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Saturday
Rolf Smedvig 1st trumpet |
presented by the Singapore Symphonia Company |
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William Byrd (1543-1623) Earl of Oxford March Tomaso Albinoni (1671-1751) Alleluia Concerto in C (No.5 Op.6) Dominico Scaiatti (1685-1757) Sarabande (from Sonata in C, Kp 49) Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904) Slavonic Dance No.1 Op.46 Claude Debussy (1862-1918) Sarabande from Trois Images Oubliees Quant j'ai ouy le tambourin from Three Songs of Charles D'Orleans
Kenneth Amish (b.1970) Allegro con brio from Quintet No.1
George Gerswhin (1898-1937) Prelude No.2 |
OVERALL NOISE RATING: 3 (Two ungentlemen in seats II 3-4 who thought it was perfectly alright to talk in loud whispers throughout the concert, and
the beeper that went off in just before the Albinoni Concerto
that Rolf Smedvig said was "in the wrong key".)
The Noise Rating Index is a partially-objective measurement of pager and handphone blasts, 9pm and 10pm watch beeps, coughing-during-the-pianissimo-bits, intra-audience conversation and other mind-bogglingly inept noises emitted in the concert hall during actual performance of music. It is measured on a scale of 0 to 5, in increasing annoyance.
by William Beh
You'd have known that something wasn't right when you turned up at
the entrance and they were giving out concert programmes on
photocopied pieces of paper rather than the usual glossy booklet from
Camy Communications.
Hardly surprising ? Apparently the musicians' agent had sent
outdated biographies of members who had already left the group, which
the Singapore Symphonia office unknowingly and duly printed up into
glossy booklets which wasn't discovered until it was too late. Rather
than use correctional inserts in the booklets, the musicians
themselves unanimously voted to use photocopied programme sheets
instead. The truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.
Well, the diminuitive audience of 150 didn't seem to mind, showing
enough enthusiasm to even applaud the pre-concert announcement about
turning off pagers and handphones. There were apparently quite a
number of school band members in the audience.
The programme was arranged in chronological order, the first half
comprising music from William Byrd (1543-1623) to Kenneth Amis (b.
1970 and still playing the tuba in the Empire Brass, thank you very
much). After opening with Byrd, they continued with a transcription of
the Violin Concerto in C (Op.6 No.5) in its four-movement
entirety by Albinoni and yes, the audience clapped after each
movement; not that Rolf Smedvig didn't hint to the audience to
"encourage us between the movements".
Rolf Smedvig, with Ken Amis and Marc Reese, in keeping with the
informal mien of the concert, would step forward to introduce each
piece before it was played. This not only established a very
charismatic rapport between performer and audience, it was doubly
important in lieu of not having any detailed programme notes in the
handouts (just musician bios and a list of the two night's
programmes). The haste in prepating the handouts were painfully
obvious in typos along the lines of Ralph Vaughan Williams
(1872-1875) and Luciano Berio (b. 1970).
For the Albinoni concerto, their remarkable talent was to produce a
brass chorale with their instruments that came across as five clear,
separate strata of sound, with the first trumpet as concerto and
second trumpet as ripieno, and the other three instruments playing the
continuo or doubling the ripieno as required. There is an art in
classical heavy metal - and these guys could write the proverbial book
on it.
The group sashayed through a Scarlatti Sarabande and a
Dvorak Slavonic Dance, before adopting a different tack for two
impressionistic Debussy pieces. The first half then concluded with the
allegro con brio final movement of Ken Amis' Brass Quintet No.1
and written as part of his coursework in university. (Mr Amis holds a
Masters in Composition, as the bio tells us.)
The second half saw the Empire Brass take to the stage with a
change of shirts, from all-black to "faded-tone" shirts. As before,
the group sauntered out and began without ado: the Hamilin
Gigue by Praetorius, followed by a Gigue from Anthony
Holborne (1560-1602).
Strangely, Smedvig informed the audience that the Holborne
Gigue was written in 1487, which distinctively does not match
with the given years of Holborne's existence. Still, they did justice
to the Gigue, finishing with a dose of humour at the abrupt ending,
sufficient to bring a smile to SSO Programme Notes author John Howard
who was sitting close by.
Smedvig introduced the next work, the Farandole from the
opera L'Arlesienne, as an "orchestral work" by Bizet - not
exactly inaccurate, but not exactly otherwise, either. More
surprisingly, the high quality of the playing started to deteriorate
and noticeably, too. The horn, already disadvantaged by its bell
perpetually facing the back of the stage, was at times in danger of
being drowned by the other instruments. Then the piccolo trumpet
failed to hit the last (high) note cleanly.
The Fantasia on Greensleeves by Vaughan Williams was even
less enjoyable. The opening of the piece was attacked with a zeal
better reserved for loud fanfares, the transition into the Lovely
Joan exposition was ungainly and the overall impression that
resulted was VW watered-down into a "classical lollipops" treatment
that made up in volume what it lacked in subtlety. Again, there were
wrong notes played - you could tell the group had switched from a
"difficult, serious music" mode to "let's have fun", but surely not
such basic technical mistakes ?
The two following Russian and Arabian Dances (from
Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker) were hardly an improvement; the
fortissimos were brash and a kid sitting in DD8 went to sleep
on his mother's lap. One senses that perhaps not all classical works,
least of all European mid-19th century music, were conducive to the
Empire Brass' pops-style transcription and performance.
The conclusion of the programme was dominated by quote great
American composers unquote. First to bat was Gershwin's Prelude
II, which saw a remarkable improvement in the performance: the
trombone, coming forward to perform "solo", injected a mellow, bluesy
feel albeit the first trumpet, following suit, could not quite match;
some of the idiomatic quasi-jazz nuances just weren't coming.
Lenny Bernstein's rambunctous America from West Side
Story was next. Another bushel of wrong notes amidst the
cut-and-thrust of instrumental dialogue, with the tempo increasing
steadily as the players rushed towards the end.
The Empire Brass's tongue-in-cheek approach to classical hits was
confirmed by their rendition of Seventy-Six Trombones from
Meredith Wilson's quintessential American musical The Music
Man. As Smedvig quipped in the intro, "...this arrangement by Ken
Amis, with all seventy-six trombone parts taken by (here, he pointed
at Mark Hertzler, the trombonist)."
This was an understatement. Hertzler, apart from showing some slide
gymnastics that was visually as pleasing as it was aurally, displayed
a triple-tonguing technique that sounded as if two instruments were
being played simultaneously, one on the melody and the other on scalar
roulades. The audience broke into spontaneous applause once during the
music, and twice more during the - I'm not kidding - cadenza.
And that wasn't even the end. The work to cap the evening was the
traditional Carnival of Venice (also known as the children's
song My Hat It Has Three Corners) in an increasingly and
extraordinarily difficult progression of variations on the theme.
Smedvig came to the fore, variously demonstrating legato scalar
passages on one-sixteenth notes, then rapid-fire phrases of
one-thirty-second notes of varying dynamics, then an immaculate
triple-tonguing display, as Hertzler had just done, to make one
trumpet sound like two, which itself was worth the price of admission.
There were two encores, after Smedvig twice teased the audience,
"We've come all this way, may we play one more piece ?" The first was
Gershwin's Summertime (and also on the next day's programme);
the second was the Basil Street Blues, in Dixieland dress. The
applause just went on and on, and afterwards the audience crowded into
the side corridor for post-concert autographs.
The Empire Brass has made a name for itself playing "pops"
transcriptions of classical music with much &eaccent;lan and flair,
and it's not hard to see why. Sometimes it doesn't work (cf. a
"fun-loving" Fantasia on Greensleeves) but mostly it does, and
then some. It's such a pity that the turnout was so poor - credit to
the Empire Brass for putting a brave face on a near-empty hall -
because music-making of this quality deserved a full house.
Empire Brass walked onstage, all nattily dressed in black, and as
soon as the applause stopped, launched into a undescribably rich and
vibrant rendition of Byrd's The March before the Battle of the Earl
of Oxford's (originally for harpsichord) and Alleluia (for
choir): theirs was a timbre keen enough to peel the paint off the
walls of the Victoria Concert Hall and bring the ceiling down. It was
music-making of a quality which was as sharp and charismatic it was rare.
Empire Brass Website.
William Beh has heard
John Wilbraham and Doc Severinsen play the Carnival of Venice
variations in recordings, but this is the first time he's heard it
live and he still can't believe it is humanly possible.
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635: 27.1.2000. up.1.2.2000 ©William Beh
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