EARTH: UNHEARD / Ding Yi Music Company / Review

 

EARTH: UNHEARD 

Ding Yi Music Company 

Esplanade Recital Studio 

Sunday (20 April 2025)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 22 April 2025 with the title "Returning to the basics and celebrating earth".

The secret of appreciating chamber music is to look beyond the big sound of massed instruments, paying attention instead to details found in individual instruments. In this same spirit, Ding Yi Music Company’s invitation was to put aside worries of life and listen to the song of the earth, which has far more to offer than meets the eye. 

Photo: Moonrise Studio

This varied two-hour long concert was loving look at folk and ethnic traditions, encapsulated in five varied works curated by Ding Yi concertmaster Fred Chan Hong Wei and artistic advisor, banhu specialist Hu Yu from Beijing’s Central Conservatory of Music. 

The evening opened with Hu’s Echoes of the Mountain which featured just nine players. The songs and dances (shan ge) of highland peoples were relived in this contemporary but tonal work, with melodic interest provided by Chan and Chin Yen Choong’s huqins and Ng Hsien Han’s dizi. Alternating between contemplative and animated sections, the music was a celebration of a way of life that risks being lost forever. 

In Yang Yong’s Three Folk Sentiments, musical scenes of village life were accompanied by projections of Chinese art. In Rising Sun, a finely-balanced heterophony was honed by Hu’s banhu joining the ranks. 

His solo in the central Lament, supported by the plaintive xiao and guan, was a moving portrait of sadness and deep thought. Comic Interlude, which closed the suite, was not so much a playful scherzo but a bantering conversation between close friends. 

The most modern and abstract work on show was Taiwanese composer Tsai Cheng-che’s Mahakala, which was ritualistic and drew from various Asian spiritual movements including Hinduism, Tibetan Buddhism and their Chinese derivatives. 

With the hall in semi-darkness, Yvonne Tay’s guzheng was joined by Ng Hsien Han’s dizi and Wong Wai Kit’s zhongruan, trooping from the wings. They had different chants to intone in addition to the drones and groans with the bold bowing of guzheng strings. Calming and hypnotic, the audience was witness to some religious ceremony taking place. 

Receiving the loudest cheers were two concertante works with full ensemble conducted by Dedric Wong De Li. Young Artist Award recipient Wang Chenwei’s Barong Dance is destined to be a popular favourite. Like his other Nanyang music, it used gamelan scales, in this case representing the lion-like Barong (benign guardian of the forest) and Rangda (malevolent witch-queen), both pitched in an eternal battle between good and evil. 

This well-known Balinese dance could not have had a better orchestral representation. The bigger issue is whether the imposing sheng solo by Soh Swee Kiat, with wind power substituting for percussion prowess, could ever be surpassed. 

The final work was Zhou Juan’s Polyphonic Returns, an impressive show with Hu as banhu soloist which traversed from gentle serenade to rapturous dance rhapsody. Much like the first work, this was a clarion call for a return to the basics, where the simpler things in life really matter.

ASCO IS 5! / Asian Cultural Symphony Orchestra / Review

ACSO IS 5!

Asian Cultural 

Symphony Orchestra

Victoria Concert Hall

Tuesday (30 August 2022)

 

The Asian Cultural Symphony Orchestra (ACSO), founded in 2016, occupies an important niche in Singapore’s music scene by performing works that merge Asian cultures and sensibilities with the western symphony orchestra. By championing music by Singaporean and Asian composers, it has complemented the good work fostered by the Singapore Chinese Orchestra and its Nanyang music projects. It also filled the gaping lacuna left by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, which had earlier in this century marketed itself as a “destination orchestra by bringing together musical cultures from the East and West”, but quietly dropped that tagline somewhere along the way.

 

ACSO is led by a team of two conductors, Dedric Wong Deli, well-known as a conductor of the Chinese instrumental chamber group Ding Yi Music Company, and Adrian Chiang, General Manager of re:Sound Collective and conductor of numerous ensembles thus representing the western classical music caucus. They share conducting duties in its concerts, taking turns in leading different works with the programme.

 

Wong opened the evening with Confluence by Wang Chen Wei (present Composer-in-Residence of the Singapore Chinese Orchestra), a rousing overture-like work that typified the Nanyang sound. Using the pelog scale in its lilting main theme, there is a recognisable Indo-Malayan character to the music, which also benefitted from the use of liberal portamenti and sheer colour of symphonic instruments. To seal this colourful marriage between cultures, a fugue was also thrown into the fray, livening the proceedings besides offering further proof of the composer’s academic credentials.  

 

Following this were four concertante works, more than amply demonstrating the wealth of solo instrumental talent on our shores. The first was Germaine Goh’s Kaleidoscope, a single-movement fantasy for clarinet and orchestra with Ralph Emmanuel Lim as exuberant soloist. Opening with a solo accompanied by harp ostinatos, the music opened dreamily and then came to life with a series of animated dance-like rhythms. Influences from Debussy may be discerned, as well as Copland and Bernstein in the more jazzy bits, but she does not imitate them. Much is attractive and enjoyable in this work, where the demi-mondaine world of smokey speakeasies and Hollywood glamour is not just hinted at but relived.    

 

Chinese composer Wang Dan Hong is a well-known name in Chinese orchestra circles and her guzheng concerto As Thus is as glitzy as they come. Its slow introduction with gentle string accompaniment established soloist Yvonne Tay, in an advanced antenatal state, as a sensitive protagonist. However the amplication of her guzheng was garishly overdone, with distorted sound detracting from her brilliant narrative. As with Wang’s rhapsodic and quasi-cinematic scores, the pacing hastened to an exciting climax, and a faux ending which had the audience applauding prematurely. A true apotheosis and close came later, and the payoff was no less vociferous.

 

Singapore-based Briton Eric Watson’s Dialogue for tabla and orchestra is a well-travelled work commissioned by the Singapore Chinese Orchestra. Its iteration with western instruments was no less trenchant, held together by the virtuosic drumming of Govin Tan, young tabla virtuoso who comes from a Hindu Chinese family. If one wondered what mileage could be had with a pair of drums which essentially plays single notes, one is prepared to be surprised. For the first half, the tabla provided accompaniment to a series of varied themes from the orchestra (including one resembling a motif from Stravinsky’s Firebird), then it takes a life of its own – a good four minutes or so of solo improvisation. As cadenzas go, this was simply breathtaking.

Edmund Song is better known as the double bassist of Red Dot Baroque and re:Sound. This evening, he took on duo-mantle of composer and conductor, leading the World Premiere of his Triple Concertino entitled Till The End Of Time. A work that employed a mix of Asian scales, the music emanated a variety of aromatic incenses. The soloists Niranjan Pandian (bansuri, North Indian bamboo flute), Jacky Ng (suona) and Azrin Abdullah (oud, Middle Eastern lute) had their moments in the spotlight, and how precious these were. The bansuri was positively haunting, the suona took on cor anglais tones resembling Rodrigo’s Aranjuez, while the oud could have had more air time. Some degree of counterpoint with all three together should have been the end-result but the opportunity was not taken, with heterophony prevailing instead.

 

It would still have been a totally satisfying experience had the concert ended there, but ACSO possessed several encores up its collective sleeve. Surprise celebrity cameos took the form of busker-of-the-season Jeff Ng in a medley of JJ Lin songs, while legendary songstress and 2021 Cultural Medallion recipient Rahimah Rahim irrepressibly strutted her stuff with two Malay songs and Bob Gaudio’s Can’t Take My Eyes Off You (Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons). That was mere icing on a wonderfully baked cake, and long may the Asian Cultural Symphony Orchestra thrive, and entertain.

 

All the soloists joined in the finale
Can't Take My Eyes Off You.

FIRST STEP / Singapore National Youth Chinese Orchestra / Review

FIRST STEP

Singapore National Youth Chinese Orchestra

Singapore Conference Hall

Saturday (18 December 2021)

 

It has long been a misconception of mine that Chinese classical music, specifically music played on traditional Chinese instruments, is a preserve of the senior demographic. I have often remarked that audiences at Singapore Chinese Orchestra concerts were mostly boomers and older, and more young people needed to come to these concerts lest this hallowed tradition becomes extinct. This evening I heaved a sigh of relief, to find that the Singapore National Youth Chinese Orchestra (SNYCO) is the very antidote to this notion of musical extinction. Encouragingly, more young Singaporeans are learning to play Chinese instruments, and consequently more young composers are writing works for these instruments.

 

Conducted by Quek Ling Kiong, the SNYCO gave its first concert in almost two years, the hiatus caused by the Covid pandemic’s disruptions. It opened with two movements from Lo Leung Fai’s Echoes of Spring, almost a Chinese version of Rossini’s Sonatas for strings or Mendelssohn’s Symphonies for strings. The bowed strings – huqins with four cellos and two double basses – were in fine form despite not having played for a long while. The prestidigitation achieved in both fast movements was impressive, the opening serving as a warm-up for the furious finale.

 

A larger mixed ensemble converged for young Singaporean composer Jon Lin Chua’s Princess Miao Shan, a symphonic poem receiving its Singapore premiere. Inspired by the legend of how Guanyin Boddhisatva (the Goddess of Mercy) came to be, it is a colourful melange of sound beginning tumultuously and a suona solo. Despite its modern idiom, there was still room for a big melody evoking the open country and broad landscapes. Percussion provided the dramatics and a poignant dizi solo paved the way for music which portrayed profound sadness and tragedy, representing the ultimate sacrifice the eponymous princess was to make. Ending quietly rather than in the customary blaze of glory gave the work an extra dimension of sobriety it needed.   

 

There were two concertante works, the first being Lo Leung Fai’s Joyful (Xi) with Leong Kim Yang’s dextrous dizi solo. Scherzo-like for most part, this dizi occupied the piccolo register, its timbre and nimbleness suggesting that mischief and pranks were also part of its definition of joy. The virtuoso role included two really demanding cadenzas which Leong nailed most impressively despite his relative youth, having joined the orchestra just two years ago.

 

Sulwyn Lok’s Sand Mystique was the second concertante work, essentially a concerto grosso for erhu/zhonghu, pipa and darbuka (a Middle-Eastern hand-held drum). Soloists Li Siyu, Chen Xinyu and Tan Sheng Rong stole the show in a work which opened Mahler-like (the pedal-point of his First Symphony) in its rapt evocation of dawn in the desert. The idiom was distinctly Middle-Eastern or Central Asian whichever direction one travelled, with the aromatic flavours of the exotic Silk Road richly relived. The accompanying orchestra also contributed with a spot of rhythmic clapping in this lively dance built upon vigorous ostinatos.  

 

When writing music about outer space and the cosmos, the obvious influences are Holst or Hollywood. Chen Si Ang’s Interstellar went for the latter in a sonorous soundscape accompanied by lighting illuminations that evoked the Milky Way and distant galaxies. The opening was quiet, with dizi solo breaking the silence, then came ostinatos of The X Files variety, leading one on a journey of wonderment. The quote from Oscar Wilde, “We are all in the gutters, but some of us are looking at stars” was ever-present as the odyssey closed with typical bombast that such a title foretold.

 

Closing the 75-minute long concert was present Singapore Chinese Orchestra composer-in-residence Wang Chen Wei’s Aspirations, composed as far back as 2008. This is an extended version of its original, which revelled in the cheerful melodies heard in television and film music depicting heartland life. Nothing wrong with that, but as soon as new ideas are wanting, always rely on the trusty fugato. That spot of Bachian counterpoint – with sheng, dizi and zhongruan thrown into the mix - was a welcome departure as the concert wound to a happy and optimistic conclusion.

 

The Singapore National Youth Chinese Orchestra and its talented young musicians represent the bright future for Chinese instrumental music in Singapore. This bright future is in the best of hands, and long may the enterprise thrive.    

All photographs by the kind courtesy of SNYCO/SCO.

SCO 25: DAZZLING RHAPSODIES / Singapore Chinese Orchestra / Review

SCO 25: DAZZLING RHAPSODIES

Singapore Chinese Orchestra

Singapore Conference Hall

Saturday 9 October 2021

 

The second of Singapore Chinese Orchestra’s 25^th anniversary concerts was devoted to works composed more recently, specifically during what we know as the Yeh Tsung era. It was the Shanghai-born American-trained conductor (Music Director since 2002) who defined and revolutionised what may be called Chinese orchestral music with Singaporean characteristics. Nanyang music was essentially his brainchild and is what identifies the SCO from other ensembles of Chinese instruments around the world.

 

The Singapore International Competition for Chinese Orchestral Competition (SICCOC), organised by SCO in 2006, 2011 and 2016, helped establish the landscape for Nanyang music to flourish. Two locally-based composers “discovered” at the first concours have now become recognised names in the Chinese instrumental scene. The first was current SCO composer-in-residence Wang Chen Wei, whose Lion City Rhapsody was given its World Premiere, conducted by Quek Ling Kiong.  

 

This short bustling overture with its kinetic Nanyin theme Trotting Horse employed characteristic instruments and timbres associated with the five Chinese dialect groups in Singapore, namely Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Hakka and Hainanese. These groups of instruments operated like the concertino section of a baroque concerto grosso, distinguished by their piquant and higher-pitched sounds, lending the work a particularly distinctive flavour. Add Teochew percussion and voice-overs in the five dialects (with well wishes to the SCO), this made for a memorable opener.

 

There was also a nod to sentimental Mandopop with Phang Kok Jun’s Medley of Singapore Chinese Pop, conducted by Moses Gay, which included songs popularised by Kit Chan, Stephanie Sun, Eric Moo, JJ Lin and Crowd Lu. I concede not knowing a single of these hits, but enjoyed the solos on guan (Jin Shiyi), erhu (Zhao Jianhua), sheng (Guo Changsuo) and dizi (Yin Zhiyang), backed by Shen Guoqin’s enthusiastic drum beat.

 

Yeh Tsung conducted the rest of the concert, including two concertante works. The first was Tang Jianping’s Spring and Autumn, a single movement concerto for pipa featuring principal Yu Jia in all her vermillion sequined splendour. This is a stunning work in a modern idiom which recalled the chunqiu shidai (Spring and Autumn era, circa eighth to fifth century b.c.), a tumultuous period of Chinese history. There are virtuoso cadenzas aplenty, after which a procession of Central Asian flavour took place, leading to a feverish climax where Yu’s pipa stood out above the din. Completing the spectacle was a wild chase, which was breathtaking to say the least.

 

The other concerto was Liu Xijin’s The Legend of the Merlion, already an established classic. Commissioned by the SCO in 1999, and taken on tour several times, this gaohu concerto is unusual for its slow-fast-slow three-movement form. Forget the programmatic story of a tourist-board created chimera (PR-generated fiction at its most contrived), it still has good thematic material that was well brought out by SCO concertmaster Li Baoshun.

 

The first movement (Seek Blessings) was meditative and reflective, contrasted by a scherzo-like middle movement (Raging Sea) which closed with the reassuring chimes of tubular bells. The lyrical finale’s (Nanyang’s Affection) broad melody was given an added touch of poignancy with gaohu heard alongside Xu Zhong’s cello - a veritable love duet – before its sublime close. Rare is a Chinese concerto that does not end with a big bang.

 

Concluding the celebratory concert was Eric Watson’s Tapestries – Time Dances, the winning work of the afore-mentioned composition competition in 2006. Since that triumph, the highly accomplished and eclectic British composer has been the SCO’s composer-in-residence in 2016 to 2018. While Tapestries may not exactly be Nanyang music, it nonetheless possessed Pan-Asian influences including hints of Indonesian gamelan, Southeast Asian dance rhythms and Indian drumming. However it is the Western model of symphonic poems which it most strongly resembles.

 

The long-held pedal point in D at the rapt beginning is reminiscent of the opening dawn scene from Mahler’s First Symphony, while the pastoral air of Vaughan Williams hangs over the work’s latter half. The point of it all was not trying to imitate Chinese idioms, but the skilful use of Chinese instruments to serve musical ends. The performance itself was energetic and finely detailed, bringing the concert to a suitably spirited close.  

 

I have little doubt that this is the whole ethos of the Singapore Chinese Orchestra, to stimulate and make good music that the general public can identify with and also enjoy. Not for nothing has the SCO been hailed as “The People’s Orchestra”.   

 

SSO NATIONAL DAY CONCERT / Singapore Symphony Orchestra / Review

SSO NATIONAL DAY CONCERT

Singapore Symphony Orchestra

Esplanade Concert Hall

Saturday (11 August 2018)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 14 August 2018 with the title "Something for everyone in concert of Singaporean music".

What is Singaporean music? That question was partially answered in a first-ever National Day Concert by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, led by Singaporean conductor Darrell Ang. In premiering new works and reliving popular tunes, there seemed to be something for everyone this evening. 

Cultural Medallion recipient Kelly Tang's two suites on popular local melodies began each half of the concert. The Symphonic Suite On A Set Of Local Tunes had Home, Chan Mali Chan, Bunga Sayang and Singapore Heartbeat as main themes, with Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and Elmer Bernstein's Magnificent Seven as clever cameos. His Sketches Of Singapore did service to Stand Up For Singapore, Rasa Sayang, Where I Belong and Di Tanjong Katong in the flag-waving Americanised style of John Williams.

It was feel good all the way in the original works, beginning with Syafiqah 'Adha Sallehin's Bidasari, a short work based on the pan-Malayan legend of Syair Bidasari. An orchestration of the main theme from her 2016 choreographed work Ikan Girl, atmospheric piccolo and flute solos backed by lush orchestration suggested this to be the Prelude To The Afternoon Of The Fish.

The Malay and marine setting also dominated Wang Chen Wei The Sisters' Islands, based on another legend. This work sounded even more Indo-Malay with the use of the pelog scale, and had solos from a blown conch shell and ocarina as part of its storytelling. The Vienna-trained Wang's Wagnerian orchestration brought echoes of the Rhine to the Straits of Singapore. 

The longest work was Chen Zhangyi 17-minute-long Violin Concerto entitled Vanda, a tribute to the national flower (Vanda Miss Joachim) and our Garden City. The soloist was London-based Kam Ning who mastered its three movements with her usual easy-going aplomb. The first two botanically-inspired movements were slow, and the fast finale, titled A Renaissance, included a virtuosic jazz-inflected cadenza by Kam herself. Her encore relived the raucous sounds of Chinatown, a Paganinian movement from her father Kam Kee Yong's 1976 sonata Huai Ku.

Xinyao (1980s Singaporean mandarin pop) had a look in with Liang Wern Fook's This Is Singapore Medley orchestrated by Samuel Tan, Its big band arrangement that found an apotheosis in his best-known song Xi Shui Chang Liu. The legacy of Sing Singapore and NDP was revived in Phoon Yew Tien's arrangements of Zubir Said's Semoga Bahagia (May You Achieve Happiness, better known as The Children's Day Song) and S.Jesudassan's Tamil favourite Munnaeru Vaalibaa (Come Forward, Youths!), now joined by the 100-strong combined choirs of the Singapore Symphony group.

It would not be a National Day Concert without Dick Lee's ubiquitous Home, arranged by Tang, and the audience stood up for the national anthem Majulah Singapura by Zubir Said. One senses that this concert has merely scratched the surface of Singaporean music. It is imperative that there will be many more National Day Concerts by the SSO to come in the future. 

SETTS #3 / Southeastern Ensemble for Today's and Tomorrow's Sounds / Review

SETTS #3

Southeastern Ensemble for

Today's and Tomorrow's Sounds

The Chamber, The Arts House

Sunday (1 May 2016)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 3 May 2016 with the title "Concert with an edge".

Simply put, Southeastern Ensemble for Today's and Tomorrow's Sounds (SETTS) is the most avant-garde of Singapore's new music groups. Its latest presentation was not so much a concert but a sitting within a creator's workshop and laboratory, half-expecting something to blow up in the face.

Composer Wang Chen Wei arranges a
microphone to record the string quartet.

The artists and technical crew of UFO Project
prepare themselves as an amused audience
(including Pearl Samuel and Peter Kellock) look on.

Tables and floor were littered with metres of cables and wires, a veritable spaghetti connected to computers, cameras, microphones, electronica and various paraphernalia. There were possibly more composers, performers, collaborators and support staff in attendance than actual audience, but nobody was counting.

The 2-hour programme performed without break opened with Waves, conceived by UFO Project, possessing the polystylism that described Russian composer Alfred Schnittke's works. A string quartet (violinists Christina Zhou and Nanako Takata, violist Janice Tsai and cellist Lin Juan), playing a Bach-like chorale, was being peppered by electronic sounds, and soon they were completely submerged.

A dancer dressed as an alien in pink polka dots then commanded the floor, spinning a globe attached to a slowly rotating electric drill. The quartet soon returned, closing in a serene C major chord, perhaps symbolising that peace and strife on earth comes in waves and cycles.

The longest work was Chow Jun Yan's Childhood Rhapsody, from which four of six numbers were performed by pianist Shane Thio alongside the real-time painting of four canvasses by visual artist Frank Lee Foo Koon. Using combinations of brushes, rollers, improvised styli and Pollockian drip technique, these were more than mere scribbles.  Possibly representing suppressed memories of past trauma, the sometimes violent music was achieved by scraping and striking the innards of the grand piano.   

The chamber was then plunged into total darkness for Malaysian Goh Lee Kwang's The Air (Singapore). Snatches of clarinet (Colin Tan), flute (Roberto Alvarez) and oboe (Joost Flach) tones punctuating the stilness as a projected electronic stop watch counted the time elapsed. Resembling forest sounds at night and John Cage's Ryoanji, the work concluded just past the 10-minute mark.

Wang Chen Wei's Cosmic Echoes employed Alan Kartik's French horn skills, transformed by Kittiphan Janbuala's manipulations into time-phased distant tones. These had an unearthly ethereal feel, as if heard from some faraway galaxy with digitally transformed images from the Hubble telescope. In a similar vein, transformations were applied to Christoph Wichert's bassooon and vocalisations in Ding Jian Han's Hanged,  using Eric Tan Wei Fang's poetry read by dramaturge Natalie Hennedige. 

The final work, E-lab-oration, was a joint effort by Hennedige, Thai composer Anothai Nithibon and Singaporean Hoh Chung Shih. Its title provides certain clues, as this was derived from a Facebook chat-cum discussion, with protagonists played by French horn, bassoon, piano and Iskandar Rashid on percussion. Whether solo, in conversation, or engaging in debate and gentle disagreement, here was a forum of ideas tossed up, discussed, accepted or rejected.

Composer Hoh Chung Shih works on his
personal composer as a silhouetted Shane Thio performs.

By wait, who does the fourth instrument represent? One guesses that to be the audience, the fourth leg of a stable table, without whom created music and performances such as these would cease to exist. The stars of SETTS #4 strike back on 26 September at Esplanade Recital Studio, so be sure to return. 

All the performers and artists of SETT #3