TREE LINE / Yong Siew Toh Conservatory New Music Ensemble / Review

TREE LINE

Conservatory New Music Ensemble

Esplanade Recital Studio

Sunday (12 April 2015)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 14 April 2015 with the title "Mix of new music boggles the mind".

The performance of new music in Singapore used to be an extremely irregular affair, with the odd New Music Forum organised by the Singapore Arts Festival or Singapore Symphony Orchestra held on a sporadic basis, or whenever the inspiration or inclination arose. The Yong Siew Toh Conservatory New Music Ensemble, founded by conductor Chan Tze Law in 2007, has however completely changed the scenery, guaranteeing musical mayhem no less than twice a year.

Its latest concert conducted by the indefatigable Chan takes its title from Toru Takemitsu's Tree Line (1988), the earliest work on the programme and also the most traditional. His stock-in-trade sound is soft, subtle and lush, with wisps of melody floating above a bed of zen-like stasis and stillness. The alternating use of flute and alto flute, piano, celesta, harp and marimba, never all at once, was a clear indication of how finely calibrated his recipe was. It concluded with an off-stage oboe played by Bagaskoro Byar Sumirat gently receding into the distance.  

The helpful programme booklet compiled by Eric Watson provided short interviews with each of the living composers. When asked what their compositional styles tended to favour, two composers cited harmony, melody, rhythm and tonal colour while another two unanimously opted for energy.

Malaysia-born Adeline Wong, now lecturing at the Conservatory, had all of these in Synclastic Illuminations (2005), originally written for the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra. Its title was inspired by a Kurt Vonnegut novel, where sound like the time travellers in the story, emanated with pulsatile and percussive bursts at the speed of light. An excitingly violent but exuberant ride tapered off in placid calm, with the solo piano trailing in its wake.

In the ubiquitous Chen Zhangyi's Walks On Water, there was a return to the delicate aesthetics of Takemitsu. This time, the obbligato piano dominated, where Clarence Lee churned out ripples upon waves in a piano concerto in miniature recounting the messianic miracle of Jesus Christ levitating on the Sea of Galilee.

If there were a soundtrack for a nightmare, Timothy Tan's Hypertuba Magna would be it. The lanky composition student operated a laptop computer which generated a morass of pre-recorded sounds to which eight instrumentalists accompanied. A drum banged out an insistent rhythm, while the other instruments screamed out for attention. There was no tuba part, as composer's title was a metaphorical quest for the Übermensch of intruments, which this most experimental and provocative of works proved is the hyperactive imagination of the composer himself.

Narong Prangcharoen's Echoes of Silence (2010) was prompted by the legacy of the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall in upper New York State, home of the Albany Symphony Orchestra. A fast paced and fluid work, short quotes from Borodin's Second Symphony and Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms (both related to the years which the bank and orchestra were founded) were worked into the musical fabric. There was no silence, only distant echoes from the past in this unlikely Thai-Russian-American inspiration.

Seventy-five minutes of music passed like a flash. The heterogeneity of new music is as wide-ranging as it is mind-boggling. Its proselytisers, especially the young players of the Conservatory New Music Ensemble (who are all virtuosos in their own right), and Esplanade's Spectrum series are doing a fine job; all it needs is an inquisitive and open-minded audience to reciprocate.

MUSIC OF EMBERS / Yong Siew Toh Conservatory New Music Ensemble / Review

MUSIC OF EMBERS

Yong Siew Toh Conservatory 

New Music Ensemble

Esplanade Recital Studio

Sunday (9 November 2014)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 11 November 2014 with the title "Singlish song lightens up the night".

The mere notion of new music usually strikes fear in the minds of potential concert-goers, but they can be assured that atonality and serialism (their usual bête noir) is only a narrow segment of what is a potentially limitless field of expression. This concert by the Conservatory New Music Ensemble, led by Belgium-born but locally residing composer-conductor Robert Casteels, showed that new music could be both listenable and funny.

Filipino composer Ramon Pagayon Santos’s Galluda-Pallotgot (2002) had taken several pages from American minimalists in his work inspired by the beads, baubles and jewellery of Mindanao highlanders. Its unusual scoring including mandolin, guitar, harp, piano and percussion (including singing bowls) suggested he was trying to achieve a sound that evoked tribal cultures and ancient customs.

Shimmering and aurally brilliant, its attempt at reliving the primal also meant paying tribute – knowingly or unwittingly - to that inevitable classic of early barbarism, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.

Young Taiwanese Lu Wei-Ping’s Nicotine (2014) was a shorter and cogent work dedicated to “those who cannot live without smoking”. Scored for just six players, it was flute and trombone that played chief protagonists in its two contrasting parts. The first part portrayed irritability and agitation, which turned sinuous and dreamy in the second to close. Such is the narcotic’s ability to induce a short-lived nirvana, hence its potent drawing power.

American Joseph Schwantner’s Music of Amber (1980) was the oldest piece, one which exploited its six instrumental parts to the full. An impressionist sound world of Debussy and Messiaen was conjured in its first movement Wind, Willow, Whisper, while the second movement Sanctuary explored wider dynamics by upping its volume and tempo, including a segment for solo drumming before ending in quiet calm.

The work that tickled most palates was Casteels’s own Travelogue (2014), which was performed without conductor. Baritone Keane Ong narrated the part of a Singaporean who resides on Mars but returns for a day in 2065, and finds that the more things change, much more remains the same. It was a satirical look at a dystopian future when present policies are carried to their logical conclusions.

Singlish expressions (bo chup), colloquialisms (blur like sotong), catch phrases (no U-turn), long defunct cartographical landmarks (Gemmill’s Hill) littered the score at every conceivable opportunity, punctuated by sopranos Melodie Tan and Rachel Lim who served like a Greek chorus with their recitation of Tourism Board slogans and various performance indices. For most part, the singers were intelligible until the final tutti, when the punchlines were all but submerged amid the instrumental throng.

A libretto would have been helpful, and a repeat performance is welcome, if anything to laugh at ourselves come SG50 or SG100. As it is, we just do not laugh enough.

CONTEMPLATIO / Yong Siew Toh Conservatory New Music Ensemble / Review

CONTEMPLATIO

Yong Siew Toh Conservatory 

New Music Ensemble

Esplanade Recital Studio

Wednesday (13 November 2013)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 14 November 2013 with the titles "Palette of riotous sounds".

The scope of modern music offers contemporary composers the widest possible range of musical expressions and resources available for creating new works. It is this sheer variety and endless possibilities that make new music invigourating, and nothing has to sound the same or tuneless, just to name common accusations levelled at this genre.

The Conservatory’s New Music Ensemble conducted by Chan Tze Law skilfully and persuasively demonstrated this diversity in four very different works. The chamber version of Singaporean Kelly Tang’s Radiance (2012), commissioned for the Esplanade’s 10^th Anniversary, opened the concert.

It displayed a panoply of shifting moods; intimacy from the strings contrasted with outward extroversion in the brass, well complemented by thoughtful woodwinds. The almost impressionist haze gave way to a series of chorales, which resembled stretches of film music before ending in an abrupt upshot, described by the composer as a sardonic smirk.

Twilight Colours (2007) by the first important Chinese-American composer Chou Wen-Chung was more extended, but limited to just three strings and three woodwinds. Solos were heard separately and other voices later joined with varying timbres in this desolate and contemplative piece. Little resembled Chinese music and somewhere, the tonal spectre of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde hovered, straining to break free before its loud chordal ending.

A wider palette of colours was the exploited by Filipino student composer Joshua Pangilinan in When You Contemplate The Waters (2013). Piano, marimba and more brass joined the ensemble in the metamorphosis of a rising three note motif, evoking a lotus blooming. Stillness with Rit Xu’s alto flute accompanied by Chen Yang’s marimba, and the climactic orchestral roar near the end were some memorable moments. Pagilinan dedicated this World Premiere to the people of the Philippines, rebuilding lives in the wake of the typhoon tragedy. 

The longest work, and the most entertaining, was John Adam’s Gnarly Buttons (1996), a virtuoso clarinet concerto showcasing the impressive prowess of conservatory alumnus Li Xin. Taking a byway derived from minimalism, the three intricately rhythmic movements played on popular musical idioms including jazz, country and western, and the sentimental ballad.  

Li’s free-wheeling manner in the frenetic and acrobatic score resembled improvisation, leaping through thickets of instrumental interjections as electric guitar, banjo, mandolin and two synthesizer keyboards were thrown into the fray. The madcap antics including a bovine moo in the central hoedown, aptly subtitled Mad Cow, lent an air of demented anarchy to the proceedings, and the finale was a soppy song turned agitated. It made for a riotous end indeed.  

  

This concert was presented as part of the Esplanade's Spectrum Series.

ENSO / Yong Siew Toh Conservatory New Music Ensemble / Review

ENSO

Yong Siew Toh Conservatory New Music Ensemble

Esplanade Recital Studio

Sunday (14 April 2013)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 16 April 2013 with the title "Programme for nuclear fission".

Pieces of new music benefit greatly from the manner they are presented, often in juxtaposition with other works, to gain coherence and synergy they would otherwise not have if performed separately on their own. Such was the case of the five works presented by the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory New Music Ensemble conducted by Kawai Shiu, a composer himself.

The title Enso, accordingly to his interview notes, refers to the focused energy inherent in mere notes and motifs with their potential for infinite variations. This reviewer chooses to equate this with the power harnessed within the nucleus of an atom, the concert being a controlled experiment in nuclear fission. With each work being progressively longer and generating greater volume than the last, the result was a chain reaction leading to ever increasing circles.

The first three works were brief and relatively quiet. Even Pierre Boulez’s Memoriale from …explosante-fixe… (1985) had a strange and ethereal serenity, centred around flautist Tanasak Angsugomutkul’s virtuosity in trills and flutter-tongue technique.  Thai student composer Achittapol Tinnarat’s Compression (2012) opened with an emphatic, even grandiose, statement of the G note, and generated interesting textures with harp, piano, woodwind and brass in what may be seen as a prelude to something bigger.

Allied to this was Giacinto Scelsi’s Pranam II (1985), centred round a C sharp pedal-note, for whom the concept of sound was a series of sustained vibrations. There were small and subtle changes of textures along the way, making barely perceptible shift in the aural geography, like the minute movements of tectonic plates, mostly silent but unusually impactful.

Greater upheavals were reserved for Polish centenarian Witold Lutoslawski’s Chain 1 (1983), which employed the largest ensemble on the evening. His technique was to utilise mere fragments or shards of themes, developing into larger blocks or segments, the overlapping of which provides the origin of his title Chain. The manner in which the work progressed inexorably to a massive climax and its application to nuclear physics is perhaps coincidental.

Shiu’s own composition kör (2013) gets its title from the Hungarian word for “circle”. Superficially it takes the form of a single-movement piano concerto, opening with pianist Abigail Sin’s statement of themes based on Messiaen-like chords. Around her, instrumental groups were creating a moving spectrum of sound, arriving at a centre of calm represented by Yang Shuxiang’s solitary violin. Joined by Victor Williams’s viola, the music then segued to a short sequence with piano and vibraphone as partners in percussion.

The music contrasted light with darkness, high-pitched instruments with lower register ones, before returning for solo piano to close, a full circle being completed. There was a small but receptive audience for this show, sympathetic to the conviction and confidence of the young players. It looks like Esplanade's Spectrum Series and new music performance is hear to stay.

Kawai Shiu speaks forthrightly at the post-concert talk, and exhorts the audience to listen to more new music - Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring on Thursday week.

BEYOND COLOURS / Yong Siew Toh Conservatory New Music Ensemble / Review

BEYOND COLOURS
Yong Siew Toh Conservatory 

New Music Ensemble
Esplanade Recital Studio
Saturday (7 April 2012)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 9 April 2012 with the title "Sprouting varied but polished sounds".

There has never been a better time for the performance of new music in Singapore. That is because of Esplanade’s ongoing Spectrum series and Yong Siew Toh Conservatory’s commitment to two concerts a year from its New Music Ensemble.

Further stature is gained when these concerts are conducted by bona fide gurus of contemporary music. The French conductor Diego Masson (left), a student of the great Pierre Boulez, is one of them.Under his guidance, the young Conservatory musicians performed an 80 minute programme that showed that new music was a heterogeneous and varied entity.

Student composer Xu Wei Wei’s X Virus had the honour of opening the concert, beginning with long held single notes from the double bass, and then organically building up through a growth of ideas. The idea of a virus replicating its own genetic material within a host cell leading to an implosion, represented by a violent climax, before dissipating into its original single notes is a plausible description of the music.

Three more conventional works followed. Colin Matthews' Two Tributes (1999) contrasted the dynamism and movement of Little Continuum (dedicated to Elliott Carter) with the slow, troubled cortege of Elegeia, written in memory of the late cellist Christopher van Kampen. In the latter, brass dominated while the sole cellist took his symbolic leave from the ensemble. Toshio Hosokawa’s Interim (1994) was a Zen-like study in static shifts. The instrumentation of strings, harp, flute, clarinet and percussion re-created the serene sound world favoured by Toru Takemitsu, Japan’s most famous composer.

It was a welcome re-encounter with Singaporean Ho Chee Kong’s Shades of Oil Lamps, commissioned by the Singapore Arts Festival in 2008 and premiered by London Sinfonietta and Masson. Over a spirited counterpoint of percussion (woodblock, gong and marimba), a Chinatown storyteller spins a tantalising yarn, regales and draws his audience in before abruptly leaving it hanging as he collects hand-outs. A marvellous piece of musical characterisation that will be often heard, one hopes.

The concert closed with Greek avant-gardist Iannis Xenakis’s Thalleïn (1984), a more than worthy bookend to mirror the opening work. Both worked on the premise of germination (Thalleïn means to “sprout” or “shoot forth”), but this one began with a loud crashing chord and expanded upon its waves of repercussions. Exuberant and wide-ranging in sound and dynamics, this was the most complex score, but one delivered with much brio and immediacy.

New music, performed with polish and professionalism, looks likely to stay.

MIXED METAPHORS / Yong Siew Toh Conservatory New Music Ensemble / Review

MIXED METAPHORS
Yong Siew Toh Conservatory 

New Music Ensemble
Esplanade Recital Studio
Wednesday (9 November 2011)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 11 November 2011 with the title "Moving images add suspense".

Probably the best way to approach new music is to leave all pre-conceptions and expectations at the door, and let the occasion and process of performance sweep you along. New music has had bad rep, especially when what one normally defines as music – a regulated combination of melody, harmony and rhythm - is suspended, replaced by seemingly random sounds, even noises. However, little effort is made on the part of listeners to understand the minds of composers and performers.

Performances by the Conservatory’s New Music Ensemble in Esplanade’s ground-breaking Spectrum Series have helped bridge this creator-audience divide. With the national orchestra avoiding this hazard-laden path, nobody does it better. The Singapore premieres of three landmark works, conducted by Chan Tze Law (left), could not have been more persuasively handled.

Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel (1971) is not for the impatient, as it ambles along in a static and glacial pace. When silences and pauses are as important as sounds, we begin to appreciate their true value. The sparse scoring gave much scope for Jonathan Lee’s throaty but emphatic viola to be a protagonist, alongside Yoo Seol Ah’s haunting dulcet soprano tones and serene voices from the SYC Ensemble Singers. Commissioned for a performance in a Houston (Texas) chapel adorned with Mark Rothko’s iconic paintings, its contemplative thirty minutes passed for a seemingly far shorter duration of time.

Quite the opposite was Thomas Ades’s Concerto Conciso (1997), which packed a great deal in three short movements. Pianist Thomas Hecht provided the main cut and thrust, with winds and brass gelling rhythmically like a jazz band. As if constrained by compositional form, there was a mini chaconne and a round dance (called a brawl), bringing the bustling work to an abrupt end with the piano’s lid slammed shut.

The evening’s most challenging work was Edgard Varese’s Deserts (1954), scored for winds, percussion and electronic tape. The composer’s vision was of vast wastelands of the physical and metaphorical, including solitude of the soul. Its dense swathes of sound were interpolated with taped noise of a more mechanical kind, and accompanied by Bill Viola’s more contemporary film of geographical wildernesses, lightning, fire and water.

This was the rare case of moving images accompanying music, but it added an edge of suspense and the unexpected to the proceedings. But given the committed and convincing playing of all involved, it also became an added luxury.

SPECTRUM: MUSIC AND WORDS / Conservatory New Music Ensemble / Review

SPECTRUM: MUSIC & WORDS / Conservatory New Music Ensemble

Esplanade Recital Studio / Sunday (10 April 2011)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 12 April 2011 with the title "Soaking in surprises".

With new music, one really does not know exactly what to expect. Just take each surprise as they come. The first was conductor Tony Makarome himself. More familiar as a jazz bassist, he ambled in attired like some extra on the set of Casablanca. Assuming the role of engaging introducer and stand-up comic, he looked like a cross between circus ringmaster and Uncle Peter of Babies Proms.

Breaking the ice which often frosts up concerts of contemporary music, his way was direct and unstuffy. Soon the music began, with luscious strains of America-based Indian composer Juhi Bansal’s song cycle The Lost Country of Sight, based on Neil Aitken’s words. The scoring was light and transparent, for just cello, piano and sparing percussion, enabling the words to be highlighted.

Unfortunately soprano Khor Ai Ming, audibly recovering from laryngitis and placed too posteriorly, was limited in range and projection. Struggling with the words, much of the nuances in this exotically-coloured idiom were lost in the fray. Another reading on a better day will be keenly anticipated.

No such problems existed for the programme’s main work, Morton Feldman’s Music & Words. The 1987 collaboration between the New York avant-garde composer and playwright Samuel Beckett explored an uneasy relationship between the spoken word and music, encapsulated in a radio play.

The protagonists, played by narrators Craig De Wilde and Thomas Hecht, were holed up in a mock-up of a disc-jockey’s studio, complete with illuminated “On The Air” sign, reel-to-reel tape-player and several LPs. The props did not obscure a tour de force from De Wilde, whose typical broadcaster’s drawl was as convincing as his efforts to sing like a drunkard. The droll and grizzled Hecht, enacting a godlike character called Croak, was the perfect foil. Seven musicians performed sequences in interjection, but seemed distant from where the action was, which was probably what both creators had intimated all along. While it will take some time for this Asian premiere to sink in, just sitting back to contemplate this 35-minute Godot-like effort and its inanities was reward enough.

The concert closed with Chinese composer Huang Ruo’s Chamber Symphony No.1, named after the Sung Dynasty patriot-general Yue Fei. Mostly instrumental, its blend of Chinese and Western idioms was alluring, closing with the players laying down their instruments and chanting incantations. In this case, music often better expresses feelings which elude words.

Spectrum: Alternating Current / YST New Music Ensemble / Review

ALTERNATING CURRENT
Yong Siew Toh Conservatory New Music Ensemble
Esplanade Recital Studio
Wednesday (3 November 2010)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 5 November 2010.

It is always fascinating to view the stage set-up for any new music concert. Surprises invariably come up. This evening, concertgoers were greeted by the sight of gamelan metallophones and four standing loudspeakers. Seven musicians then trooped onstage for Alvin Lucier’s 1994 Music for Gamelan, Microphones, Amplifiers & Loud Speakers.

A mundane title for 15 minutes that involved amplification of resonance produced by gently percussing the gamelan and vibrating of bonangs (handheld bowl gongs). Feedback, that usually irritating quirk of mikes going berserk, was employed to eerie effect for this static and unusually calming piece.

Eminent British conductor Sian Edwards (left) conducted the rest of the concert. The next work, also inspired by things Indonesian, tossed disparate sounds of oboe, bassoon, bass, harpsichord and percussion into a salad dish. Its sheer randomness was baffling, and to what objective? Composer Dieter Mack had anticipated the poser, and titled it Gado-Gado (2005). Could rojak be next?

Singaporean Yuan Peiying’s Mutability (2009, left), at 8 minutes, was the shortest piece, but one with the lushest sound. Everything changes, according to the Buddhist principle of wuchang, was her credo in a work that varied in colour, shade and metre with every passing moment. This was music on a move, and going somewhere.

American Peter Edwards (left), faculty member at the Conservatory, saw his Artifact (2010) receiving its world premiere. A most eventful work, it began with individual instrumental notes coming together as if in search of some cohering form. With a discernable rhythm established, the music traversed through multiple shifting soundscapes. Taped static and broadcast frequencies were also introduced, as the piece zipped perpetual motion to a sizzling end.

A second half was devoted to Heiner Goebbels’ Samplersuite (1994, left). A half-hour distillation of his far longer Surrogate Cities, its 10 short movements were titled like dances in a baroque partita. Strung together like a pendant, each reflected some aspect of urban-living. A synagogue cantor’s wails, strains of Scarlatti, sentimental piano musings all pointed to some historical perspective or social life of a city.

Both frenetic and phlegmatic, the work pulsed like a breathing organism, and the ensemble’s committed playing brought it rude, hale and hearty life. With the national orchestra not paying too much attention to new music, the Conservatory is now Singapore’s de facto contemporary music champions.

Life and Death in the City / Yong Siew Toh Conservatory New Music Ensemble / Review

LIFE & DEATH IN THE CITY
Yong Siew Toh Conservatory New Music Ensemble
Esplanade Recital Studio
Sunday (18 April 2010)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 20 April 2010.

The idea of musique concrete – the use of natural sounds mixed into a musical score - has been in existence for several decades, a technique often employed by the avant-garde movement. It made a definitive grand appearance in a concert by the Conservatory New Music Ensemble in works by Steve Reich and Mauricio Kagel conducted by SSO principal percussionist Jonathan Fox.

Reich’s City Life (1995) recently received its Singapore premiere some weeks ago by the same forces, and a second airing was equally welcome. If anything, the young performers displayed more confidence in tackling the thorny score that got increasingly frenetic and oppressive. Samples of street cries, pile-drivers, sirens, a fire engine and looped voices (a Reich specialty) were mixed within its five linked movements. The last, Heavy Smoke, used sounds from the scene of the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing, eerily foretelling the events of 911.

There was some relief provided by Malaysian Chong Kee Yong’s Liu Xu Fei (2001), a 6-minute work for oboe and cello inspired by Tang poetry. Oboist Wang Jin and cellist Pan Chang rendered their demanding intertwined soliloquys with much authority. The work was atonal for certain, but it had a strangely calming effect.

The largest work was the Argentine maverick Kagel’s “December 24, 1931” Garbled News (1991), which was also the zaniest. The date referred to his actual birthday, and each movement based on a news event that occurred on that day. Performed by just nine musicians, it seemed like a whole orchestra and the proverbial kitchen sink.

Sublime and ridiculous sat cheek by jowl in its seven movements, which included reports of a Buenos Aires jail revolt, Japanese atrocities in Manchuria, a Nazi cigarette commercial, a Vatican library accident, a migrant worker’s letter and Christmas chimes that failed. Reporting and singing the news in German was veteran baritone William Lim, whose deadpan yet theatrical delivery was a revelation.

The scoring was colourful, ingenious and often riotous. The final movement literally saw sparks fly from a car battery, an Ivesian collision of carillons and Lim’s own procession of “ding dongs” as he exited the stage. With persuasive performers like these, modern music at its most outlandish and irreverent looks likely to stay.

PAINTED SCENES by Yong Siew Toh Percussion and New Music Ensemble / Review

PAINTED SCENES
Yong Siew Toh Conservatory
Percussion & New Music Ensemble
Jonathan Fox, Conductor

Conservatory Concert Hall
Saturday (27 March 2010)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 29 March 2010.

People who attend orchestral concerts and carry the misconception that percussion players have it easy could do worse than attending all-percussion concerts, now regular features at the Conservatory. Led by SSO’s principal percussionist Jonathan Fox, these students of the “kitchen department” are bona fide virtuosos.

The opening work, Conversations In The Forest III by Japanese marimba doyenne Keiko Abe, featured just two players. Just how Sun Yi and Akari Tsurata, who played facing each other, reflected and reacted to each other’s playing was pure choreography. The marimba music was mellow timbred yet sonorous, filling the hall with a gentle and soothing aural glow.

Even more vibrant was American minimalist Steve Reich’s City Life (composer pictured left), performed by the New Music Ensemble and percussion casually attired in T-shirts, jeans, jockey caps and sneakers. Conductor Fox then turned up in his favourite Boston Red Sox jersey. In five conjoined movements, the 1995 work not mindless looping but a colourful mosaic of the urban landscape.

Recorded sounds of street cries such as “Check it out!”, taxi horns, car brakes, pile drivers and other heavy machinery “played” on sampling keyboards mingled with those of the orchestra. There was Reich’s trademark rhythmic chugging in the middle movement while a heartbeat pulsed through the fourth. Rhythmic precision ruled in this performance, which ended before it outlasted its freshness.

The big work was Mussorgsky’s Pictures At An Exhibition (composer pictured left), with the original piano part augmented with six percussionists. Not merely an amplification of the score, Fox’s ingenious arrangement for all instruments available to him also altered the tone and character of some movements. The Old Castle was transported from the Mediterranean to East Asia, while Ballet Of The Unhatched Chicks took on a groovy samba beat.

Through all this, American-born pianist and conservatory professor Thomas Hecht was rock solid in one of his signature pieces, even if there were moments where overdone percussion threatened to drown him out. After the final massive chimes of The Great Gate Of Kiev, the party was just starting.

As the encore, Hecht and all eight percussionists clad in sunshades hammered out Lalo Schifrin’s iconic Mission Impossible theme, including an improvisation that interpolated Mussorgsky’s Promenade theme from the Pictures. They were having fun, and very much so had the audience.