of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos in a single sitting. Its latest concert, celebrating SG60 and marking sixty years of Singapore-Germany diplomacy, saw four favourite concertos of the German baroque master aired.

Photo: Yong Junyi

Opening the show was the Concerto for violin and oboe in C minor (BWV.1060) with soloists Placido Ho (violin) and Veda Lin (oboe). Both played as members of the general ensemble before assuming their solo parts and standing out with piquant tones. There were few moments as beautiful as the slow central movement’s duet, before a flurry of counterpoint completed the fast finale.

The title of Orchestral Suite No.2 in B minor (BWV.1067) may seem a misnomer as there were just six players partnering Rachel Ho on traverso (baroque flute) for the set in seven movements. Partita or Overture might have been more apt titles for this, but Ho’s lovely tone presided over dances including a Rondeau, Sarabande, Bourree, Polonaise and Menuet.

Photo: Yong Junyi

The audience’s erratic response of applauding between some movements may have distracted the ensemble, leading to a false start for the Badinerie. However, playful bantering between players was the idea of this mercurial finale, closing the work on an irrepressible high.

Photo: Yong Junyi

After the interval, a rare performance of the Harpsichord Concerto in A major (BWV.1055) featured Mervyn Lee as soloist. His understated but crystal-clear articulation was the highlight in this forerunner of the piano concerto, with brooding and emoting in the Larghetto slow movement, before breaking free of fetters in the fast outer movements.

Photo: Yong Junyi

Closing the matinee was the popular Concerto for two violins in D minor (BWV.1043) with leader Choo and Gabriel Lee in the spotlight. The unspoken chemistry between two founding members shone through despite having quite different stage demeanours, Choo’s animated movements versus Lee’s steadfast stance. The performance, true to form, exuded joy from every pore.

Inserted between the concertos in each half was the Asian premiere of Rainforest Refrains (2025), composed for RDB’s Italian tour earlier this year by Young Artist Award recipient Chen Zhangyi. This is a modern update of the multi-movement baroque suite or partita. With narration and delightful singing by soprano Teng Xiang Ting, this could also pass off as a neo-baroque cantata.

Photo: Yong Junyi

Tropical flora and fauna were the subjects in its nine movements. Burung Hamba Kera (The Monkey’s Servant Bird), a reimagination of the Malay song Burung Kakak Tua contrasted with Pangolin Passacaglia, a doleful lament. The lively finale became a play on the Chinese words “liu lian”, which was to linger besides being the name of a thorny but aromatic fruit.

Composer Chen Zhangyi
acknowledges the applause.

The encore of Phang Kok Jun’s A Barojak Suite (2020) comprised four dance movements which were settings of local songs in the form of antique dances: the allemande, corrente, sarabande and gigue. Commissioned out of pure fun, one has not lived without having heard Munnaeru Vaalibaa or Jinkli Nona played on baroque instruments.

FLOURISHES / NAFA New Music Ensemble / Review

FLOURISHES

NAFA New Music Ensemble

Lee Foundation Theatre

Thursday (3 October 2013)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 5 October 2013 with the title "Aural snapshot of city and country".

Following the fine example set by the Conservatory, the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts has begun to present new music in chamber concerts open to the public. This modest but encouraging free event, attended by a small audience, featured works by four locally-based composers who are faculty or alumni of the institution (below).

The eponymous Flourishes by Jeremiah Li which began the concert was a set of three contrasting canvasses exploring different moods and textures on flute, clarinet, cello and piano. Loud and emphatic riffs issued from the opening Presto Agitato, a world apart from the static calm of the middle movement Tranquillo which included the insides of the piano being quietly percussed. A jazzy ostinato from Tran Thanh Xuan’s piano set the rhythm of the insouciant finale which gave the work a languid feel of the American Deep South.

Each composer spoke briefly about their pieces. Li likened his Daemonwing for solo violin to the malevolence of a gothic cathedral gargoyle in flight. Violinist Guo Xingchen (below left) was put through an etude-like test which bristled with high-pitched harmonics and sul ponticello, the wiry timbre produced when the instrument is bowed near its bridge.

Similarly inspired was Lim Tee Heong’s The Devil Dancing for solo piano, receiving its world premiere by excellent Indonesian pianist Wilson (above right). Lim attempted to outdo the efforts of Liszt’s First Mephisto Waltz which he considered being “too nice”. Its 333 bars (exactly half of the diabolical number triple 6) housed trills galore, insistent gestures and abrupt rhythm changes before coruscating home with a tarantella from hell.

The two pieces by Zechariah Goh Toh Chai sounded more conventional but have the best chance of becoming central repertoire works. Four Taiwanese Aboriginal Songs for woodwind quintet is an excellently scored study of ethno-musicological research, in the best tradition of masters like Bartok and Kodaly. Conducted by the composer himself, the EDQ quintet brought out its quaint folksy flavour to great effect.

Goh’s T’was The Rain, part of an ongoing series of chamber pieces, was impressionistic in its colour, with long-breathed passages by flautist Jasper Goh and oboist Veda Lin (above) sensitively accompanied by Ernest Lim on the piano. This was the aurally the most alluring work in the whole concert.

Not to be outdone was Eric Watson’s Aftermath for solo piano, composed in 2011 as a reflection of the Japanese tsunami tragedy. Introspective rather than violent, its subtle mood changes ranged from stoic despair to placid resignation, masterfully negotiated by Ukrainian pianist Kseniia Vokhmianina (above) with much polish and poise.

This concert was in essence a 70-minute panoramic snapshot of the contemporary composing scene in the “city” (the Academy at Bencoolen Street), a quite different but equally valid vista from the “country” (the Conservatory at Kent Ridge). It is hoped that more is forthcoming in the near future. 

EDQ! A Woodwind Quintet Recital / EDQ / Review

EDQ!

A Woodwind Quintet Recital

Esplanade Recital Studio

Wednesday (7 August 2013)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 9 August 2013 with the title "Unfamiliar delights".

EDQ is an award-winning woodwind quintet formed by young professional musicians who were alumni of the Singapore National Youth Orchestra. Fresh from winning the contemporary music prize at the Henri Tomasi International Competition in Marseilles, its second public concert in Singapore was greeted by a full-house and a standing ovation.

Repertoire for woodwind quintet often involves different composers from those of standard chamber music programmes, usually peripheral figures unfamiliar to the public. Bohemian composer Anton Reicha (1770-1836), the acknowledged “Father of the woodwind quintet”, was a contemporary of Beethoven, but how many people know of his 24 quintets?   

The members of EDQ showed that his very well-crafted Quintet in D major (Op.91 No.3) was worth listening to because of its freshness and vitality. A slow introduction heralded a florid cadenza from flautist Jasper Goh, and the ensuing Allegro was launched with an energetic fervour. Veda Lin’s oboe and Goh provided the main melodic thrust in the four movements, well supported by their partners on lower pitched instruments.

Frenchman Jean Francaix (1912-1997) was a colleague of Olivier Messiaen but their music could not be more different. The former was the master of musical comedy, as his Wind Quintet No.1 (1948) proved. After a languorous opening, jazzy runs erupted in all directions, with side-splitting bellyaches from Alan Kartik’s French horn which almost stole the show. Neoclassical and mock-serious, this was music that spared no effort to entertain, and the performers reciprocated with every ounce of their wits.

Two works that utilised folk music followed after the interval. Hungarian Ferenc Farkas’s Serenade (1951) was short and pleasing, full of bucolic charm and Italianate warmth. The World Premiere of Singapore composer Zechariah Goh Toh Chai’s Four Taiwanese Aboriginal Songs (2013) was nothing short of a success. The way he dressed these simple melodies with unusual harmonies and counterpoint made them sound contemporary and relevant.

Opportunities were given for clarinettist Benjamin Wong and bassoonist Emerald Chee to bask in melody, while Goh briefly exchanged his flute for the piquant piccolo in the Dance of the Paiwan Tribe. The final Dance of the Beinan Tribe brought all five instrumentalists together for a grand tutti.

The final and longest work was the Sextet (1888) for piano and winds by the Austrian Ludwig Thuille (1861-1907), who knew Richard Strauss and was probably acquainted with Mahler. The first two movements breathed the same air as Brahms, the expansive themes rich with piano chords and figurations from guest artist Nicholas Loh. The music could have suffered from a surfeit of voices, but it was the clarity of articulation and individual mastery of each performer that saved the day.

As if effecting a change of heart, the music broke off from its shackles of convention with a jocular little Gavotte and finished with a sunny Tarantella in rapid triple rhythm. It was like the composer saying, “Enough of the serious stuff, and now let us have fun.” That spirit was clearly conveyed by the six musicians to all present, and the audience voted with its feet. Bravo all round.      

MODERN VOICES - CLASS OF 1978 / Ding Yi Music Company / Review

MODERN VOICES – CLASS OF 1978

Ding Yi Music Company

Esplanade Recital Studio

Saturday (3 August 2013)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 5 August 2013 with the title "Invigorating mix in new music".

The year 1978 was an important one for Chinese music. With Chairman Mao Zedong dead and the Cultural Revolution ended, the Central Conservatory in Beijing reopened its doors to a cohort of students whose lives had been disrupted by years of chaos, mayhem and forced labour. They would later become the voice of Musical China in the West in the 21^st century, their legacies celebrated in this two-hour-long concert by the Ding Yi Music Company directed by Lim Yau.   

The evening began with Zhou Long’s Mount A Long Wind (2004), scored for erhu, pipa, dizi, guzheng and percussion. Impressionist in colour, the work inspired by Li Bai’s Xing Lu Nan (The Hard Road) was evocative of wind, water and nature’s elements. Poetic and meditative in part, it also drew upon a raw primal energy that gave the concert a stirring opening.



Tan Dun’s Ghost Opera (1994) is one of his best known scores, almost a microcosm of his entire well-exposed output. The parts played by a western string quartet (violinists Siew Yi Li and Lim Hui, violist Mervyn Wong and cellist Lin Juan) and pipa soloist Chua Yew Kok, all of whom multi-tasked as percussionists and vocalists, were both visual and musical. The hall was cloaked in darkness, with spotlights on the soloists and glass bowls of water.

Music from a Bach Prelude merged with the Chinese folksong Xiao Bai Cai (Little Cabbage), shamanistic yelps and Shakespearean quotes, traditions representing the “past”. The sounds of water (and the effects of gongs being immersed), metal (percussion), stone (struck close to resonating open mouths) and paper (a long roll being flapped in space) were the symbols of “eternity”, played by performers of “now”.

This 40-minute theatrical experience played out as an enthralling dialogue between “ghosts” of the past and future, confronting the present. Its symbolism was not lost on the full-house audience, which greeted the convincing performance with a most stirring of ovations.

Chen Yi’s Huqin Suite (1997) was brought on tour by the Singapore Symphony to Germany in 2000. This was however the Singapore premiere of the version scored for Chinese instruments (2007), with Chin Yen Choong playing on three bowed instruments. The erhu with its mellifluous singing was contrasted with the lower and more guttural zhonghu recitations, and capped by the diminutive squeak of the gaohu in the furious final dance. 

The concert closed with Extase III (2010) by Chen Qigang, well known for having been the Music Director of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. A virtuosic score much in the tradition of Messiaen and Boulez, Veda Lin stood out for her ceaseless acrobatics and breathtaking long phrases (circular breathing being the secret) on the oboe. This fantasy on the folksong San Shi Li Pu also pitted her with Wong Deli’s suona, as the music drew to a feverish and raucous climax. Both soloist and ensemble emerged first among equals, in a concert of new music that was both invigorating and inspiring. 

Concert photographs courtesy of Ding Yi Music Company.