| Oh
dear. After reading this review the majority of concert-goers who attended tonight's
performance will no doubt think that I should save up and invest in a pair of
new ears. Nevertheless they have served me well these many years and this is what
I have to say about what I heard tonight: it was a total and utter waste of my
time, and that of my companion, whom I went to the concert with. How
so? Let us start with that soggy and uninspired performance of the 'Miracle'
symphony. I am not at all adverse to big-band Haydn - just to give you an idea
of where my tastes lie, I have no problems enjoying Davis' accounts of the 'London'
symphonies (if you don't know these wonderful pieces you really should - they
are little gems), nor for that matter, Beecham's. But
performances such as tonight's simply give due cause to the HIP movement's arguments
that smaller bands should be used in performing such music - this performance
suffered in terms of clarity, transparency, articulation and accuracy of rhythm.
In terms of balancing, Haydn's use of woodwind and occasional brass hardly managed
to rise over the masses of strings (we are talking about the full-strength strings
section here), putting paid to the lovely obligatti given to them. Lan Shui did
not seem to have a clear idea of where the music was going, especially in the
first and last movements. I did like the third movement for its rather rustic,
peasant character, but as in the performance overall I found that there would
have been more to enjoy if more attention were given to detail, "pointing"
and ensemble. Surely 'Classical' music is one of the hardest to play, and every
outing of Mozart, Haydn, you name it, just shows off the SSO's flaws.  I
would have liked to give higher points to the Bright Sheng work, 'Tibetan Swing'
that followed - not knowing the work, but having heard one or two other pieces
by Bright Sheng I expected colour, colour, colour. This of course, was delivered
in abundance, as anyone who heard the piece will be able to tell you. Having said
that though, I do think that this is not one of Sheng's better works. The piece
lasted roughly fifteen minutes; if you put a gun to my head I'd probably say it's
something like an overture, but that would hardly be satisfying description.
In
brief then, there are four disparate elements - one pounding, rhythmical one not
unlike something from let us say, the Rite of Spring. The second was a wisp of
melodic figure, supposed to be from a Tibetian folk-song. The third was the swing
itself -a musical onomatopoiea which is supposed to be the natives swinging "long
leaves", and the fourth the braying of the Tibetian long-horns. (All of this
is my interpretation of Lan Shui's very courageous effort at explaining what the
piece is all about; none of this was in the programme notes. If without quite
the charm that Bernstein might have brought to such a personal introduction, Lan
Shui was in fact quite effective and got everyone's attention; however, that communicating
to an audience in speech rather than music is not his strong suit was rather obvious)
The piece itself, however, did not fulfill the promise
of its composer. To me it sounded like a rather fragmented work, certainly interesting
for the first one or two minutes, but there did not seem to have much thematic
development that I could discern (admittedly this was on one single hearing, and
if the structure of the piece were explained better I would probably have appreciated
this). No amount of gimmicry will ever be a substitute for real music-making,
and I'm afraid the whole work just went over my head, in one ear and out the other.
I suppose to have it sound vaguely like one of the many Tibetian pieces I have
heard would be a stretch for a "modern" composer, but there it is. We
broke for an interval and I met a couple of friends, and we all agreed that that
rarity repertoire played Rachmainoff piano concerto after the interval had better
be a lot better than what came before. Unfortunately, I am sure, in all honesty
I'm afraid, that I never want to hear Alexander Markovich play again after this
night. That we live in an age of musical uniformity
is a fact which collectors and concert-goers are painfully aware of. The trend
nowadays is one towards a more "honest" and less "individul"
performance. No amount of persuasion, however, will be enough to convince me that
tonight's performance was even mediocre.  From
the first beautiful statement of the theme, his short-comings were made painfully
aware of to me. The first statement, in both hands, is of course of some importance
- it sets the tone of the whole of the first movement. This was inadequately played
and phrasing was awkward. As Mr Markovich launched into the river of notes that
supports the orchestra as it plays the theme, it became apparent to me that he
was technically not up to the standards of the music. Rachmaninoff wrote for himself
to play; his music is virtuoso music written by a virtuoso pianist for virtuoso
pianists.
To watch Mr Markovich struggle his way
slowly through even the lyrical sections, with not a care as to the ebb and flow
or the tempo or the character of the music, all the time playing nothing softer
than a mezzo-forte, with a tone that was rather lacking in beauty, past the disaster
and near train-wreck that was the development even at the rather sedate tempi
that were taken, the reader may perhaps forgive my morbid curiosity when the cadenza
came strolling along, as to which of the two he would choose. Naturally it was
the more difficult, and longer of the two cadenzas Rachmaninoff wrote. By the
time the coda for the first movement came along it wasn't funny any more - this
was clearly a disaster of a performance, and only reviewer's duties kept me from
leaving earlier than expected. Afterall, performances sometimes get better as
they go along right? Boy was I ever wrong. The rest
of the concerto was pure Chinese water-drip torture - it never seemed to end.
Every false cadence, every emergence of another theme, every turn of the concerto
I previously enjoyed I now dreaded. There is something vaguely masochistic in
staying and listening to something you love, knowing that the performer is going
to make an absolute mess of it. By the time the coda rolled along I could not
wait to run off. I motioned to my friend to get his bag and get ready to leave.
Naturally he got a ovation that Horowitz, were he
alive and kicking, might have been envious of. But what's new, really? I've never
seen a concert in Singapore where the soloist left without the audience demanding
an encore, no matter how mediocre the playing was. I heard he played the Wagner-Liszt
'Liebestod' (from Tristan und Isolde), and an arrangement of some
other pop song from the 80s. I also heard the audience loved it and wanted more.
How did he play in those? Don't ask me, I did not stay long enough to find out.
Derek Lim goes
back to his CDs for performances of assured quality. Photo
of Bright Sheng taken from the Sequenza 21 - Contemporary
Music Weekly webpage. If
you wish to Add a Comment to this review, please post your comments to classical@inkpot.com.
Last
Concert Reviewed | Next
Concert Reviewed All
original texts are copyrighted. Please seek permission from the Classical
Editor
if you wish to reproduce/quote Inkpot material. | 
