(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.