
City Chinese Orchestra
Web Composer:
Wong Chin Loon
E-mail:
chinloon@pacific.net.sg
Updated:
28 Jun 1997
Feedback, comments
and suggestions
are welcomed.
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Review on Youth Chinese Orchestra of Young Musician Society of Singapore Concert 2 Mar 1997
I am impressed by Chen Zewang’s Forest Fantasia. It is a brave
attempt in putting all the notes together all on his own. It is not easy
for him to get to perform on stage that day with the Youth Chinese
Orchestra of Young Musician Society of Singapore. For this, I
congratulate him, and I had never seen him so happy that day. It is
very creative, although his ideas are not totally original, and as Ma
Sheng Long, the conductor from Shanghai Traditional Music
Troupe, who had helped him in arranging the orchestra, had said: his
art of composing music needs time to mature. It is his own music,
whether it is good or bad in the eyes for professionals, it is a music
out from his heart! People who play their own music, feel strongly
about them, for they know the meaning of it best. Writing music and
writing novel is the same, you must have the touch and feeling first,
and then you have the strong urge to share that kind of feeling with
your friends and the public, so strong to the extent that you go
through all the torment in getting your own creation into the world.
After creation, what is left is waiting for the results that you had
intended, or had anticipated. People might not understand your
music. People may criticised heavily. Or people might be inspired to
do a music. However, these are not important, the seeds of
nurturing local composer is being sowed, and we just have to wait for
them to grow. Or course Chen Zewang is by no means the first local
composer, the more senior composer, Yang Peixian, and the equally
junior composer, Su Handa had attempted to do. They received
criticisms also, which I feel personally that these criticisms are also
not professional. Again, the standards of composing music must
grow with the standard of criticism. I hope that in the near future, we
have improvements in both areas.
The trend of organising a Music Concert like this, is that
motivations are falling and the effort put in in preparing the concert
is falling also. It is not a good sign. This concert is not very well
prepared. Hong Dingliang, a well-known Dizi Soloist in Singapore,
had not performed to our expectation. And the fact that making him
presenting two solos, seems like a no choice situation where
Dingliang had to fill up a significant duration of the concert. Xie
Meiling’s Yangqin Solo, The Symphonic Poem of Taiwan Straits,
sounds ok under the conduction of her senior Jiawei. However, in
most part of the music, the sound of the Yangqin is dampened by the
accompanied music. It is a nice music, and Yangqin has no choice
and has to stand out in its melody!
I am looking forward to a better concert from the Youth Orchestra,
and hope that the motivation to present a good concert never die!
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