Monday 4 December 2000 Hall 603, SICEC |
SSO Goes Pop! |
| Long
De Chuan Ren Ting Hai Kang Ding Qing Ge Hu Xi* I'll Remember You* Zhi Shao Hai You Ni* True Love* Luck* Li Xiang Lan Feng Huang Yu Fei Qing Ren De Yan Lei - Jin Xiao Duo Zhen Zhong - Wo De Xin Li Mei You Ta Shi Shui Liu Nian Yi Han - Tie Chuang - Cheng Li De Yue Guang* Ka Fei Xiang* Hong Yan* Imagine* Tian Cai Bai Chi Meng Ni De Ming Zi Wo De Xing Shi Po Xiao Zhui Stars and Crescent**
Tanya CHUA*
· Mavis HEE*
singers |
NOISE RATING INDEX: 1 (The crowd was, like, so quiet. Maybe because of the ample size of Convention Hall).
The Noise Rating Index is a partially-objective measurement of pager and handphone blasts, 9pm and 10pm watch beeps, coughing-during-the-pianissimo-bits, intra-audience conversation and other mind-bogglingly inept noises emitted in the concert hall during actual performance of music. It is measured on a scale of 0 to 5, in increasing annoyance.
by William Beh
|
Working
with Iskandar |
|
Benjamin Chee, our closet theatre person, had the opportunity of working with Iskandar on a musical project a few years ago. He recalls his experience for us here. I first met Iskandar more than two years ago when he was the composer and arranger of the music for a charity musical which I was co-directing and stage managing. It was in the second round of auditions and Iskandar was personally playing the keyboard accompaniment for the hopeful auditionees. Over the next few months, he showed himself to be a consummate professional and team player, despite his more professional pedigree than the rest of us who were amateurs and volunteers. Whenever he could turn up for our rehearsals, you could feel his presence alone rejuvenating the entire room. Actors would deliver their lines with that much more brio, gesture with more panache. At the original cast album recording for the musical, he came along to lend his moral support - despite not really having anything "useful" to do - and stayed with everyone until well past midnight. Our session lasted well into the early hours of the following morning, but his presence spoke volumes. In his own native vernacular, he had semagnat, or what can only be poorly translated as "team spirit". For the musical, I remember asking him to produce something "like Chopin's slow movement of the second piano concerto" as background music for a scene set in a rich man's house. He promptly delivered a three-minute cello-piano chamber-like arrangement of one of the songs. As incidental background music in other scenes, he also produced a muzak-like "shopping centre music" and also the soundtrack for our music video which I directed, all clever variations based on music from the show. The video editor used his own temporary track when assembling the final cut, and when we watched it, Iskandar decided to keep the editor's music and did not hesitate to drop his own, because in his opinion, "hey, this is perfect" - even though Iskandar had already finished a rough cut of his own soundtrack. |
One should remember that classical music used to be the opiate of the masses, before somehow, audiences became less sophisticated and the quality of mass-consumed music was watered down to suit that taste. It is therefore somewhat of an irony that the orchestra, as one of the last bastions of highbrow art in a cultural wasteland, should find itself playing a "pops" concert with radio chart and teenybopper songs on the programme.
But tonight's concert is the result of a direct imperative from more than a year ago, when newly-arrived Chairman of the Board Dr Cham Tao Soon raised a storm by fecklessly declaring that the SSO would go "pop" - pun probably unintended - in order to reach out to the younger masses. Despite what was written in his introduction in the programme, this is not the first time that the SSO has gone "lowbrow".
Only recently, the SSO has performed a concert of Dick Lee songs. Going all the way back to September 17, 1991, we can find Kay Hamid singing with the SSO. That gig, interestingly, featured an arrangement of The Way We Were by tonight's conductor Iskandar Ismail. But for scheduling problems, the orchestra narrowly escaped playing aural wallpaper to Richard Clayderman and Kitaro when they performed in Singapore. Hardly, one feels, a channel by which to bring proper classical music to the public at large.
However, inside Hall 603 of the Singapore International Convention and Exhibition Centre, the trappings were all there: a huge non-concert venue with collapsible modular seating, funky lighting effects in a chirascuro of purples and yellows, demolition-grade low-fi speakers. A five-piece lounge-style band (synths, acoustic and electric guitars, electric bass and drum set) was brought in to augment the orchestra.
The musical arrangements of the night's music - mostly Chinese ballads with a mix of oldies thrown in - were done by Iskandar himself, in his usual ebullient style: syncopated timpani, lots of tremolando on strings, riffs provided by winds and brasses, the sort of thing that harkens back to the heyday of Mantovani and his 101 Strings. If lowbrow orchestra music was ever palatable, this is as good as it gets (and I do mean this in a nice way.)
The concert started slightly late, but with a bang. After a three-piece percussive intro from Jon Fox, Mark de Souza and Lim Meng Keh, the speakers exploded - not literally, but almost - with a kitschy but saccharine rendition of a quintessential Chinese pop number, Long De Chuan Ren (loosely translated as "The Descendant of the Dragon"). It set the tone for the evening, with ample lighting effects and music blasting maximum volume for each song.
Honoured Artist of Russia and former leader of the State Symphony Orchestra of the USSR for 10 years, SSO concertmaster Sasha Souptel had the lion's share of the solos spots on the night. The speakers did not flatter his violin tone, of course, flattening out the high and low overtones and making him sound more squeaky than normal: totally bad. Other soloists, some from the orchestra and others who weren't, were also introduced as the evening wore on.
Some of the freelancers were not too bad - two Chinese instrumentalists who joined the orchestra in the last few songs - but a couple of other soloists were either overwhelmed by the occasion or they weren't very good to begin with (not to mention that this sort of thing shows up even more when you play with soloists from the pedigree of the SSO.)
| The
Flying Inkpot's original recipe Music
reviews section (d.1999) recommends... ( 
by Chia Han-Leon, believe it or not). |
 |
There was a saxophonist whose soprano instrument was simply quite irritating - but then I'll be the first to admit that I have no love lost for Kenny G, either. I'd mention names here, but I didn't catch them when the emcee (yes, there was one) introduced them and the freelance soloists were strangely left out of the programme book credits.
The two featured celebrity singers, Tanya and Mavis, were both quite unlike in character; the former speaking and switching between English and Chinese more comfortably than the latter, who quite mangled up her sole English offering, John Lennon's seminal Imagine. They performed five and six songs respectively, in addition to their barnstorming quasi-nationalist finale Stars and Crescent.
Each had their own character and charisma, with Mavis having more presence and being more comfortable on stage as the more experienced performer. On the other hand, Tanya was clearly thrilled to bits to perform with the SSO - and the audience loved her all the more for it. People brought signs and threw flowers on stage, as one might expect in slightly more, ah, normal pop concerts - greatly adding to the exuberance of the occasion.
Iskandar has been accused of being a time-beating conductor, but I'll say this: he has never had any pretensions to being highbrow, so let's not judge him on those terms. He has arranged and conducted orchestras for diverse public-consumption gigs like Chang and Eng and Manhattan Transfer, and a superb job of it he does, too. Tonight was no different. I'm sure I wasn't the first that night to wonder whether the SSO will ever release a Classic Rock album.
The
concert could have been improved in other ways, though. The programme,
lasting more than two hours without a break, might have had perhaps a
few items cut - there were too many orchestral songs between the sung
items by the pop stars, who were after all, the main draw. Alternately,
an interval would have given the audience a chance to recover, because
by the end of the first hour, everyone was walking to-and-fro (from the
washrooms, presumably).
More notably, we did see a couple of familiar faces belonging to concert subscribers - partisan crowd in the eighty-dollar seats who did not want to miss a single performance by the SSO. I suppose for these guys, the occasion was not an outreach effort to the masses as much as showing another aspect of the SSO which we have not seen too much of in recent times.
William Beh sat two rows directly in front of Dr Cham Tao Soon at the concert and narrowly missed being spotlighted.
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806: 18.01.2001 © William Beh
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