Concert review: Wayfarer Sinfonietta plays contemporary fare with flair

Impossible Things

Wayfarer Sinfonietta
Esplanade Annexe Studio
Thursday, 7.30pm

Established in 2021, Wayfarer Sinfonietta is a professional chamber group that specialises in performing contemporary music and accompanying singers, led by prize-winning young conductor Lien Boon Hua, who is also the director of Yong Siew Toh Conservatory’s new music ensemble OpusNovus.

Its latest concert for string ensemble was as uncompromisingly edgy as it was original, putting a marker on future programmes to come.

Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Illumine (2016) exploited the possibilities of string playing, opening the evening with a chill.

Its skilful use of tremolos, harmonics, slides and explosive pizzicatos generated an unnerving atmosphere. Although one of calm and stasis, it however radiated a strange warmth. The sonorities generated in the blackbox theatre were not unlike the sun casting rays on a frigid Arctic landscape.

What followed was far more tonal, with American composer Nico Muhly’s three-part song cycle Impossible Things (2009), a setting of six poems by Egypt-born Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (or C.P. Cavafy), translated into English and scored for voice, solo violin and strings.

Tenor David Charles Tay was the protagonist, opening with I Believe In The Hereafter. This and each of the subsequent verses translocated the listener to some distinct time and place.

His clear diction was complemented by Chan Yoong-Han’s virtuosic violin, serving as partner in commentary as well as conflicting voice.

The final part, dated at precisely June 27, 1906, 2pm, could not have more diverse subjects – the brutal execution of a teenager followed by the eponymous Impossible Things.

Accompanied by repetitious patterns favoured by minimalists, the words “The loveliest music is the one that cannot be played... the best life is the one that cannot be lived” had a ringing resonance.

After Tay trooped offstage, Chan continued without a break into Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s Nocturne (1994) for solo violin, with its grinding dissonances and fiendishly tricky passages. This was a brief return to the desolate and wintry climes that opened the concert, before massed strings erupted into perhaps the programme’s only remotely familiar work, American minimalist John Adams’ Shaker Loops (1978).

If there were any preconceptions that this ensemble was merely a pick-up group of freelancers, this performance shattered all such illusions. A work demanding such immense precision and incisiveness, played at neck-breaking pace, could be accomplished only by the best in the land.

Scanning the faces and names of the players, one found Singapore Symphony Orchestra musicians and competition award-winners among them – and why not? The challenge of playing difficult music and surmounting all kinds of odds are what set true professionals apart.

There was a visceral thrill in witnessing the incessant buzz, rapidly shifting rhythms and tonalities of the opening movement, Shaking And Trembling. The middle movements were an epiphany of control and restrain, with no less attention paid to the finer details.

Closing with more dynamism in A Final Shaking and a surprisingly quiet final bar, the 70-minute concert was greeted by nothing less than tumultuous applause.