(21 Nov 08) Tang Quartet performs Singaporean New Music @ Republic Polytechnic Cultural Centre

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Ravel, String Quartet in F

Tan Dun, Eight Colours

Phoon Yew Tien, Scenic Jiangnan

Ho Chee Kong, Echoes of Fall

Goh Toh Chai, Vasantham

Jimi Hendrix, Purple Haze

Tonight’s concert was a mix of pieces ranging from modal Ravel, avant garde Tan Dun, musical arrangements, to a transcription of a rock song by Jimi Hendrix. The opening piece (Ravel) set the bar for ensemble finesse and technical skill, although there were some technical glitches in the second movement when the tempo slowed. It is a pity that Ng Yu-ying (violin 1) still has yet to be presented with the opportunity to play on a superior instrument. His was adequate – a little shrill and tight at times, and one could sense that the artistic ability far exceeded the capability of the instrument. On the issue of the programming, Ravel stuck out like a sore thumb. One could constantly imagine a more colourful orchestral version as the piece is being performed. Ravel is also perhaps a little over-played. For a recital of 20^th century music, some of the early works from the Second Viennese School could have presented interesting perspectives.

Tan Dun’s Eight Colours made use of a large range of extended techniques, expanding the sound palette to include slapping, tapping, irregular vibrato, and glissando, all of which add up to a completely different sound world from the 19^th century. The quartet exhibited the interpretive and technical skills needed to explicate the epigrammatic fragments that comprise the piece.

Ho Chee Kong’s Echoes of Fall incorporated skillful use of the gambus, adding a new dimension to the string quartet. The piece centers on the meditative gambus solos, from which the string texture grows in an organic fashion, underpinned by a modal-flavoured centricity. One of the more striking features was the long gambus solo in the middle of the piece that held everyone spell-bound. This was soulfully performed.

Like Ho’s piece, the rest of the evening was relatively easy from a technical point of view for the performers. Phoon Yew Tien’s and Goh Toh Chai’s arrangements suffered very occasionally from lack of rehearsal time. Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze gave the musicians an opportunity to venture out of the refined, balanced and highly crafted world of classical sound, bringing a crude strength to the tone that bulged and slid in a wanton fashion into the world of rock. One could almost smell the Sixties in this unlikely and highly entertaining piece, executed with panache.

(22 Feb 09) Lim Yau conducts Haydn's "The Hunt" & "The Bear" @ The Salon, National Museum of Singapore

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Phua Ee Kia presenter

The orchestra presented two symphonies from different stages of Haydn’s development as a composer. Symphony No. 73 represents the light musical style of the period after Haydn’s venture into Sturm und Drang (‘Storm and Stress’). Symphony No. 82 clearly was written to capture the attention of the composer’s Parisian audience, replete with dramatic gestures, surprising twists and turns, and greater experimentation with orchestral colours.

The account of the Classical era given by the presenter for this concert had the character of a caricature, and was designed to engage an audience for whom classical music is akin to a foreign language. This was successful to a certain extent, though it was perhaps a little long; more explication of the musical material would have been useful for such an audience. More to the point, the presentation of two entire symphonies in the same characteristic Haydnesque style is not entirely suited to this audience, regardless of the countless distinctions musical connoisseurs can make. Nevertheless, the little quiz tickled the audience with its outlandish multiple choice options. One wonders if Haydn was not quite so proficient on the electric guitar, in response to the question of which instrument Haydn did not manage so well.

As an instance of performance practice (rather than the concert as a whole), the orchestra and the conductor was much more successful. The structure of the music was clearly presented. Important moments were suitably emphasized and one gets a sense of the ebb and flow of energy in the vivacious Allegros. Metrical and musical accentuation was applied in good proportion. Tempo was well judged, though a little flexibility in the inner movements would not have been amiss.

In terms of the choice of venue, chamber groups (such as the downsized TPO formed specially for this concert) tend to be limited in their options. However, a worse choice could not have been made. The Salon is much too small for the 30 or so players. Much of the fine work by the orchestra was undone by the acoustics. Loud forte passages on the violins came across in a shrill manner as, beyond a certain point, the ear cannot comfortably adjust to the higher decibels. As a result, the perceivable dynamics range was much smaller than in reality. Soft piano passages were like desiccated leaves, deprived of the benefits of reverberations. This dryness is due in part to the limited use of vibrato, as is the practice in the eighteenth century; a different venue is clearly needed. The wind instruments’ sound was more palatable, perhaps because they were not disadvantaged by a playing technique not designed for their instruments; these were often too loud in the small room. More disturbing was the constant pounding of the three cellos and two double basses, which in a larger venue would not have had the same effect. The punishing acoustics revealed every instance of splayed microtones which would have been disguised in another venue.

The slower movements of No. 73 were a little dull due to the ‘light’ style Haydn employed; this music was perhaps more suited as the background to conversations. If we were to follow performance practice to the extreme, i.e. in the manner performances were conducted in the eighteenth century, the symphony could have been performed in the middle of the sunlit atrium in the National Museum, while museum goers pass by. It is clear that certain symphonies (‘The Bear’) are intended to capture the attention of audiences more than others. Even into the 1780s, symphonies were intended not to be the main attraction, serving instead as a formal gesture signaling the start of concerts that featured singers and pianists; they were sometimes performed as outdoor serenades. Symphonic movements were often divided and dispersed through the programme, serving to open the concert, and end the first half of the programme or the entire concert. (Neal Zaslaw, Mozart’s Symphonies: Contexts, Performance Practice, and Reception).

Overall, this concert would have been more enjoyable with if more consideration had been given to the ‘extra-musical’ aspects, such as the venue and the programming. Some symphonies can be transferred from the pedestal to other performing spaces, and mixed with other genres or music by different composers. Musical decisions such as the number of lower strings and the use of vibrato on strings can also be profitably reviewed, given the specific acoustics of the venue. Instrumental technique was not generally a problem with the exception of one of the horn players who had permanent difficulties with tone production - and practically crippled the last leg of ‘The Bear’.

(13 Nov 2008) Lan Shui conducts Brahms' Requiem with Singapore Symphony Orchestra @ Esplanade Concert Hall

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Singapore Symphony Chorus, Singapore Bible College Chorale, and Hallelujah Chorus, with soloists Brigitte Wohlfarth and Garry Magee

The combined choir was excellent tonight, and the choristers did justice to a work in which they were the primary feature. Different sections were homogenous and equally matched. The intonation was mostly in place, with some notable misses from the sopranos, who were also noticeably out of place a few times. When the singers came together, the sound was brilliant and remarkably pure for a choir of this size. There were a few places when the men’s vowels were less than refined, and they were also perhaps a little overly enthusiastic in enunciating consonant endings. (A particularly unsettling moment was one individual’s loud ending on ‘Kraft’, meaning ‘power’, at the end of the sixth movement.) The chorus did admirably well in bringing out the different choral colours of the requiem, although the phrasing suffered under the laborious tempo of the opening movements, especially at the beginning of the movement two.

Brigitte Wohlfarth’s startling vibrato brought new meaning to her opening line ‘And ye now therefore have sorrow’. She belongs to a tradition of sopranos who have now gone out of fashion. In a world dominated by the new school of early music influenced singers, characterized by brighter timbre and restrained, colouristic use of vibrato, the old school needs more than ever to find a way of singing that uses vibrato to enhance the emotive appeal of music. There was some evidence of the latter tonight, especially in the higher tessitura. However, the soprano had little control over the mechanistic pitch fluctuations of her vibrato in her siren-like middle range.

Garry Magee’s crystal baritone was a reservoir which invited one to quench his thirst. Unfortunately, this was not to be. A minor problem was that of high notes, which Magee tossed out but missed. On the issue of interpretation, the singer really needed to follow the text more closely. In movement six, ‘Behold, I shall show you a mystery’ lacked the obvious. (Why did the singer not follow the pianissimo marked in the score?)

The orchestra supported the chorus admirably through most of the work, with the notable exception of the ending of movement six when it crowded out the voices. At some points, the higher strings sounded unsuitably soloistic. More peculiarly, the aggressive sforzando from the double bass at the beginning of movement seven sent a strange message at the start of a movement proclaiming ‘Blessed are the dead’. Neither the pitch, nor the timbre was blessed. Several entries from the trumpet in movements two and three had a similar effect to the double bass entry; one is reminded of the mechanism of the expulsion of wind rather too abruptly.

On a brighter note, the orchestra gave a full blooded, Romantic rendition in movement four with expressive swells (that are somewhat against the grain of modern interpretation). This style was more appropriately used here in relation to the cloying music than in movement two, when the string sequences near the opening was etched out in a gratingly slow tempo that did little to prevent the musical momentum from dissipating. That the maestro has placed his mark on Brahms’ Requiem is beyond question. His attempt to secure originality and meaning, though, is less successful in the opening movements than in the later ones. Still, one has to admire Lan Shui’s spirit. The audience was silently reprimanded when he refused to lower his baton at the end of the work, outraged as he was by one overly enthusiastic audience member who sparked off a brief avalanche of claps - which died off when the audience realized that the music was still reverberating in the air.

(10 Oct 2008) Leonard Slatkin conducts Vaughan Williams and Elgar with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra @ Esplanade Concert Hall

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The Royal Philharmonic was certainly very good but judging from the audience’s standing ovation (quite, odd, come to think of it – an ovation for an orchestral performance), you would have thought that they were Berlin or Wien. The opening piece, extracted from a film score by William Walton, showed off the melting tones of the strings. Thereafter, Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No.6 struck like a bolt of fury. I have to say that hearing the work was one of the most enjoyable musical experiences I have had in a long time. The orchestra, obviously under expert direction, slashed, burned, laughed hysterically, and left one with a terrible sense of cold beauty at the end. Here we got a glimpse of what the Maestro had been up to in the past few years with the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington D.C. A work in which all the movements were linked, the Symphony reverberated like a live wire through 35 min - and left the audience feeling bemused. I think most of them did not ‘get it’. Nevertheless, time and experience – I am sure – will lead more to appreciate such a fine work, one which is relevant to our political and musical times, being neither too esoteric, nor too cloyingly palatable.

I had to close my eyes as ‘Nimrod’, the world’s favourite English music - one of the movements from the Enigma Variations, was performed. So overwhelmed was I by the descending sevenths in the melody - powerfully expressive, and fleshed out in full glory by the orchestra, which I believe, is in top form. (None of the boo-boos one occasionally observes in London’s top four.) I am grateful that ‘Nimrod’ was not overdone, though I had yearned for more pathos in the opening variation. The principal cellist had a beautiful tone, although her stroke was somewhat wavering. Many brilliant passages by the brasses deserve mention, and the all too often forgotten percussionist did fine work, especially in ‘Nimrod’.

Overall, this evening witnessed fine musicianship and some great moments. The outer works were enough to melt a hardened cynic, whilst Vaughan Williams brought a different, more contemporary dimension of reality to the evening. This is a programme which is hard to beat. We had the opportunity to see London’s step-child of an orchestra at work (the only one of the top four not linked to a major performance venue), and it was quite remarkable.

(03 Sep 2008) Turandot @ Esplanade Theatre

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In 1920, after his foray into the Land of the Rising Sun in Madama Butterfly (1904), Puccini chose China as the setting for his next opera. Unlike Butterfly, which has captured the imagination of American audiences with the sexual drama of an American male’s encounter with an extremely young geisha (under-aged by today’s standards), Turandot is based entirely in the fictitious, ancient past. Princess Turandot originated from a set of Persian tales (translated into French); her name means ‘daughter of Turan’, which (historically) referred to the lower portion of Central Asia on today’s world map. Her eventual lover Calaf, a Tartar, originates from the higher portion of Central Asia, and in this production, is garbed in Mongolian dress. At the beginning of the opera, we witness the doomed Persian Prince from today’s Middle East. The bulk of the characterizations in the opera, of course, focus on the Chinese, from the emperor, to officials, servants, and the common people. At the end of the opera, the Mongolian prince successfully woos over the ruthless princess, while his forsaken Chinese slave girl, Liu, sacrifices herself to facilitate that union. Up till 1998, China had banned the opera. Perhaps they objected to the portrayal of the ruthless princess, the clownish trio Ping, Pong, and Pang, the methods of torture exercised on Liu, and the uneasy death of the abject Chinese slave girl who sacrificed herself for the royalty.

Ten years later, coinciding with the Beijing Olympics, Turandot is revived in Chinese-majority Singapore. The Games had monopolised the country’s only major English entertainment television channel for two whole weeks. Eighty-eight years after Puccini first set his pen to the score, a Singaporean audience finds itself bemused at some of (what are supposed to be) the most dramatic points in the opera. (Lots of ‘eights’ here, which the Chinese traditionally believes to be auspicious.) The audience could not help itself but laugh at the archaic mannerisms of an operatic tradition that has been grafted on our society. After her first kiss with Calaf, the distraught Turandot utters ‘What is happening to me?’, drawing laughter. When Calaf reveals his name, Turandot drew more laughter with her tautological ‘I know your name!’. (These translations were shown on the two screens on either side of the stage, which probably explains why the libretto was not provided in the $5 programme notes.) Well, the translations could be improved. There is also, however, the issue of the symbolic kiss and the symbolic revelation of identity, neither of which makes much impact on a modern audience more accustomed to – ironically - the ‘verismo’ (realism, in its original usage, referring to early twentieth century Italian opera) in today’s cinemas.

You may not think that an audience’s reception is important for an established work like Turandot. But trust me, it tells us a lot about ourselves. The audience was universally amused by Ping, Pong, and Pang, not least by their names, which correspond to a particularly distasteful joke that tells of how Chinese names are chosen as pots and pans fall down a staircase. (But you should know that ‘ping pong’, the game for which Singapore won a silver medal in the recent Olympics, originated in England; the name, too, came from the same country.)

From the Persian Empire, to Tartar, to Turan (which includes China), Turandot has traversed a vast track of the Asian continent, almost in the same way as some of our own music by Singaporean composers traverses India, China, and Indonesia. The composerly imagination is captured by the discourses of his time. By 1920, Europe, which at one time controlled 85% of the land mass in the world, was beginning the process of releasing this land to the populations in those regions. Canada, Australasia, the former Ottoman Empire, and the Baltic region all slipped from European control in the aftermath of World War I. What information about Asia that existed in Italy was what Puccini drew on in 1920, composing in a time when Italy was feeling the pinch of shrinking in the amount of land it controlled, at a point when the nascent imperialist Facist movement was about to engulf the whole country.

Today, we are privileged with better information about so many different countries, and we should be more resistant to characterisations that proceeded from a lack of knowledge. This is the meaning of ‘criticism’. We can appreciate the lavish, authentic-looking costumes (from what I have gathered through media images) of China, Mongolia, and the Middle East. (I am not sure if the dome on the Persian prince was a little large and unwieldy.) There were gracefully choreographed dances and fights (although the men in the fights could have been more aggressive). The staging was minimal but imposing, with effective use of lighting to suggest different times of the day and to enhance the mood. A particularly memorable, long drawn moment was the transition from night to sunrise effected on the large background screen, first with lights dotting a cobalt canvas like stars, then with streaks of off-white suggesting sunrise, followed by an emerging warm tangerine glow (the sun) that fused into the remnants of night.

Throughout the whole two hours, the orchestra provided brilliant support, though there were some unacceptable coordination problems right at the beginning of the opera, when the players should have been more alert. The chorus comprised of at least a substantial portion of amateur singers, with larynxes insufficiently raised to give depth, vowels insufficiently masked to give warmth, and phrases insufficiently nuanced to achieve the desired lyric quality; all these ironically lent the chorus a speech like, flat quality that distinguished a crowd that was supposed to be Chinese rather well from the European crowds in other operas. Indeed, if you compare the speech patterns of an upper class Englishman speaking Oxford English versus a Singaporean speaking Singlish, you will find that they correspond rather well to the singing voices of the royalty versus the crowd in the opera. A historical accident - but one which has many implications if we were to consider how to make opera come alive today.

The P*ng trio sang well, adopting feminine characteristics to draw laughter from the audience. Their gender ambiguity generated humour which relieved the tense moments, especially in their extended nostalgic aside in Act 2. Opposed to this femininity is the masculine figure of the emperor, who unfortunately failed to fulfil the requirements of his role both vocally and visually. Martin Ng portrayed a convincing father to Calaf, and Nancy Yuen was brilliant in her characterization of the pious Liu, although I think the character of Liu can plausibly be reinterpreted for today’s audiences as someone who is less of a submissive female slave. (I’m sure some of you are reminded of the other sexualized Liu in American media; let’s find other alternatives.) At times, Yuen’s voice sounded pinched, and the pitch faltered, but her dramatic entry right in the middle of the mob scene in Act 1 was nothing short of flawless.

Jessica Chen and Lee Jae Wook played the roles of Turandot and Calaf respectively. Both were adequate to the exhausting vocal demands of their roles, which necessitated two different artistes who sang each of these roles on alternate nights. They both sang in the expansive style associated with the heroes and heroines of Puccini. This is the general practice but I wonder if more characterization could have been infused in their quieter passages. Chen sounded tense in her higher register where all the consonants disappeared. Lee was much more successful, handling the vocal pyrotechnics effortlessly, although his first entry in Act 1 was obviously very tense and paled beside Yuen’s dramatic cry (mentioned earlier). The real test for Lee, though, is - of course - the staple of all operatic fans, the crowning aria of Turandot, ‘Nessun Dorma’. This was adequately sung, but the orchestra started out far too slowly for the tenor’s comfort; I’m not sure whether this was due glitches in the rehearsals. Like Turandot, the character of Calaf could have been more thoroughly thought through, both vocally, and in terms of stage presence. The singer appeared to fall short of breath at the apex of the aria on the triple pronouncement of ‘winning’ over Turandot. Nevertheless, his performance was undeniably the most brilliant of the night.

Overall, I would say that Singapore Lyric Opera has indeed come a long way since the times of poor orchestral support and dubious singers. This was a major production which showed Singaporeans that the musical scene has developed the capacity to handle Western opera. Now, how about more operas by our local composers?

(18 Jul 2008) Lim Yan plays Rachmaninov Complete Preludes @ Esplanade Recital Studio

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Young Artist award winner Lim Yan lived up to his name in his fiery performance this evening which promises to be a preview of greater things to come. The opening prelude Op. 3 No. 2 was the only unsatisfactory item which sounded a little clockwork-like, and could definitely have done with more tonal variation. Op. 23 opened with one of the exquisite melodies that only Rachmaninov could write, which the pianist passionately traced over pleasurably/painfully long arches. Lim Yan’s ability to observe the architectonic lines of the precludes is one aspect of his pianistic brilliance which I am sure must have moved both expert and amateur music lovers. Other highlights from the first half of the concert included the flashy G minor prelude which Lim Yan took at lightning speed, and the elegiac G flat major prelude which concluded Op. 23. Op. 32 provided more extended opportunities for technical display which the pianist exploited to the full. From the expansive E major prelude, to the turbulent F minor prelude, to the bombastic D flat major prelude which concluded the set, Lim Yan performed with finesse, meditation and volcanic energy. He is not one of those pallid, risk adverse pianists flooding the field of professional performance, but one risk taker to look out for in the future. In exchange for the occasional slip, one receives an entire world of the pianist’s creation.

As a concert goer, I would personally have preferred a more varied programme. Such unnecessary musicological completeness (‘complete preludes’), providing the illusion of unity and an atmosphere of methodological scholarliness has the effect of alienating some amateurs, and tiring some experts. (And this is in spite of the tonal linkages between the preludes. Do you seriously expect each successive prelude to slowly add up to an aesthetic whole of 24 keys in the listener’s head over the course of 2 hours?) The era of composer/oeuvre-worship has already met its demise in the academy and one would expect the international field of performance to follow suit soon. Let us celebrate the pianist and not the score.

(27 Jun 2008) Lan Shui conducts Smetana with Singapore Symphony Orchestra; Pianist Emanuel Ax in Chopin Second

(Esplanade Concert Hall. First published on http://musicians.com.sg. All rights reserved. No part of this may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form without permission in writing from the author.)

Smetana, My Fatherland: The High Castle, The Moldau, Šárka

Chopin, Piano Concerto in F# minor, Op. 21

Lan Shui was in his element, commanding the orchestra with a startling directness, drawing fresh energy from perhaps the most tired portion of the repertoire in the first half, The Moldau. The fine work of the woodwinds at the beginning of the movement deserves special mention. Lan Shui practically danced on the stage in the sections of folk music which were incorporated into the score. Whilst these folk touches may seem quaint to a modern day audience, the conductor convincingly pulled out all the stops to revel in the sheer joy of rhythm and melody.

The Moldau stands as the dramatic centerpiece framed by the stately tone poem The High Castle, and the primitivist closing tone poem Šárka (the title derives from the name of the legendary prehistoric woman warrior). Whilst the three pieces are contrasting in style, it is not entirely clear that the decision to play them in succession is appropriate for the concert format; Smetana had not intended this. Many programmes which feature exhaustive studies of a certain group of works (such as a full concert of Beethoven symphonies) seem to be guided more by a musicological inquisitiveness, than a concern for the audience’s interest level. The insipid harmonies and textures of the first tone poem (in spite of the SSO’s valiant effort) detracted from the overall effectiveness of the programme in the first half.

It is inevitable that when a pianist tackles the epitome of pianistic writing, he will be compared with other recent virtuosos who have practically defined the two Chopin piano concertos. Individual taste will vary; personally, I have not heard anything that even comes close to the brilliance of Kissin’s 84 recording of both concertos (made when he was 12), and Zimerman’s elegiac poetry in his performance of the first concerto at the Royal Festival Hall in London (1999, at Chopin 150, commemorating the 150^th anniversary of the composer’s death).

As a pianist who has recorded both concertos on a period instrument - a 1851 fortepiano from the manufacturer Erard - Ax’s interpretation could potentially be of great interest. Unfortunately, the performance came across as rather uninspired. Aside from the questionable ritardandos that occurred at almost every phrase (which is not a feature of period performance), Ax’s execution of the pianistic figuration was rather heavy handed, and lacking in shape. Unwieldy bumps made appearances in some of the cantabile passages, and the evenness of tone through both hands in unison passages was not always guaranteed. The orchestra was continuously too soft in extended passages and failed in its role as accompaniment. Ax seems to have delighted the audience, though; two encores were called for and the evening closed with the pianist having impressed many with his technical display.

(30 Mar 2008) Lim Yau conducts Sibelius Second and Fourth with The Philharmonic Orchestra @ Esplanade Concert Hall

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Looking past the hermeneutic gloss in the blurb on the concert, and the tedious, analytical concert introduction which was probably lost on the masses, one can see the fine achievement by a young orchestra clearly. Aside from a failed attempt by the first violins in the stratospheric heights in the Fourth, and a lackluster horn entry near the beginning of the Second, these players maintained a consistently high level of commitment to technical excellence and musicianship.

Maestro Lim Yau has coached the orchestra well in responding to the Romantic gestures of the Second. Waves of orchestral colour and, in particular, the glorious, rustic mordent that characteristises the first movement, were executed with panache. A strong momentum propelled the Scherzo into the Finale; one must be satiated with heroic feeling at the conclusion.

The second movement of the Second Symphony, I believe, can unlock the mystery of the Fourth. Cadential gestures lead painfully and repeatedly into harmonic impasses. With every fermata, the tension mounts until it reaches its breaking point at the end of the movement, when string pizzicati are plucked in futile protest against the bravado of the tonic chord sounded by the winds. It is as if Sibelius were asking himself, ‘Can a mere cadence at the end suffice to resolve all that has come before?’

From this vantage point, the curious endings of the movements in the Fourth begin to take shape as truncated gestures. The tritone, correctly identified in the programme notes as the germinal seed of the work, is a foundational element of tonal (i.e. ‘of sense of key’) instability that underlies the music throughout. (But the tritone does not, as the notes inaccurately implies, ‘grow’ inside an ‘aural womb’. Rather, its function is to disfigure – as it were – the tonal structure.) Composers have reacted to the dilemma of endings in different ways. Beethoven pounded it relentlessly with tonic chords. Mahler and Wagner created musical behemoths as they unraveled harmonies that set up so much tension that incapable of ending, the composers added more and more… Schoenberg threw the baby out with the bath water.

And Sibelius simply stopped composing for the movements in the Fourth. It is as if the audience is hearing a snippet of music which reveals itself to us momentarily for the length of the movement, before it disappears into the distance (or the cosmic universe/heavens etc.). How do you ‘end’ where no ending is in sight? The failing of the performance lies in its overly austere reading of the score. A truncation is only as powerful as the momentum leading up to it. Anyone who describes this music as ‘intellectual’ has well and truly missed the point. Passionate – but ultimately futile - protests rail against the impossibility of endings throughout the outer movements. If the conclusions of the earlier movements have little effect, it is because the instrumental lines that tear the tonal fabric apart with the tritone were sometimes given cosmetic treatment, and the wailing in the face of the brutal fact of tonality’s inadequacy was not grasped by the throat. A tremulous conclusion in the elliptical ending to the last movement, however, salvaged a meaningful thread from the work.

In spite of its outward appearance, the Fourth has announced the death of tonality. I wonder, though, whether Sibelius’ endings are true insights, or simply truncated -

(22 Jun 2008) London Sinfonietta @ Esplanade Concert Hall

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Piazzolla, Tango seis

Toru Takemitsu, Rain Coming

Stravinsky, The Soldier’s Tale

Eggard Varèse, Octandre

Ho Chee Kong, Shades of Oil Lamps

John Adams, Chamber Symphony

From the first note to the last, the ensemble soloists mesmerized the audience. The violinist’s impassioned playing in Piazzolla’s Tango seis drew blood from the score; it seared your brain and bruised your heart. Tango seis’ sextet struck magic with their immaculate grasp of Piazolla’s sensuality. Waves of precise and finely judged tones swelled, subsided and caressed.

The Sinfonietta brought Takemitsu’s sound world into fruition, lines and different timbral configurations blending to form myriad pictures. Winds melted into strings, into the vibraphone, and so on, continuously transiting and transforming.

There is always concern when music from a dramatic work is culled to form a concert suite. Whereas the original production was guided by many artistic elements – dramaturgy, dance, narration, and music – which coalesce to form an overall impression, a concert suite must sustain the audience’s interest purely with music. Musical vignettes which were composed to serve the drama can only fit in a concert suite to a variable degree of success. Here, I think the performance would have been more successful with some elements of narration built into it, even if summarized. The Soldier’s Tale is based on a parable which has pointed significance for Singapore; it is about a soldier who exchanges his violin for a book that can foretell future changes in the economy. Performed without a conductor through the labyrinth of changing time signatures, Soldier’s Tale was a virtuosic tour de force for the septet, both in terms of ensemble and individual skill. The quick fire of the violinist deserves special mention.

The octet which performed Varèse’s Octandre realized fully the piece’s aggressive sound world, with screeching muted brass and forced woodwind tones in the high register. For pieces such as this, the audience should ideally not be seated too close to the stage, or the entire piece becomes an uncomfortable fortissimo, and the subtler shades of articulation and dynamics inflexions are lost.

Ho Chee Kong’s Shades of Oil Lamps is a self consciously Asian piece, which uses the woodblock as a recurring motif that loosely guides the pitch and timbral surges in the other instruments. The players brought out the primal rhythmic impetus of the piece, which was finely crafted in the ensemble writing. A pentatonic flavoured harmony contributed to the piece’s Asiatic-Chinese feel. The work culminated with a conclusive, cadential flourish, rare in an age when most works recognize that the harmonic tensions worked into a contemporary composition can never be resolved.

John Adams’ Chamber Symphony demonstrates how musical styles are permeable to substrates of meaning. Expressionism and cartoons weaved in his mind a canvas of aggressive atonal gestures that are used in a post-minimalist manner in the Symphony. Outwardly similar, but carrying different meanings in different contexts, these gestures become open to interpretation in the new context Adams created. The variously screeching, rushing, exaggerated and mechanically repeated sounds present to the audience a plethora of meanings and associations that cancel each other out. The rush of energy from start to end is void of ‘content’ in a despairing vision of today’s culture, in which circulated material assume a ‘used’ quality.

Chamber Symphony closed the concert in another flawless execution by the Sinfonietta. The composers’ aspiration to ‘beauty and perfection’ which was mentioned in the programme notes was certainly matched by the brilliant ensemble.

(15 Jun 2008) Timothy Reynish conducts The Philharmonic Winds @ Esplanade Concert Hall

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Reynish’s dramatic personality was in exposed in full force tonight, with his robust conducting gestures and gruff comments, ranging from his opinion of ‘cheese’ in band music to certain disquieting comments on the Iraq war (made in relation to Del Tredici’s In Wartime). Del Tredici’s piece was perhaps the highlight of the first half, a work in which the tone of the instruments was given a chance to coalesce, and the virtuosity of the various instrumental parts contributed to a soaring and ebbing whirlwind of sounds. Certain instruments were clearly not up to par with the rest of the wind band in solos (trumpet) and in running passages (piccolo). Zechariah Goh’s Symphonique Bombastique offered a caricature of the eminent Reynish, incorporating juicy jazz harmonies and large mounts of sounds. The opening piece - Kenneth Hesketh’s Vranjanka - is a child of modernism, with various instrumental fragments aspiring towards a total picture, not entirely successful in execution by either composer or performers.

The second half presented a variety of attractive pieces for the mass audience, including the saccharine U Trau by Christopher Marshall, who ingenuously invented a whole new language for the text. Luis Serrano Alarcón’s Concertango gave the band a chance to show off its timbral unity, while Adam Gorb’s Dances from Crete is perhaps suitably entertaining, but somewhat tiresomely intertextual.

Overall, the concert was perhaps not entirely satisfying. The tonal or neotonal (tonal, but not quite) pieces presented have neither the urgency of the Romantics, the intimidation of eternity in the post-minimalists, nor the punch of a large body of contemporary neotonal music. Most of the pieces in the second half, whilst offering educational opportunities for the players, simply do not measure up against the artistic stature of the pieces in the first half. The modernist fragmentation found in the first half was more or less successful. Some of the passages were unnecessarily and incessantly complicated.

(24 May 2008) Gennady Rozhdestvensky conducts Russian Composers with Singapore Symphony Orchestra @ Esplanade Concert Hall

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Rozhdestvensky’s strokes are direct and unambiguous, peppered with the occasional arabesque when he wanted to make a special point. SSO responded to the presence of the great conductor, producing some of its most passionate sounds yet. The intensity of the violins in Tchaikovsky's First emerged out of the depths of every single player and coalesced into a magnificent organism that reached out from the stage and pulled on the heart strings of the audience. Horns and flutes produced some awkward errors at prominent points.

Vitoria Postnikova stole the show in the second half with her immaculate performance of Rachmaninov's Paganini Rhapsody. At turns steely, ephemeral, fiery, and elegiac, this was a classic performance by a Russian virtuosi wanting in no aspects, except perhaps the choice of a rather tired, haggard, artistically vacuous piece of music. The eighteenth variation was a relief from the sad story of Rachmaninov’s decline as a composer under American capitalism which rewarded him oh-so-richly as a pianist.

Taken from the satirical film of 1983, The Dead Souls’ Register, Schnittke’s music has been orchestrated by Rozhdestvensky and staged as a absurd theatre complete with 2 metronomes clicking at different speeds; a pianist who plays ‘wrong’ notes, falls asleep at the piano, and has a pretentious Romantic epiphany; orchestra players that ‘lost’ their place in the score; a section of ‘Russian’ band music featuring vulgar brasses and piccolos; and much more of the same. Comedy is the gentle corrective for human foibles and the audience lapped it up completely. There is hope yet.

The composers tonight belong to a group of Russian artists who have experienced tragedies. Schnittke suffered under the socialist regime which persecuted his music, Rachmaninov under the capitalist regime which exploited his fingers, and Tchaikovsky under the bourgeoise regime that eventually blackmailed him into committing suicide for his homosexuality. Tchaikovsky’s First was itself written under a time of great anguish, physically and mentally devastated as he was by the criticism of his teachers Anton Rubenstein and Nikolai Zaremba from the St Petersburg Conservatory. The scent of sweetness in the First is only a thin foil against which his inner turmoil raged. One mulls over the startling relevance of art - on the one hand - and life under censorship, capitalism, and bourgeoise conformism - on the other - in this Russian programme.

(12 Apr 2008) Violinist Kam Ning performs Barber with Singapore Symphony Orchestra; Lan Shui conducts Mahler Fifth @ Esplanade Concert Hall

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Barber, Violin Concerto

Mahler, Symphony No. 5

Donning a simple black dress accentuated with a turquoise sash, Kam Ning swept the audience away with her virtuosity and artistry. Every note in Barber’s Violin Concerto glistened like a dew drop, touched by the light of her sure handed interpretation. The familiar melody in the second movement was given new depth in her searching meditation, an extraordinarily intense brooding. At the end of the quick fire third movement, an enthusiastic audience member shouted ‘Bravo’; however, no encore was to be had. Indeed, what could possibly top the performance we had just witnessed? Here was no oriental exoticism dressed in bright primary colours, but a vigorous artistic force to be reckoned with. Claus Peter Flor led the orchestra in a thoroughly convincing rendition of the concerto. Even at the height of musical and emotional tumult, the soloist could be heard struggling valiantly against the inexorable orchestral onslaught in a finely wrought balance. The evening was graced by the presence of a 1793 Lorenzo Storioni, revealed in its full majesty. Kam Ning’s airing released the full power of the bouquet: a dark somber middle register balanced with the turbid mercury of the higher notes.

Mahler’s Fifth is mixed bag of tunes which cross paths throughout the symphony. Elements of apocalypse plague the movements throughout, and the schizophrenic alternation between jubilance and destruction was handled adeptly by the orchestra. The horn solo in the expansive Scherzo was adequate, stretched as the player was by the demands of the preceding movements. An especially harrowing moment was the desolate notes of the theme which was eked out by various soloists as the second movement came to a close, ending on an agonized pizzicato unison. The overplayed Adagietto (which appeared in the soundtrack to Visconti’s Death in Venice) was rendered with dignity.

One cannot realistically expect total precision in the tumultuous string writing throughout the Fifth; however, some of the climaxes were too diluted by scattered entries. At quite a few points in the music, the brasses obliterated the strings. Perhaps better programming choices could have been made. Especially coming after Barber’s concerto, the Fifth felt interminable; the Adagietto, in particular, felt like a reminiscence of the Andante of the concerto, and both movements felt like reminiscences of various soundtracks.