Over the past four or five years I could have used this
same title for a blog post almost as many times. It seems that almost every year a new
orchestra emerges on to the Singapore music scene. According to one colleague in the know, there are currently no less than 21 orchestras floating around Singapore.
Why this growth of orchestras? Is it audience-driven? Do audiences crave more orchestral concerts
than are currently available to them here?
Or is it musician-driven? Is
there such a burning desire to belong to an orchestra that, when existing ones
are full to capacity, new ones have to be created?
The answer was possibly provided by Mervin Beng at the
inaugural concert of Singapore’s latest new orchestra (re:Sound) at the
Victoria Concert Hall last night.
Speaking from the stage after the interval, he proudly pointed to the
fact that a majority of the musicians in re:Sound were Singaporean by birth and,
moreover, a great many were graduates of the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory. That might lead the cynical observer to
suggest that the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory produces orchestral players merely
to create more and more orchestras in Singapore, and that the prime function of
orchestras in Singapore is as a statement of national pride rather than an
indicator of musical health.
Yes, it is good to know that in the few short years since
the creation of Singapore’s first professional orchestra (1979) musical training
in the country has so dramatically improved that it can now people a dozen or
more orchestras. That is a certainly cause
for national pride.
But an orchestra cannot exist merely to provide employment
for local musicians or to wave the flag of nationalistic self-congratulation. For orchestras to survive, thrive and grow,
there has to be the cross-fertilisation which comes from international input. Singaporean musicians are infinitely devalued
if they remain immune from the influence of foreign talent – either through
rubbing shoulders with them in the orchestra or by going overseas themselves to
gain invaluable orchestral and musical experience.
If evidence of the importance of national and cultural
cross-fertilisation were needed, we should only look to the Malaysian Philharmonic
Orchestra.
Founded amidst great fanfare in 1998, the Malaysian Philharmonic
had 106 playing members of whom just two could be defined, albeit by some stretching
of the definition, as Malaysian. The
rest were out-and-out foreigners. This
was deliberate. The Prime Minister of
the day boasted how it showed that Malaysia could attract the very best, while
the President of the company which paid for the orchestra promised that no Malaysian
would ever play in the orchestra unless they earned their place through fair competition
with players from elsewhere in the world.
It was called the Malaysian orchestra, we were told, because it belonged
to Malaysia, not because it was peopled by Malaysians.
Things went wrong when management succumbed to popular
pressure and started to bring in Malaysian players because they were Malaysians
rather than because they were good. Morale
hit rock bottom and standards dropped.
What had once been unquestionably the finest orchestra in Asia, was
reduced to just another local band.
Luckily, a hard core of foreign players remained and, while it teetered
on the brink for a time, it has held on and, although I have not heard it since
2012, reports I get are that, while it is but a shadow of its former self, it
is still a highly competent orchestra, the foreigners having held fast to their
standards and the Malaysians having conscientiously worked themselves up to
match their level of playing.
So, to create an orchestra in Singapore merely for
Singaporean players, laudable as that might seem, is almost doomed to
failure. Other orchestras here have
grown up, performed once, and then sunk back into obscurity. Will it be the case with re:Sound?
I suspect not. Largely,
I have to say, because unlike earlier attempts to get an orchestra off the
ground here, this one is driven by an absolutely determined body of people,
headed by Mervin Beng, who know what they want and are absolutely focused on
achieving it. On top of that, Beng is a
hard-headed realist who knows the pitfalls and problems of running an
orchestra, and has set the necessary mechanisms in place to ensure that ideals
do not obscure the cold hard light of reality.
On top of that, he seems to have been able to attract strong and
committed sponsors and certainly knows how to play the field to ensure his orchestra
has all it needs to develop and thrive.
And he has certainly done well in his choice of conductor (Jason Lai)
and musicians.
Beng’s trump card, however, is his identification of a
particular niche in the Singapore musical scene which has not been filled adequately
by others. He recognised that the core
works of the classical orchestral repertory – the music of Bach, Mozart, Haydn,
Schubert, and so on – were either overlooked or treated peripherally by the existing
players in the field. The Singapore
Symphony is too big and too firmly rooted in the grand orchestral repertory of
the late 19th century to put this music at the heart of its concert
programmes or even offer anything but occasional glib and superficial readings
of it in its mainstream programming.
Other local orchestras never showed sufficient grasp of the stylistic implications
of this music to give worthwhile performances.
In short, Singapore orchestras have worked on the principle that everybody
knew this music, so it did not require special care or attention.
By creating a professional chamber orchestra, Beng’s thinking
was to draw together highly capable players who could, by focusing exclusively
on this repertory, get right to the heart of it and make the effective interpretation
of it the very core of their existence.
Of course, to achieve the level of collective involvement in the interpretation
of this music that it demands in a world where the performance of the classical
repertory is widely regarded as an extremely specialist endeavour, the
orchestra needs to play it in public a great many times before it can begin to
make its own mark on it and convince the Singaporean audience that there is
value in treating these familiar works as significant musical journeys rather than
popular musical stocking-fillers. They
got off to a good start last night, but there are a couple of significant hurdles,
which seem endemic in Singaporean musicians, which need to be overcome.
The vast majority of Singaporean orchestral players emerging
from Yong Siew Toh (and other local institutions) have had precious little
exposure to high quality, live performances of this repertory. There is a hugely active concert calendar at
the Conservatory, but it is wide-ranging, and genuinely accomplished
performances of this repertory by those who have made its interpretation their
life’s work are inevitably few and far between.
Few of the Singaporeans, too, have had prolonged and wide exposure to
these sorts of performances on their travels overseas. In the main, they have got to hear of this
specialist approach to the classics through recordings; and a recording - even
a fabulous one by a world-class ensemble - is a very, very different animal from
a living, breathing, live performance.
On top of their general lack of awareness of the orthodoxies
of modern-day realisation of the classical repertory, Singaporean musicians
have another issue to overcome; and this is a more personal and, consequently,
more complex one.
Because they have had to make so many sacrifices, have
had to go against the advice and wishes of their peers and, often, their
parents, young Singaporeans regard music as a deadly serious business. They have drilled themselves to a state of technical
mastery which is the result of years spent in the narrow confines of the teaching
studio and practice room; read their biographies and see how much more they value
the teachers they have had and the competitions they have entered than the exposure
they have had to music in the non-educational, non-competitive environment.
The one thing which has marked out the vast majority
of performances I have heard from Singaporean students and young Singaporean
professionals is an inability to communicate in their performance anything
other than a knowledge of the technical challenges the piece presents to them
and an awareness of the purely academic structure they have identified through
visual analysis of the composer’s technique.
Yet music is a communicative art which uses sound (the
player’s technique) and structure (the composer’s technique) to convey a
message. Identifying that message and
then attempting to project it to the audience is what interpretation is all
about; and what is so signally lacking in so much of the musical activity of young
Singaporean players.
To grasp that message, the performer has to forget the
technical and academic details of the physical score and get to grips with the complex
notion of combining an understanding of the society in which the music was
born, the life of the composer who conceived it, the political, religious,
social aspirations that went into the creation of the work, and a profound
grasp of the full gamut of human emotions.
You can read about this in books, or be taught it by lecturers, but you
never understand it until you go to the place where the music was written or
rub shoulders with those who have some personal connection with it.
Singaporean musicians are extremely lucky that the
likes of Mervin Beng are around to provide them with the opportunity to develop
and perfect their skills. But they themselves
have to create their own environment in which they can fully develop their art.
{my review of re:Sound - The Journey Begins appears in tomorrow's Straits Times and will be reprinted here over the weekend.]
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