ECONCERT / Ding Yi Music Company / Review

 

ECONCERT 

Ding Yi Music Company 

Esplanade Recital Music 

Wednesday (23 October 2024)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 25 October 2024 with the title "Eco-themed concert a wake-up call about waste".

Some of Ding Yi Music Company’s most interesting concerts over the years have focused on Singapore’s history and disappearing local culture, but more recently the ensemble has turned to highlighting environmental issues. 

The second of its ECOncerts, directed by resident conductor Dedric Wong De Li, was about the high toll exacted by the generation of waste. Stage-directed by Ang Xiao Ting, with music composed by Malaysian Yii Kah Hoe and Singaporean Avik Chari, the 75-minute concert was inspired by the documentary feature Wasted (www.wasted.film) by Eco-Business which highlighted a modern-day dilemma resulting from rampant consumerism. 

Much of the concert’s first third was devoted to accompanying film excerpts featuring vast vistas and mountains of garbage from rising Asian economies, including Vietnam, South Korea and India. “Nature creates no waste. Waste is a human invention” was the overriding message, and so was, “What we throw away doesn’t go away”. The music was dissonant, depicting a bleak landscape with ultimate despair being the foreseeable future. 

The chamber ensemble of Chinese instruments performed within an arts installation created by Alecia Neo, which include an amorphous pile of plastic flakes and fake rocks, and a barren tree in the foreground, a la Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot. The play of darkness and light, representing futility and hope, by lighting designer Liu Yong Huay also provided a suitable ambience for the action to take place. 

Some hard truths about recycling were presented, including the stark statistic that less than ten percent of waste discarded in recycle bins was actually recyclable. Depressing. The concert’s second third had no projected visuals, instead allowing more of the music to be better appreciated. 

In Nature’s Realm – Sounds Of Waste, Chin Yen Choong’s jinghu and Tan Yong Yaw’s yangqin was heard over a cacophonous counterpoint provided by rustling of bags and wrappings, banging of bottles and crushing of cups, all plastic, of course. 

Symbolism was also strong, with composer Yii emerging from within the audience to rake the plastic flakes, forming a Zen sand garden in the process, and playing tunes on the xiao (vertical flute, crafted from bamboo) before disappearing offstage. All this while accompanied by zhongruan and bowed strings, most likely a sign of regeneration. 

In Humans Produce Waste: Recycling Concerto came the concert’s much-awaited climax, with Bekhzod Oblayorov and Wong Wai Kit playing on a sustainable cello and zhongruan respectively. These instruments were created from recycled cardboard, designed by the team of Alvin Chea Hong Shen and Chea Wei Xian from Trio Packaging. While not quite as sonorous as originals of wood, these were obviously works in progress. 

As the score moved ever so gradually from discordance to concordance, from dark desolation to bright illumination, its denouement was an optimistic but guarded conclusion. As long as we pay heed to our environment and better manage our resources, the wake-up call provided by this thought-provoking concert should not go to waste.

SETTS #2 / South-Eastern Ensemble for Today's and Tomorrow's Sounds / Review

SETTS #2

South-Eastern Ensemble for

Today's & Tomorrow's Sounds

Esplanade Recital Studio

Sunday (24 January 2016)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 26 January 2016 with the title "Madhatter's party with serving of afternoon tea".

The second concert by the South-Eastern Ensemble for Today's & Tomorrow's Sounds (SETTS), a new music ensemble formed wholly by professional musicians, was by far a less anarchic affair than its debut last year. It nevertheless occupies an important position for the performance of new local works once undertaken by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra's New Music Forum.

The 70-minute concert presented works by seven composers, including two world premieres and two Singapore premieres. Emily Koh's Implodex! (Singapore Premiere) for six musicians opened the proceedings. Conducted by SETTS co-founder Christoph Wichert, its configuration had strings (violin, viola and cello) placed onstage, complemented by offstage woodwinds (flute, oboe and clarinet).

Its title delves upon the origin of matter and anti-matter, with fragments of sound passed around the hall, the concordant alternating with the discordant. Its climax was a solo cadenza from oboist Joost Flach who went on to tear up pieces of paper, symbolic of a point of no return, before all the musical parts coalescing in a serene C major chord.

Receiving a World Premiere was full-time National Serviceman Tan Tiag Yi's The Quiet scored for string quartet (Christina Zhou & Nanako Takata on violins, Janice Tsai on viola and Lin Juan on cello) and marimba. Iskandar Rashid's mellow marimba strikes provided a gentle counterpoint to pizzicatos and bowing from the strings in this short movement, which revealed in its subdued mood the influence of Shostakovich.

Chen Zhangyi's Lost In Order was composed ten years ago, with the vastly contrasting timbres of Roberto Alvarez's flute pitted against Iskandar's assembly of four timpanis. The work began with the ennui of routine and repetition, escalated by an increasing urgency for the instrumentalists to break out from habit. They do so with an abrupt end to the piece.

Indonesian composer Ivan Tangkalung's Morning Call for solo bassoon was virtuosically tossed off by Wichert, with his instrument the channelling a cockerel's chanticleer and the urban sounds of a city readying for a day's busyness and business.

Zechariah Goh Toh Chai's Four Taiwanese Aboriginal Songs for wind quintet will be the most often performed work of all these. The reason is simple. Like a modern-day Bartok or Kodaly, its treatment of two songs and dances from the Pai-wan and Bei-nan tribes is both idiomatic and engaging. The performance by Alvarez, Flach, Colin Tan (clarinet), Wichert and Alan Kartik (French horn) will be hard to better.

Works by two Malaysian composers completed the show. Yii Kah Hoe's Cheers (Singapore premiere) was literally a madhatter's party, with Alvarez and pianist Shane Thio punctuating their solo parts with a serving of afternoon tea, complete with the clinking of teapots and teacups, noisy stirring of spoons, obligatory slurping and a toast of “cheers!”

The World Premiere of Wong Chee Yean's Six Sketches was a complete success. The full ensemble of strings, winds and percussion engaged in its short scenes from Greek mythology, drawn from Ovid's Metamorphosis. Among its movements involved the sinuous flute as Narcissus gazing at his own shadow, a beautiful duet for oboe and clarinet representing Orpheus and Euridice, a lively Dionysian scherzo, and a string fugue as Arethusa flees before transforming into a fountain to a wind serenade.

Inventive and surprising as before, SETTS #3 on 1 May at The Arts House is keenly awaited.  

SINGAPORE CHINESE ORCHESTRA IN PARIS / Sneak Preview / Review

SCO IN PARIS A Sneak Preview
Singapore Chinese Orchestra

Tsung Yeh, Conductor
SCO Concert Hall
Wednesday (22 September 2010)

Parisians will get a taste of Singapore when the Singapore Chinese Orchestra performs at the Musée du Quai Branly on two evenings in October, part of the Singapour Festivarts exchange programme between the two nations. But what will they get to hear? Singaporean music, Chinese music or Asian music?

The one-hour programme devised for 25 instrumentalists by SCO Music Director Yeh Tsung was an excellent showcase of the orchestra’s virtuosity, and had a little bit of everything. It was however unfortunate that no Singaporean composers were represented. The Nanyang segment (incorporating music of Indo-Malayan flavour) came from the Malaysian composer Yii Kah Hoe’s Buka Panggang, his musical vision of an overture to a wayang kulit play.

The sheng’s piercing timbre and wails of the diyin suona opened this ten-minute tone poem that gradually expanded into a full-scale processional replete with kampung drumming. This was not Chinese music per se, for its essence lay somewhere lying far south, much nearer the equator. But could it pass off as Singaporean? Perhaps so, if we were not so busy sacrificing our heritage for modern trappings, IRs, Formula One and their like.

The middle two numbers were chamber music. Xing Jie (Strolling Down The Street), a Jiangnan melody played by seven players was the most traditional and recognisably Chinese work. Not so, Hongkonger Chan Hing Yan’s Seven Images of the Moon scored for erhu, pipa, guzheng and percussion. A work where John Cage-like silences and pauses were as vital as the intimate instrumental sounds, its static and minimalist leanings provided an unusual and almost soporific contrast.

The strongest impression came from Extase by Paris-based Chinese composer Chen Qigang, Olivier Messiaen’s last student and better known as the Music Director for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Guest soloist Jean-Louis Capezzali’s evocative oboe solo began the work, which rhapsodically swung from contemplative to wildly kinetic, as its title implied. Fragments of an Oriental theme emerged, gradually coalescing into something discernibly Chinese as the Frenchman’s fiendish riffs tore through the collage of raucous sound for an energetic finish.

This was not the usual fare served up at subscription concerts, but for a French audience more familiar with Ensemble Intercontemporain and Boulez musings, the Singapore Chinese Orchestra will be more than well received. In fact, it stakes a claim at the vanguard of music’s cutting edge.