Orchestral Institute: Richter and Sibelius

ABOUT YST

Inspirational life-affirming music-making is at the heart of the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music at the National University of Singapore. Centred in one of the world’s most dynamic countries, the Conservatory is uniquely placed to offer a distinct and powerful contemporary Asian voice.

Founded in 2003, YST quickly established a reputation as Asia’s most exciting international conservatory by bringing together a worldclass faculty and facility to develop excellence in instrumental performance and composition. Building on this strong foundation, the Conservatory has evolved over the past decade to become one of the world’s most distinctive music schools, diversifying its offerings and continually seeking to connect authentically with its surrounding community. Specialisations added subsequently include Voice, Audio Arts & Sciences, Conducting, Music & Society and Music, Collaboration & Production. Alongside students from Singapore, the Conservatory community is internationally diverse, with representation from over 20 countries and five continents.

Keenly focused on nurturing identity as a driver for excellence, YST’s Bachelor of Music programme offers full financial support for all its undergraduate students, enabled by major gifts from the Yong Loo Lin Trust. The Conservatory’s continuum of offerings further includes a Master of Music degree, NUS-facing Second Majors, Minor and modules, Continuing Education & Training courses for adult learners, and a Young Artist programme. We host a vibrant performance calendar with around 200 concerts annually, featuring students and faculty alongside international artists and ensembles. Our community engagement and professional integration programme has extensive local, regional and global reach. Students are supported to find their own artistic pathways through exchanges, festivals, competitions and projects. More broadly, our international networks and partnerships further enhance the educational experience and ensure our continued evolution.

VICE DEAN'S MESSAGE

Welcome and thank you for joining us in this opening concert of YST’s 202223 Orchestral Institute Series: Richter and Sibelius, Looking Back, Moving Forward!

As the YST Orchestral Institute embarks on its concert season, and as we look back at the Conservatory’s evolution – reflecting upon the brilliantly voluminous ensemble music-making over the past two decades – we are also inspired by the multiplicities of innovative resonances that move us forward.

And although the music of Jean Sibelius might not seem like the most obvious programmatic frame for a 21st century Conservatory in Southeast Asia “looking back” and “moving forward”, Sibelius’s life and music – and his association with a rise of Finnish musical identity – offers a kind of century-old Nordic cultural reference point that has remarkable reverberations with Singapore’s own current rapidly evolving presence on the

international classical music stage.

Jean Sibelius as the central musical ambassador for a burgeoning Finnish stylistic identity is well known, but his compositional output also represents an interesting and pivotal turning point in the history of the symphonic tradition: with his stylistic straddling of the post-romanticism of the late nineteenth century on one hand – well represented in his Violin Concerto in D minor, Op. 47 – and the understated, yet sublimely powerful, progressivism of his late symphonies on the other – exemplified in his pastorally heroic Symphony No. 5 in E-flat Major op. 82.

Max Richter’s sublime On the Nature of Daylight – a meditative piece that somberly reflects on humanity’s foibles, yet also suggests the healing hope of nature (a sentiment certainly shared by Sibelius) – serves as tonight’s prelude-overture leading directly to BMus4 Georgii Moroz’s lyrically virtuosic interpretation of the Sibelius concerto. In addition to being a YST Concerto Prizewinner, Mr. Moroz had the recent honor of being named one of the six finalists at the prestigious XII International Jean Sibelius Competition that took place in May of this year.

As YST looks back over its twenty-year evolution, we are consistently moved by the alumni and students who collectively inspire the Conservatory to move ever forward towards realizing our community’s best artistic self.

As Kafka’s writings stirred Max Richter, may we nurture “the room inside us”.

Associate Professor Brett Stemple Vice Dean (Ensembles, Research & Professional Awareness)

JASON LAI

PRINCIPAL CONDUCTOR OF THE YST ORCHESTRAL INSTITUTE

Jason Lai is the Principal Conductor at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory, Principal Guest Conductor at the Orchestra of the Swan, and former Associate Conductor of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra and Hong Kong Sinfonietta. He’s been a prominent figure in Singapore’s musical life since his arrival in 2010, but also active internationally giving masterclasses in Europe and China. He has also guest conducted the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, New Japan Philharmonic, Podlasie Opera Philharmonic in Poland, Macao Orchestra, Hong Kong Sinfonietta, and the Osaka Symphony.

Intent on broadening the appeal of classical music to audiences who would not normally think of going into a concert hall, Jason is also building a unique reputation as a communicator with mass appeal through his television appearances in both

the UK and Asia. He has frequently appeared on BBC television as a judge in both the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition and the classical talent show “Classical Star”. He reached his widest audience when, as a conducting mentor in the series “Maestro”, his celebrity student, the popular comedienne Sue Perkins, won with a nailbiting final in front of the BBC Concert Orchestra and a live studio audience. Other BBC television appearances have include “How a Choir Works” and “The Culture Show”. Jason also starred in “Clash” for the children’s television channel, CBBC.

Since settling in Singapore he has continued with his television work. He was presenter and conductor for “Project Symphony”, an eight part series for Okto where he was filmed setting up a community orchestra. He has recently been involved in filming for a BBC series “Heart of Asia” which explores the contemporary arts and culture scene in Thailand, Indonesia, Korea and the Philippines, and a further series for BBC World called “Tales from Modern China”.

Jason’s roots lie in Hong Kong but he was born in the UK and was a pupil at the prestigious specialist music school in Manchester, Chetham’s, where he studied cello. At Oxford University he studied both

cello and composition, and went on to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London where he was awarded a Fellowship in Conducting.

Despite having toured as a cellist with the Allegri String Quartet and having been a finalist in the BBC Young Composers Award, Jason gravitated increasingly towards conducting after he won the BBC Young Conductors Workshop in 2002. This led to his appointment as Assistant Conductor to the BBC Philharmonic with whom he made his BBC Proms debut in 2003. Following his work with various British orchestras, he was appointed Artist Associate to the Hong Kong Sinfonietta and became their Associate Conductor in 2009. Jason most recently had debuts with the Adelaide Symphony and Macau Orchestra and made return visits to conduct the Hong Kong Sinfonietta and Orchestra of the Swan.

Education is an important part of Jason’s work in Singapore. At the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory he trains the next generation of conductors, many of whom have had many successes both at home and abroad, and with the SSO he spearheaded the education and outreach programme, helping the orchestra reach new audiences notably through his Discovering Music and Children’s concerts.

GEORGII MOROZ

CONCERTO PRIZEWINNER SOLOIST

Georgii Moroz was born on April 7, 2001 in Kyiv, Ukraine to a family of musicians. Georgii started to play violin at the age of five. From 2011 till 2019, Georgii studied in the Kyiv Special Music School named after M. Lysenko, where he started his performing activities and successfully graduated in 2019 with numerous honours. Georgii was a concertmaster of Youth Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine and performed with orchestras and chamber ensembles including string quartets (where he plays viola sometimes), piano trios and duets.

Georgii is also a laureate of many all-Ukrainian and international competitions, such as the Eugen Coca International Competition (XIX, XXI) in Kishinev, Moldova; the Cornelia Bronzetti International Violin Competition (2014) in Romania; the Grumiaux International Violin Competition (2017) in Brussels, Belgium; and the all-Ukrainian

Leonid Kogan Competition (2018). Georgii became one of six finalists in the prestigious XII International Jean Sibelius Competition (2022) in Helsinki, Finland. Georgii has had two recitals with the Bucharest Philharmonic (2014, 2016) and took part in masterclasses with artists such as Shlomo Mintz, Midori Goto, Chaim Taub, Vilmos Szabadi, Ilia Kaler, Shmuel Ashkenasi and others.

Since 2019 Georgii has been studying at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music with Professor Qian Zhou. Nowadays, Georgii performs actively and engages in theoretical research. He plays a Montagnana 1729 violin on generous loan from the Rin Collection.

ABOUT THE YST ORCHESTRAL INSTITUTE

The YST Orchestral Institute is a creative musicians’ laboratory, designed as an innovative forum for conservatory-level orchestral training. First conceptualized in 2018 by former YST Dean, Prof. Bernard Lanskey, as a way of revitalizing learning and teaching systems within a large ensemble context, the Orchestral Institute has emerged as a dynamic platform in which aspirational orchestral musicians work collaboratively alongside professionals drawn from Conservatory faculty, staff, and alumni, as well as YST partner institutions, from Southeast Asia and beyond. Pioneering interdisciplinary

programming, a unique production style, collaborative-composition creation, musician health & well-being, and an open-dialogue approach to rehearsing are all hallmarks of the Orchestral Institute approach – a phil-harmonie philosophy which seeks to create a safe ‘playspace’ emphasizing creativity, mutual learning, and skills development appropriate for large ensemble music-making, with the ambition of enabling musicians to be even more open, daring, questioning, collaborative and passionate about the music they make together.

Currently under the leadership of YST Conservatory Principal Conductor, Jason Lai; Vice Dean of Ensembles, Brett Stemple; OpusNovus Conductor (and YST Artist Fellow), Dr Lien Boon Hua, and Orchestral Manager, Yap Zi Qi; and working alongside Conservatory students, faculty, staff, and YST Artist Fellows – the Orchestral Institute has created and curated a number of groundbreaking orchestral productions including Telling Beyond Words (2019), and – despite the global pandemic – Springs of Uncertainty (2020), Lichtbogen (2020), Landscapes of Souls (2021), Transfigurations (2021), Dream for Future (as part of SoundBridge Music Festival 2021) and a special collaborative family concert with the Kids’ Philharmonic,

Symphonies Simple and Philharmonic Friends (2021), among others, many of which are available for viewing at the YST Conservatory’s YouTube channel.

PROGRAMME NOTES

RICHTER

PRELUDE

Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one's ears and listens, say at night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.

the Blue

the Nature of Daylight

YST Conservatory’s inaugural year, 2003, echoes the kind of global socio-political turbulence we face in our own times. In February of that year –as the World Health Organization was beginning to confront the reality of a global SARS outbreak – there were mass gatherings around the world in opposition to the imminent U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Moved and inspired by this humanist protest movement – and by Franz Kafka’s Blue Octavo Notebooks (1917-19) – British composer/ producer, Max Richter (b. 1966) composed a series of musical miniatures, entitled The Blue Notebooks, pairing and interlacing them with theatrical readings of Kafka’s aphorism-esque journal entries.

With the second, and most popular piece of that set – On the Nature of Daylight – Richter explains that he wanted to “create something which had a sense of luminosity and brightness, but made from the darkest possible materials.” Richter’s somber string chorale harks back to renaissance-era counterpoint, yet with a kind of pulsing repetition associated with twentieth century minimalism. The undulating motive first introduced by the second violins, which emerges out of the melancholia of the lower strings, evokes a sonic palette not unlike the opening of

Sibelius’s concerto.

When the Orchestral Institute team began planning for this evening’s concert, Jason Lai remarked that the twilight essence of Richter’s Daylight might offer a beautifully atmospheric overture to the shimmering opening of Sibelius’s concerto, as well as a fitting musical response to our current global ills. We are thankful that our soloist was so receptive to the idea of this experimental prelude-transition, one which leads directly into Georgii’s beautifully lyrical playing of Sibelius’s misty opening statement.

JEAN SIBELIUS Violin Concerto in D minor, Op. 47

LOOKING BACK

Consistently regarded as one of the greatest violin concertos ever composed, it is striking that his Opus 47 Concerto in D minor is the first and last concerto Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) wrote for any instrument. Although his nearly singular focus on composing symphonies puts him in the good company of his contemporary Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), one ponders – given Sibelius’s personal, intense relationship with the violin, and that his first foray into composing for the genre was so successful – why just the one?

Perhaps it was through professional reflection that led Sibelius to “look back” and evaluate potential next paths in his artistic journey from a mid-life, turn of the century, perspective. On an aesthetic

level, Sibelius’s Symphonies No. 1 (1899-1900) and No. 2 (1902-03) are clearly rooted in the lush post-romantic language of the of the late nineteenth-century. And although the Violin Concerto (1904-05) squarely draws on Sibelius’s experience in this late nineteenth century style, we can also hear his mature compositional voice begin to emerge: a voice that would lead to the more modernist leanings of his late symphonies, exemplified through the rhapsodic freedom Sibelius gives to the soloist in the extensive cadenzas composed into the first movement of his concerto.

On a deeper personal level, perhaps Sibelius was bidding farewell to his own youthful dreams. Having taken up the violin at the relatively late age of 14 (and in provincial Finland, where expert mentors were difficult to find at the time), his childhood aspiration of becoming a famous concert violinist was doomed to failure. Despite these impediments, his teenage passion for playing the violin had “taken him by storm” and “for the next ten years it was his dearest wish, his overriding ambition, to become a great virtuoso”, eventually driving him to play an embarrassingly ill-prepared audition for the Vienna Philharmonic in 1891, an experience that he later admitted

brought him to tears of frustration. Thankfully, for us, Sibelius was able to sublimate that youthful passion for the instrument into composition, including this emotionally intense showcase for violin and orchestra. From the moment the concerto opens, it is readily apparent that unlike a typical classicalera concerto – where the role of the orchestra primarily acts as an accompanying force to the soloist – Sibelius’s opening movement is a herculean dialogue between soloist and orchestra, with extensive virtuosic rhapsodizing from the solo violin, juxtaposed with brilliantly diverse orchestral responses: furious march music, pastoral repose and Nordic darkness. As the music writer Michael Steinberg beautifully summarizes, “The first movement, with its daring sequence of disparate ideas, its quest for the unity behind them, its bold substitute for convention, and its wedding of violinistic brilliance to compositional purposes, is one that bears the unmistakable stamp of the symphonist—perhaps the greatest symphonist after Brahms.”

Indeed, after the second movement opens with a series of mysterioso swells from pairs of

clarinets, oboes and then flutes in rising succession, the solo violin introduces the movement’s lyrical theme over a choir of horns and bassoons – a melody loosely spun out of Sibelius’s 1899 song Demanten på marssnön (The Diamond on the March Snow) – and one that evokes an achingly Brahmsian sense of nostalgia. After a stormily brooding middle section based on the opening woodwind swells, the lyrical theme returns, this time sung more full throatily by the woodwinds. In an unabashedly sentimental farewell – accompanied by rainlike descending scales in the strings and flutes – the violin soloist weaves a yearning obligato replete with a sequentially sublime teardrop-like passage before closing with a finale reflective chorale.

As in the second movement, Sibelius draws on earlier compositions (in this case a string quartet from 1890), for the infectiously boisterous main theme of this finale. The heavy-set pulsing motor rhythms in the timpani and lower strings, combined with the tripping cross rhythms sets the stage for this energetic movement, a vibe that led the eminent British musician-writer, Sir Donald Tovey, to quip “this music is evidently a polonaise for polar bears”. The unbridled, drunken joy these imagined bears eventually achieve is fun to

imagine, not to mention the fantastically complex syncopated embellishments Jean Sibelius demands out of the soloist: perhaps projections born out of his own teenage Paganini-laced dreams.

SIBELIUS

No. 5

Op. 82

MOVING FORWARD

In 1915, when Sibelius set about composing his Symphony No. 5 a compositional deadline was fast approaching. Since he was already something of a national hero in Finland, a concert-celebration was set for December 8, 1915, Sibelius’s 50th birthday (a day now memorialized annually as the “Day of Finnish Music”), where he was meant to premiere his newest symphony. As with celebrations of this sort, one might think it would be an opportunity for the composer to commemorate, to look back; but as with many a

great artist, Sibelius was determined to innovatively “move forward” with his new work.

Given Sibelius’s stylistic self-awareness amongst leading composers of the early twentieth century, he understood that if he were to remain a significant contributor to the symphonic tradition, he would need to continue to evolve his compositional style. Since the vanguards of the time like, Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) – who premiered his atonal melodrama Pierrot lunaire , Op. 21 in Berlin in 1912 – and Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) – whose primitivist, and highly dissonant ballet score The Rite of Spring , was first performed in Paris in 1913 – were breaking from the musical traditions of the past (and were both a generation younger than Sibelius), carving a forward-looking path was no small feat for the aging composer.

Although the Symphony’s 1915 premiere was received with great acclaim and helped cement Sibelius’s already iconic stature in Finnish cultural identity, the final version we hear today was not completed until some four years later, in 1919. While it was customary for Sibelius to revise and rework his large-scale symphonic works, the fouryear gestation for this symphony was

exceptionally long, and particularly significant from a modernist perspective. In addition to condensing the original four-part structure into a more streamlined and condensed three movements (by fusing the original first two movements into one), Sibelius was empowered, in the words of writer David Hurwitz “to largely abandon traditional sonata-form structure, allowing his melodic material to give the work the shape that now seems, in hindsight, so satisfyingly inevitable.”

The heroically ascending horn phrase that opens the piece and is soon echoed by the woodwinds evokes a kind of pastoral sunrise, one that is soon clouded by timpani and progressively brooding interjections from the double reeds and strings, establishes the dramatic tension central to the entire first movement. The narrative battle between these competing moods eventually subsides into a developmental fugato in the strings which evaporates into a foggy mist. A lone bassoon emerges, intoning a solo lament, leading to a series of progressively agitated string passages, angrily interrupted by declamatory winds until the sunny heroic disposition of the opening returns, triumphantly announced by the trumpets.

That this music leads so organically and directly into a joyous scherzo (originally the second movement), is part of the genius of Sibelius. By developing and transforming thematic material – first introduced in opening section of the symphony – throughout this scherzando, Sibelius establishes a Beethovenian kind of formal unity, while abandoning the traditional one movement sonata-form framework. After another developmental (and ensembly-virtuosic) fugato, Sibelius concludes the movement with undeniable and frenetic heroism.

The peaceful pizzicato tranquility of the theme and variations, Andante mosso, second movement, offers pastoral repose between the heroic tension of the first movement, and the majestic pulse of natural wonder in the finale, as well as subtly introducing several themes so brilliantly woven together in the finale movement.

The Icarus-like solar dash played by the strings in the Allegro molto opening, gives way to Sibelius’s musical portrayal of swans in flight, first introduced by a sonorously repetitive horn song, and first inspired on April 21, 1915, when the composer journaled, “today at 10.50am, I saw sixteen swans in emerge in flight. One of my

greatest experiences. Lord God, that beauty!”

Although the hypnotic effect of Sibelius’s repetition is not unlike the minimalist style associated with post WWII American composers (and reflected in the Richter that opened tonight’s program), Sibelius’s majestic use of repetition – one that eventually grows into shouts of exaltation and brings the symphony to a dramatic close – more closely echoes the kind of musical heroism associated with nineteenth-century lush romanticism. In moving forward, we are always lifted by flight of inspirations discovered through looking back.