Chang Tou LiangUPDATED Feb 23, 2025, 04:10 PM
Sounds Of The City
Yong Siew Toh Orchestral Institute
Conservatory Concert Hall
Feb 22, 7.30pm
Jazz was in the air when the Yong Siew Toh Orchestral Institute conducted by Grantham-born Jason Lai performed a concert of mostly American music.
Aaron Copland’s Clarinet Concerto, composed in 1948 for American jazz legend Benny Goodman and scored with harp, strings and piano, opened the evening. YST Concerto Competition prize-winner Zheng Shanxi delivered a polished account with virtuosity, spirit and verve.
Conceived in two continuous sections, it began with a pastoral drawl in which the clarinet sculpted a lyrical song over the slow, ambling accompaniment. Zheng’s beautifully shaped tone carried into an animated syncopated finale where she traded wits and barbs with the band. In between was an elaborately sinuous cadenza.
This music was all carefully scored and scripted, but the trick was to make it appear spontaneous and jazzy. This was the essence of 20th-century concert-hall jazz, in which the divide between actual composition and improvisation was rendered almost invisible.
A New Orleans-styled marching band trooped down the aisle in a procession that opened We Build This City, a collaborative work by the orchestra involving improvisation. With input from faculty members, Dutch improvisation specialist Karst de Jong and local composer-pianist Jonathan Shin, it was performed with neither conductor nor scored parts.
What might have sounded like complete musical mayhem came across as intelligent and almost structured. Its 14 minutes relived the plodding beginning of the earlier Copland. The music drifted into French composer Erik Satie’s Gymnopedie territory before coming to a C major pedal point where the Dawn from German composer Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra could have achieved lift-off.
These examples showed that from a primordial soup of dabbling and doodling would eventually emerge composition, an art so eloquently demonstrated at the Asia-Pacific Improvisers Symposium, where this concert was the closing event.
Over further ostinatos came a menagerie of animal sounds, and later the more familiar themes and fragments which coalesced into the first page of American composer George Gershwin’s An American In Paris.
Conductor Lai slipped onto the podium almost unnoticed as this concert showpiece went into full stride. The first Singapore performance of the unabridged critical edition by American musicology professor Mark Clague, reliving original sounds that Gershwin had conceived before its 1928 premiere, was a triumph.
With some 104 bars restored, the work was brought past its 20-minute mark. All the memorable moments were retained, including the famous honking klaxons (taxi horns), now sounding refreshingly different, and that beguiling Blues section with its silvery trumpet solo, possibly the classical canon’s sexiest music.
Particularly ear-opening was the “new” music, with glances into Gershwin’s ever-evolving creative mind. Did one briefly hear flashes from his opera Porgy And Bess or Russian composer Igor Stravinsky’s early ballets? Possibly, along with a beloved flute solo in its full extended glory.
Loud cheers erupted at the uproarious conclusion of the hour-long concert, and what an hour it was.
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