Unboxing The Organ

Phoon Yu (organ) and Lorong Boys
Victoria Concert Hall
Sunday, 4pm

Says Hu

Ding Yi Music Company
Esplanade Recital Studio
Sunday, 7.30pm

Classical music can be daunting for newcomers, but innovative programmes make appreciating the classics so much easier.

That had been the approach of local organist-composer Phoon Yu and Lorong Boys – comprising David Loke (violin), Jonathan Shin (piano), Samuel Phua (saxophone), Eugene Chew (double bass and electric bass) and Joachim Lim (drums) – in this 45-minute concert attended by many children.

Originally billed as a lecture, it was more a mini-history of the organ/classical music, with boring bits left out.

The comedic tone was set with Phoon opening with J.S. Bach’s Jesu, Joy Of Man’s Desiring as the group’s members trooped out in monastic habits.

Phoon played geeky Kevin from the Bukit Batok Benedictine Brotherhood, who travels in time to be inducted as the newest member of the gang. 

Along the way, there were nifty arrangements of Sunrise from Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra, now named Thus Rocked Zarathustra in its expanded heavy metal guise, Sergei Prokofiev’s Montagues And Capulets (from Romeo And Juliet) and Niccolo Paganini’s Caprice No. 24.

It was all tongue-in-cheek. Did anybody notice that Shin’s The Other Swan for violin and piano was an inversion of The Swan by Camille Saint-Saens, sounding more impressionistic, like Claude Debussy’s Clair De Lune?

On a lighter side, The Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby made an appearance with Shin’s none-too-shabby singing voice.

The concert closed with George Frideric Handel’s Passacaglia In G Minor, better known in Halvorsen’s violin-cello arrangement. This “big band” version truly made its short variations rock.

Despite the title Says Hu (Hu Shuo in Chinese, meaning “talking nonsense”), Ding Yi Music Company’s chamber music concert was far less irreverent, but no less relevant.

The showcase of huqin (bowed string instruments) opened with a huqin quartet led by Fred Chan.

This unit functioned like a Western string quartet, with instruments – including the gaohu, erhu, zhonghu and cello – covering different registers. 

Luo Mai Shuo’s scherzo-like Dance On Strings and Phang Kok Jun’s beautiful Rhapsody showed there was not much of a divide separating East and West.

Add two more players, including double bass, and the string sextet that resulted served Bao Yuankai’s Going To West Gate well. It included a lovely episode with Chan’s gaohu accompanied by pizzicatos.

This 100-minute concert’s second half featured works with prominent solos. Bassist Chee Jun Hong displayed a vocally agile side in ancient song Yangguan Refrains, arranged by Huo Junxia and Lim Kiong Pin, accompanied by yangqin, sheng and percussion.

Erhu player Chen Ning’s take on Li Bo Chan’s Reminiscences Of The Silk Road was more abstract and modernist. Its Central Asian idiom, accompanied by the erhu, yangqin and ruan, was more subtly handled than most works of this persuasion. Both soloists were excellent.

The most impressive work was by guest huqin player Li Baoshun, concertmaster of the Singapore Chinese Orchestra, in the Singapore premiere of Zhang Zheng’s Sword Sorrow, conducted by Wong De Li.

He was accompanied by 10 players, including pianist, harpist and percussionist, in an elegiac work that mourned the losses of war.

It opened dramatically but settled into moving plaints showing the erhu’s enormous emotional range, with suona offering a conflicting ceremonial voice. The cinematic quality was also heightened with vocalisations by orchestra members as the work closed.

That could have been the end, but it was left for the string sextet to close with Hunting The Tiger Up The Mountain, arranged by Chen Chunyuan and Sim Boon Yew, the perfectly paced chase piece to conclude the evening on a virtuosic high.