(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.