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Singapore Symphony Chorus,
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.
