SSO Pops Concert: Makoto Ozone • Rhapsody in Blue

8 APR 2017 | SAT

SSO Pops Concert: Makoto Ozone • Rhapsody in Blue Singapore Symphony Orchestra Joshua Tan, conductor Makoto Ozone, piano

PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY (Arr. DUKE ELLINGTON & BILLY STRAYHORN, Orch. JEFF TYZIK)

The Nutcracker Suite 17’00 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Overture Toot Toot Tootie Toot (Dance of the Reed-Pipes) Dance of the Floreadores (Waltz of the Flowers) Sugar Rum Cherry (Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy) Peanut Brittle Brigade (March)

MAURICE RAVEL Piano Concerto in G major 23’00 1. Allegramente 2. Adagio assai 3. Presto Intermission 20’00 JEFF TYZIK (Arr.) Symphonic Swing 10’00 GEORGE GERSHWIN Rhapsody in Blue 16’00

Concert duration: 1 hr 40 mins Let’s go green. Digital programme booklets are available on www.sso.org.sg.

Scan the QR code in the foyer to view a copy.

Singapore Symphony Orchestra Since its founding in 1979, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra (SSO) has been Singapore’s flagship orchestra, touching lives through classical music and providing the heartbeat of the cultural scene in the cosmopolitan city-state.

In addition to its subscription series concerts, the orchestra is well-loved for its outdoor and community appearances, and its significant role educating the young people of Singapore. The SSO has also earned an international reputation for its orchestral virtuosity, having garnered sterling reviews for its overseas tours and many successful recordings.

The SSO makes its performing home at the 1,800-seat state-of-the-art Esplanade Concert Hall. More intimate works and all outreach and community performances take place at the 673-seat Victoria Concert Hall, the home of the SSO. The orchestra performs 100 concerts a year, and its versatile repertoire spans all-time favourites and orchestral masterpieces to exciting cutting-edge premieres. Bridging the musical traditions of East and West, Singaporean and Asian musicians and composers are regularly showcased in the concert season.

This has been a core of the SSO's programming philosophy from the very beginning under Choo Hoey, who was Music Director from 1979 to 1996.

Since Lan Shui assumed the position of Music Director in 1997, the SSO has performed in Europe, Asia and the United States. In May 2016 the SSO was invited to perform at the Dresden Music Festival and the Prague Spring International Music Festival. This successful five-city tour of Germany and Prague also included the SSO’s return to the Berlin Philharmonie after six years.

In 2014 the SSO’s debut at the 120th BBC Proms in London received critical acclaim in the major UK newspapers The Guardian and Telegraph. The SSO has also performed in China on multiple occasions.

Notable SSO releases under BIS include a Rachmaninov series, a Debussy disc, Seascapes featuring sea-themed music by Debussy, Frank Bridge, Glazunov and Zhou Long, and the first-ever cycle of Tcherepnin’s piano concertos and symphonies. The SSO has also collaborated with such great artists as Lorin Maazel, Charles Dutoit, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Neeme Järvi, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Lang Lang, Yo-Yo Ma, Leonidas Kavakos and Gil Shaham.

“The brilliantly chiselled strings unite in moderate tempos to produce a brilliant, virtuoso and sensuous sound performance from this outstanding orchestra.”

Der Neue Merker

JOSHUA TAN

conductor

Second Prize winner of the 2008 Dimitris Mitropoulos International Competition, Singaporean conductor Joshua Tan’s rise to prominence on the international scene has been marked by successful debuts in Carnegie Hall, Philharmonie Berlin, Mariinsky Hall, Bunkamura, Shanghai, Beijing and Taiwan. He was featured as the top Singaporean musical talent in 2009 by the Singapore newspaper, Lianhe Zaobao. He has also won numerous awards and scholarships, including the Bruno Walter Memorial Foundation Award, NAC-Shell Scholarship, SSO/MOE Scholarship and is the first ever recipient of the Charles Schiff Conducting Prize from the Juilliard School for outstanding achievement. In 2011, he received the Young Artist Award of Singapore.

Tan has studied with leading conductors James DePreist, Charles Dutoit, David Zinman and Kurt Masur. He has conducted the Mariinsky Theater Orchestra, Beethoven Bonn Orchestra, St Petersburg State Symphony, Russiche Kammerphilharmonie, National Center for the Performing Arts Orchestra (NCPA), China Philharmonic, Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire, National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo Philharmonic and many more orchestras from China and Japan.

In opera, Tan has conducted La traviata, Tosca, Rigoletto, Il barbiere di Siviglia, La Cenerentola, Der fliegende Holländer, Lohengrin, Carmen, Don Giovanni, Manon Lescaut, Madama Butterfly, Cosi fan tutte and was also cover conductor for Christoph Eschenbach and Lorin Maazel. Adept with film/multimedia, Tan is a Disney-approved conductor and gave the Asian premiere of Fantasia. He has also conducted for the BBC’s Planet Earth Series.

Tan is presently Associate Conductor of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra and Principal Conductor, Guiyang Symphony Orchestra. He was Resident Conductor, NCPA Orchestra from 2009 to 2012. Highlights of the 2016/17 season include debuts with Sinfonia Varsovia, Japan Century Orchestra, Swan Lake and Giselle in Tokyo, Turandot, L’elisir d’amore in Singapore. Tan is a graduate of the Juilliard School and the Eastman School of Music (High Distinction).

MAKOTO OZONE

piano

Makoto Ozone moved to the United States in 1980 to study jazz composition and arranging at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. In 1983, Ozone graduated top in his class and gave a solo recital at the Carnegie Hall, and became the first Japanese musician to sign an exclusive contract with CBS. In recent years, Ozone has been performing works from the classical music repertoire. Under internationally renowned conductors, he has played concertos by Gershwin, Bernstein, Mozart, Beethoven, Rachmaninov and Shostakovich, in collaboration with leading orchestras in the world.

In 2014 he toured Asia with the New York Philharmonic under the baton of Alan Gilbert performing Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

In 2016 he completed a successful Piano Duo Plays “Acoustic” tour – 11 concerts with Chick Corea all over Japan, including two performances of Mozart’s Double Piano Concerto with the NHK Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Tadaaki Otaka.

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Joshua Tan

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Lim Yau

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* With deep appreciation to the Rin Collection for their generous loan of string instruments. ° Igor Yuzefovich plays an instrument generously loaned by Mr & Mrs G K Goh ^ Musician on temporary contract

Musicians listed alphabetically by family name rotate their seats on a per programme basis.

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U P COM ING CONCERT S

15 APRIL 17 | SAT, 7.30pm esplanade Concert Hall

Robert Spano • Titan Robert Spano conductor Gustav Mahler’s daring Symphony No. 1 ”Titan“ is an exceptional work that effortlessly transits between tranquility to grandeur within an hour of music. Setting the scene to Titan is Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, known as one of the greatest, and the strangest, of the genre.

“Spano has that great skill in a conductor of making every performance radiate joy” – The New York Times

SCHUBERT Symphony in B minor, D.759 ”Unfinished“ MAHLER Symphony No. 1 in D major ”Titan“

Pre-concert Talk 6.30pm-7pm I library@esplanade

ESPLANADE Concert Hall

Tan Dun • Farewell My Concubine Tan Dun conductor Ralph van Raat piano Xiao Di Peking Opera soprano

U P COM ING CONCERT S

20 APRIL 17 | Thu, 7.30pm

Peking opera meets the piano in Grammy-winning composer Tan Dun’s concerto Farewell My Concubine, which paints a tragic love story between warrior Xiang Yu and consort Yu. Passacaglia: Secret of Wind and Birds draws on forms and methods from East and West, ancient and modern, and incorporates birdsong produced by smartphones.

“A dynamic conductor” – The New York Times on Tan Dun

BARTÓK Dance Suite TAN DUN Concerto for piano and Peking opera soprano: Farewell My Concubine

TAN DUN Passacaglia: Secret of Wind and Birds (for cellphones and orchestra) BARTÓK The Miraculous Mandarin, Op. 19: Suite

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MAKOTO OZONE • RHAPSODY IN BLUE

In the 20th century, Gershwin, Ravel, Ellington and Strayhorn, and others sought to bridge perceived gaps between western art music and jazz in different ways, and often looked to the past for a foothold to anchor their considerable artistic innovations and experiments.

Tchaikovsky composed The Nutcracker as a ballet back in 1892, and compiled a selection of eight popular dances into a suite which has become a staple of orchestras worldwide. Fast forward to 1960, when the composing duo of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn (who were both also huge fans of Debussy and Ravel’s works) produced an album featuring recompositions (and retitling) of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite and Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suites, refocused through the lens of big band jazz.

In his liner notes for the album, record producer Irving Townsend went on a flight of fancy, telling the fictitious, but thoroughly amusing story of how Ellington met “Peter Ilich” Tchaikovsky while Ellington’s orchestra performed in Las Vegas: “Duke Ellington and Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky met in Las Vegas while Duke’s band was setting attendance records at the Riviera Hotel. For the first time in Ellington history, Duke had decided to devote an entire album to arrangements of another composer’s works instead of his own, and Tchaikovsky was the natural choice. Because the suite is a favourite form for Ellington’s composition, the Nutcracker was the obvious Tchaikovsky work to choose.

Duke and Billy Strayhorn needed some reassurance that nobody, including the famous Russian composer, would mind if the suite was translated into the Ellington style, but once those fears were banished, they attacked the SugarPlum Fairy and the Waltz of the Flowers as if they were no more sacred than Perdido.”

Ellington and Strayhorn’s big band score was later adapted for symphony orchestra by Jeff Tyzik, composer, arranger and pops conductor for many American orchestras. While only arranging five movements from Ellington and Strayhorn’s nine, it is notable that Tyzik’s orchestration seemed to edge away from Ellington and Strayhorn’s big band and closer to Tchaikovsky’s original, only adding a saxophone, some percussion instruments and an extra trumpet.

The suite begins with a transformation of the original miniature and delicate Overture into one with an easy stride, adding some syncopated counterpoint; the final chorus features some of the driving big band sound which Ellington’s band was famed for. Toot Toot Tootie Toot (Dance of the Reed-Pipes) was originally retitled “Caliopatootic toot toot tooti Toot”, but was shortened after Ellington’s band members had difficulty spelling it. It features a number of wind and brass section solos with some extra jazz-inflected dissonance and counterpoint.

As Townsend wrote, “whatever Floreadores are, they are not waltz lovers, and this one-time waltz now jumps”. Tchaikovsky’s sweeping string melodies now instead leap in the reeds of the winds and valves of the brasses in the Dance of the Floreadores (Waltz of the Flowers).

The Sugar Plum Fairy meets the Pink Panther, prowling around in a saxophone solo in Sugar Rum Cherry (Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy), all hints of European elegance stripped away in a drunken stupor before the concluding Peanut Brittle Brigade (March) swings the suite to a sizzling conclusion.

In the first of two pieces for piano and orchestra tonight, Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major is one of the mainstays of 20th century western art music masterpieces. Ravel wrote, “it is written very much in the same spirit as those of Mozart and Saint-Saëns. The music of a concerto should, in my opinion, be lighthearted and brilliant, and not aim at profundity or at dramatic effects.

It has been said of certain classics that their concertos were written not ’for‘ but ’against‘ the piano. I heartily agree. I had intended to title this concerto ’Divertissement‘. Then it occurred to me that there was no need to do so because the title ’Concerto‘ should be sufficiently clear.”

The percussionist releases a “wound-up spring of the whip”, to quote the musicologist Stephen Parkany, and the piano concerto “begins like a wondrous contraption in a toy shop”. The solo piano is there from the start – creating a sparkling buzz over which the piccolo whistles a jaunty tune. Ravel was very intrigued by what he knew to be jazz, which tended to be a rather watereddown version from what the Americans knew, and the piano soon introduces a new jazzy and languid theme, twists and blue notes, some of which also recall

Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. There is clear Spanish influence here too, with some basque rhythms informing the music, before a cadenza propels the first movement towards a bright conclusion.

Composed “with the assistance”, as Ravel put it, of the slow movement of Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet, the gentle second movement, which seems spontaneous and natural, had to be “squeezed out… painfully”, and came close to causing him great despair. In this Adagio assai, the piano spins an extensive melody above a tender, slow waltz in the bass that is set at a cross-rhythm against the melody. The woodwinds subsequently join in, and the English horn takes its turn at the great melody as the piano spins expressive trills to the end.

The brief finale definitely epitomises Ravel’s idea of a “lighthearted and brilliant” concerto, with a repeated rhythmic motif, first played by the trumpets over the snare drum, which shows us key structural points in the movement. Virtuosic, running figurations are tossed around by the piano and later passed to the orchestral instruments, resulting in a challenging bassoon solo. While this is going on, other instruments interject in unrelated keys, and jazz-influenced trombone interjections seemingly appear out of nowhere. Momentum is however always maintained, with every episode building towards the movement’s brilliantly irresistible close.

Jeff Tyzik also made several arrangements of popular tunes from other genres, including a Beatles Hits Medley, suites of great Western and Golden Age of Hollywood film scores, and in 1996, arranged some of the most memorable Big Band classics for orchestra in Symphonic Swing. It features swing classics from the 1940s, including Jersey Bounce, Opus 1, Sunrise Serenade, Tuxedo Junction, Satin Doll and Back Bay Shuffle, in an upbeat, toe-tapping medley.

George Gershwin was born to Russian immigrant parents in Brooklyn, where he was immersed in a vast range of music. He left high school for Tin Pan Alley, quickly absorbing both the writing and performing styles of his time. Gershwin moonlighted as a vocal accompanist and at age 20, soared to fame with “Swanee”, a mega-hit for Al Jolson. Within the next few years, the flow of songs continued, including several Broadway musicals.

On 3 January 1924, Paul Whiteman, the self-styled ”King of Jazz“, announced an eclectic concert was to take place at New York City's Aeolian Hall the following month, titled “An Experiment in Modern Music”. Whiteman went on to further proclaim that Gershwin was at work on a jazz concerto which would be premiered at this event. This was news to Gershwin, who read about it in the next day’s paper along with the rest of the world. Despite the initial confusion, Whiteman persuaded Gershwin to accept his commission. As the concert was only five weeks away, Gershwin hastily conceptualised the concerto on his way to Boston, inspired in part by the rhythmic sounds of the train ride.

Upon returning to New York, he produced a two-piano score, and Whiteman’s orchestrator Ferde Grofé cladded it in instrumental livery.

“I frequently hear music in the very heart of noise”, George Gershwin said, explaining the origins of Rhapsody in Blue. From the Rhapsody's opening clarinet wail, Gershwin created not symphonic jazz, but a unique, personal musical idiom: outdoor, urban, big-hearted, infinitely Romantic, and assuredly poetic. He purportedly showcased excerpts to Ravel, who was so impressed that he denied him composition lessons, claiming that they would hinder his natural genius.

Leonard Bernstein famously likened the work to a series of paragraphs strung together as opposed to what was traditionally understood as a composition.

Nonetheless, musical elements such as the frequent juxtaposition of broad, harmonic tutti sections with heavily syncopated virtuosic cadenzas combine to create a dazzling spectacle of musical mastery. While fully scored, the solo piano sections seem improvisational at times, creating a vernacular jazz vibe.

Throughout the single extended movement, modulations are prevalent and often do not conform to classical harmonic patterns, yet never feel forced.

The use of ragtime and clave rhythms native to Afro-Cuban music resonate with Gershwin’s sentiment that jazz should be an accompaniment for dance.

Perhaps the most reliable measure of the Rhapsody's originality is that it had no direct descendants. Indeed, subsequent attempts to meld pop and serious music always seemed awkward. Yet its fame and impact inspired many serious composers to explore jazz and stirred countless pop composers to dabble in classical forms. The work has also been interpreted as a portrait of New York

City, notably in Woody Allen’s Manhattan and Disney’s Fantasia 2000. But for Gershwin, who died at just 38 from a brain tumour, this lay well in a future that he would not live to see.

Programme notes by Christopher Cheong

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Ms Michelle Yeo (Head) Ms Erin Tan

ORCHESTRA MANAGEMENT Mr Ernest Khoo (Head) Mr Chia Jit Min Ms Tan Wei Tian Stage Management Ms Kimberly Kwa (Stage Manager) Ms Chin Rosherna Mr Ramayah Elango Mr Abdul Wahab bin Sakir Mr Mohamed Zailani bin Mohd Said Mr Muhammad Fariz bin Samsuri Mr Radin Sulaiman bin Ali

LIBRARY Mr Lim Yeow Siang (Head) Mr Lim Lip Hua Ms Priscilla Neo

PROGRAMMES (SSO) Ms Kua Li Leng (Head) Ms Teo Chew Yen Ms Jolene Yeo Community Outreach Ms Kathleen Tan Ms Vanessa Lee Choral Programmes Ms Regina Lee Ms Whitney Tan

DEVELOPMENT & SPONSORSHIP Ms Peggy Kek (Head) Mr Anthony Chng Ms Nikki Chuang Ms Zhang Jingchao

MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS & CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE Ms Cindy Lim (Head) Mr Chia Han-Leon Ms Myrtle Lee Ms Hong Shu Hui Ms Melissa Tan Ms Cheryl Pek Ms Khairani Basman Ms Dacia Cheang Ms Nur Shafiqah Bte Othman

CORPORATE SERVICES Mr Rick Ong (Head) Mr Alan Ong (Finance) Ms Goh Hoey Fen (Finance) Mr Mohamed Zailani bin Mohd Said

HUMAN RESOURCES & ADMINISTRATION Ms Wee Puay Cheng (Head) Mr Desmen Low Ms Shanti Govindasamy

SINGAPORE NATIONAL YOUTH ORCHESTRA Ms Pang Siu Yuin (Head) Ms Shirin Foo Mr Tan Yong Qing Ms Tang Ya Yun

ABRSM Ms Hay Su-San (Head) Ms Patricia Yee Ms Lai Li-Yng Mr Joong Siow Chong

Patron Sponsor

A Standing Ovation for Our Corporate Partners Official Hotel

Official training partner

Official Postage Sponsor

Official Radio Station

Official Airline

Partners

LEE FOUNDATION

Supported by various corporate sponsors and individual donors, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra is a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee and registered under the Charities Order.

Singapore Symphony Orchestra

www.sso.org.sg