VCHpresents Chamber: T'ang Quartet & SSO

T’ANG QUARTET & SSO

3 APR 2021, 7.30PM 4 APR 2021, 4PM VICTORIA CONCERT HALL

PROGRAMME T’ang Quartet* Musicians of the SSO STRAUSS Capriccio, Op. 85 Ng Yu-Ying*, violin Ye Lin, violin Gu Bing Jie, viola

13 mins

Marietta Ku, viola Jamshid Saydikarimov, cello Leslie Tan*, cello

SHOSTAKOVICH Prelude and Scherzo for String Octet, Op. 11 Ang Chek Meng*, violin Zhao Tian, violin Nikolai Koval, violin Cao Can, violin

Han Oh*, viola Julia Park, viola Chan Wei Shing, cello Song Woon Teng, cello

BRAHMS String Sextet No. 1 in B-flat major, Op. 18 I. II. III. IV.

Allegro ma non troppo Andante ma moderato Scherzo. Allegro molto Rondo. Poco Allegretto e grazioso

Ng Yu-Ying*, violin Ang Chek Meng*, violin Han Oh*, viola

10 mins

Wang Dandan, viola Leslie Tan*, cello Wang Zihao, cello

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40 mins

T’ANG QUARTET The T’ang Quartet is known for many things. Ground-breaking.

Cutting-edge. Artistically impeccable.

Underlying that patina of acclaim is hard work, constant innovation and steady reinvention. For the past 28 years, the group’s musical dexterity has surprised and delighted audiences in Singapore and the rest of the world.

What started out as a unanimous purpose to break new ground in the sharing of music to a larger audience has grown unwaveringly.

The members’ charisma and intuitive connection as a group aptly mirrors their music: smart, sharp and cosmopolitan. The T’ang Quartet’s creative output is an artful blend of East and West, seamlessly reinterpreting classical work for contemporary fans while appealing to traditional audiences.

Along the way, the T’ang Quartet has collaborated and performed with contemporaries and friends, among them: Paul Katz, Norman Fischer, John Chen, Fingin Collins, Marian Hahn, Qin Li-Wei, Karin Schaupp, Noriko Ogawa, Tedd Joselson and Horia Mihail, and Carter Enyeart.

In 2020, distinguished violist Han Oh joined the quartet to form the present group, bringing with him a wealth of experience as a studio artiste and as an award-winning musician in the field of popular music.

A playful reference to the last names of the original founding members, T’ang also symbolises the golden age of cultural expression in the Tang Dynasty, an acknowledgement of their Asian roots.

PROGRAMME NOTES RICHARD STRAUSS (1864 - 1949) Capriccio, Op. 85

Strauss’s wartime Capriccio was the last opera he ever composed. After the roaring successes of his early Salomé, Elektra, and especially Der Rosenkavalier (for which railroads had to be constructed across Europe into Vienna to meet the overwhelming demand for performances), he had gained somewhat of a reputation of a note-spinner, and his waning powers, along with radically shifting tastes in music, did mean that his later operas have never quite achieved the same popularity.

He was still capable of producing moments of utmost beauty, however, and this lovely excerpt from the opera is one of them. The opera has the question “Which is the greater art: music or poetry?” at the core of its plot, and this sextet is a key plot device, being the composer Flamand’s new work. It shows all the hallmarks of the later Strauss: a calm, assured manner, a sureness of harmonic footing, and long, flowing, independent lines in the string parts. While stormy moments do happen, mirroring the stage action, the work ultimately remains elegantly poised.

As a “musical prop”, it does not need to draw too much attention to itself during the opera.

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906 - 1975) Prelude and Scherzo for String Octet, Op. 11

Shostakovich’s string octet, begun while he was still an 18-year-old student at the Leningrad Conservatory, is a powerful work dedicated to the memory of a close poet friend. It is possible to hear in the opening a foreshadowing of the immense first movement of his 1st Violin Concerto of two decades later, and the especially virtuosic first violin part harks back to Mendelssohn’s famous string writing.

The story of Shostakovich’s mature life is wellknown: his brush with Stalin, decades of fearing for his life, and eventually agreeing to act as a Soviet mouthpiece… it is hard to think about Shostakovich without these facts, but the young Shostakovich was a hopeful artist and talented enough as a pianist to compete in the inaugural Warsaw Chopin Competition. Before these momentous events, he was a much simpler person, and in fact was censured for being politically apathetic.

That early freshness abounds in this work, and despite the truly serious moments, the quick episodes show Shostakovich coming into his own with crunchy dissonances and sparkling string writing. Much of this work predates the 1st Symphony, and with that in mind it is possible to see the seeds of Shostakovich’s symphonic language. The relative size of the Prelude implies that Shostakovich had intended to round off Opus 11 with a fugue, but the Scherzo makes for an exciting ending, looking forward to the frenetic finales in his future.

JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833 - 1897) String Sextet No. 1 in B-flat major, Op. 18

From these later masters we turn to Brahms, whose early essay in the genre came only after he had established his compositional credentials with several large piano works and obtained the blessings of Robert Schumann. It is not often performed, and the obvious choice when programming a German string sextet falls to Schoenberg’s echt-Romantic Transfigured Night. Brahms succumbs to the German propensity for profundity here, with very thick writing, but he had Joseph Joachim (the eventual dedicatee of the huge Violin Concerto) to advise him with the string writing and even some compositional details.

The expansive three-in-a-bar that the Sextet opens with proved to be an eventual favourite of Brahms.

His sensitive use of hemiola and cross-rhythm to destabilise the beat had been well learnt from Schumann, and the first movement abounds in themes that allowed him to show off that rhythmic flexibility. The soothing melodies of the cello give way to a flowing triplet accompaniment (another Brahms favourite). Brahms’s penchant for playing the lower strings off the violins, as he does in the symphonies, are evident here, and he juggles thematic fragments across all six players with great skill.

Brahms loved the theme and variation form deeply, and here, in the slow movement, the unwinding of a serious theme into a deeply-felt dramatic buildup before the warmth of the major key shines through demonstrates a master at work. This movement nods

towards Beethoven, another musical hero of his, and certainly the Scherzo does too: the rustic flavour recalls the equivalent passage from Beethoven’s 5th Symphony.

Joachim remained of the opinion that Brahms’s final movement was a little too indebted to Schubert (even going so far as to call the ending a bit weak), and indeed it could almost be a re-instrumentation of a Schubert rondo. But a composer being able to imitate musical models is no real fault, and indeed, the charm of the cello theme is undeniable. Brahms, humble as always, called this work “trash” in a letter to Clara Schumann, and wrote that she should burn it; it is a good thing she was much more lenient with his work than she was with Robert’s!

Notes by Thomas Ang

SINGAPORE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Founded in 1979, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra (SSO) is Singapore’s flagship orchestra, touching lives through classical music and providing the heartbeat of the cultural scene in the cosmopolitan citystate. Our Chief Conductor is Hans Graf.

While the SSO performs frequently at the Esplanade Concert Hall, for a more intimate experience, we return to the place of our beginnings, the Victoria Concert Hall (VCH) – the home of the SSO. The VCH is host to our popular Children’s, Family and biannual free Lunchtime Concerts as well as our VCHpresents chamber series.

HANS GRAF Chief Conductor

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