Verbalism Personified

A Reed and Mallet Affair

So what do students at the Yong Siew Toh Music Conservatory have to show after more than a year?

Plenty.

Arriving just in time to hear the first notes sound from the Conservatory Wind Quintet, I settled into my seat for some serious listening. The concert was aptly titled and organized to showcase the talent of young musicians in woodwind and percussion who have spent months blowing and hammering away to put this concert together.

Established in Two thousand and One, the Conservatory is well on its way to producing motivated and talented musicians. Judging from how they played tonight, you can be sure that some of them will go far in the field of music.

I listened specifically for three aspects. One would be tonal quality. Seasoned musicians can hit a note or a string of notes with little or no error. The amount of effort would be far less than is required for inexperienced ones. Second, would be musicality. Would these young musicians stick plainly to the marked score or would they put their own verve into it? Third would be ensemble cohesiveness. A seasoned ensemble would be able to play on cue and in-sync with each other. This kind of familiarity comes only after hours of practice with the same group members.

But the highlight for the evening was Pictures at an Exhibition by Modest Mussorgsky. Originally scored for piano, I've heard it arranged for orchestra and organ.

Now comes an arrangement for piano and percussion. According to Jon, he had built an ensemble of six percussionists around the original piano score played by Thomas Hecht. Serving as his primary source for this arrangement, this was "intended to function as a collective 'percussion orchestra', blending into a single, unified texture."

Employing a dazzling array of pitched and unpitched percussion instruments, egg-shakers, tam-tams and tom-toms were also roped in for the effort. In what amounted to an amazing display of texture and precision, Jon's mini-orchestra pulled off a world's-first for Pictures. And one of the highlights was the use of violin bows to pull shards of 'rain' from a xylophone. Ringing through the hall, Jon had more than realized Mussorgsky's masterpiece with this one.

Taking tonight's recital as a whole, exciting things can be expected from the Conservatory. With more recitals and a masterclass planned in the coming months, students and those supporting Singapore's vision of a renaissance city will have great things to look forward to.

posted by Teutoburg @ 11:22 PM