Something, clearly, is not right when you turn up for a Gala Concert, and all you can see are conspicuous vacancies in the auditorium. Which is all the more surprising, considering the calibre of a classical luminary like Lynn Harrell. Perhaps the presence of a major corporate sponsor - you know, guys in suits and ladies in long dresses who buy up huge chunks of Circle seats, throwing swanky cocktail receptions before, during and after the concert - would have added some spectacle to the occasion. Pretty people may be pretty vacant (as the Sex Pistols song goes) but eye candy sure beats looking at empty chairs any day.

The surprise of the night, however, was the order of the changed programme, with the soloist playing after the interval and foiling any would-be CFCs (Came-For-Concertos™⁾ in the audience. The first offering, Schoenberg's paradigm-shattering Five Orchestral Pieces, was an unusual start to the evening, and admittedly, in the flesh, full and erumpent, sounded very different from the recordings I've gotten used to.

Watching Lan's expansive arm-waving dramaturgy, one could also feel a vague collective discomfort at what must have been, to the inexperienced listener, a cacophonous intellectual puzzle; a bewilderment of what kind of person could possibly even pretend to enjoy this kind of music. This attitude of "putting up with it" (ie. waiting to get on to the good bits later) was all the more duly underlined when the confused audience broke into scattered applause after the fourth movement.

Admittedly, Schoenberg (above/left) had included subtitles for each of the five movements on the request of his publishers - not that they were particularly helpful. From the deceptively benign Summer Morning by the Lake to the absolutely gnomic Peripetia, this was music which had gotten so far off the beaten trail that one an entirely new species of orchestral and compositional technique had evolved: Klangfarbenmelodie, or "Tone-Colour Melody".

General ensemble was, at least initially, rather untidy and one could perceive the disjointedness between different sections of the orchestra. Was the music as difficult to interpret and perform as it was to consume ? If it was, then Lan and the musicians, if nothing else, deserve credit for their adventurism in exposing local audiences to this music.

Debussy's La Mer came after the Schoenberg. Lan last performed this work only as recently as May 1998. In this revisitation, the results were vastly different: I don't know what to call it, but it sure wasn't French Impressionism (notwithstanding Debussy's disavowal of the term).

Firstly, the full-sized orchestra produced volume quantity which was just too big and strident for the size of the hall: at fortissimo, the roof of the Victoria Concert Hall was all but blown off, and more importantly, the massed orchestral timbre took on an unagreeably hard, indurate quality. A softer edge would have been wonderful. Secondly, although the musicians (and conductor) got all the notes right, they did not (as another conductor once said) get Debussy right.

The reading was straightforward and conventional, offering no special illumination. To be fair, Lan did dot his i's and cross his t's. In the Play of the Waves, the phrasing of the emotive landscape was beautifully crafted, and the Dialogue Between the Sea and the Wind was thought-provokingly rendered. However, the volatility of Debussy's instrumental interplay was too deliberate and this resulted in a rendition hewn more out of stone and granite (a la Wolfgang Rihm) than one washed and daubed in pastels: Debussy with an edifice complex. As it was, the French master was made to sound rather prolix.

Score at the break, to use a footballing metaphor: Idiomatic Composers 2 - Young Asian Orchestra 0, but with the YAO yet to bring out their guest star. It turned out - to use a cliché - to be a match of two halves. With Harrell and his trusty Stradivarius on, Bloch's rarely-heard Schelomo (Hebrew Rhapsody for Cello and Orchestra) was given a strenuous twenty-minute workout.

 

"King Solomon is a very dynamic leader, he is a young King, he's got a great deal of vigour and reading Ecclesiastes in the old testament you get a feeling for the kind of sensuality and emotional aesthetic strength there is in King Solomon. And to pit it against the entire Israelites, the rest of the orchestra is very much like all of the Israelites, and King Solomon is the dominating over that sometimes not necessarily with muscular force but with philosophical and intellectual power." Read More about Lynn Harrell's Thoughts in David Chew's Interview with the Master Cellist.

This was a performance of virtuosity, soulfulness and meditativeness - the music inspired, as it was, from the book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament:

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, Hebel habalim, hacol hebel... all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun ?

At times the orchestra bordered on bluster and rhetoric, but always balanced by Harrell's thoughtfulness and sobriety as the title character. "Less is more" was the watchword in a work where overcharacterization was always a danger.

The Saint-Saëns was, as expected, even better. Ironically, with orchestral forces reduced from romantic- to classical-size, the massed volume was finally restored to its more logical perspective and the congested quality of the timbre went away. You could almost hear everyone thinking "Now, this is finally what we're here for," and Harrell, true to form, didn't disappoint.

With sensible rubato and an implicit getting-under-the-skin of Saint-Saëns, Harrell delivered the music much in the romantic vein, aptly accompanied by Lan and the orchestra. The cellist played with a pleasing rotundness of tone, coupled with a flair for drama as well as aristocratic refinement in the moments of contemplation.

To top it off, Harrell's encore - a right-hand transcription of Chopin's Nocturne Op.9 No.2 - kept the music in the heart of romantic territory. In a touching gesture, the encore was dedicated to Lan and the Singapore Symphony musicians.

A Glimpse of Lynn Harrell
- An Interview by David Chew

WILLIAM BEH much prefers Quidditch to soccer, actually.

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