Ng Pei-Sian Plays Shostakovich

N G P E I - S I AN P L AYS S H OS TAKOV I C H THE HERO WITHIN 8 JANUARY 2021

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ESPLANADE CONCERT HALL

WOODWIND & BRASS ENSEMBLE OF THE SSO

Live at the Esplanade Concert Hall: an all-wind programme with the Woodwind and Brass Ensemble of the SSO! Our intrepid band of musicians will present music from across the ages. Witty Hindemith, magical Mozart, seafaring shanties with Arnold, all-trombone Brucknerian solemnity and the brass sextet by underrated German trumpeter-composer Oskar Bรถhme will fill the hall together with the Renaissance splendour of Gabrieli and Byrd.

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N G P EI- S IA N PLAY S SH O ST A KO VI C H THE HERO WITHIN

8 Jan 2021, 8pm (Online premiere on SISTIC Live) Viewable from 8 Jan to 22 Jan with valid tickets.

Singapore Symphony Orchestra Hans Graf Chief Conductor Ng Pei-Sian cello

S HO ST AK O V I CH

Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat major, Op. 107

30 mins

B EET H O V E N

Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, Op. 55 “Eroica”

47 mins

Concert Duration: 1 hr 20 mins

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SINGAPORE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Since its founding in 1979, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra (SSO) has been Singapore’s flagship orchestra, touching lives through classical music and providing the heartbeat of the cultural scene in the cosmopolitan city-state.

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The SSO makes its performing home at the 1,800-seat state-of-the-art Esplanade Concert Hall.

More intimate works, as well as outreach and community performances take place at the 673seat Victoria Concert Hall, the home of the SSO. The orchestra performs over 60 concerts a year, and its versatile repertoire spans all-time favourites and orchestral masterpieces to exciting cutting-edge premieres. Bridging the musical traditions of East and West, Singaporean and Asian musicians and composers are regularly showcased in the concert season. This has been a core of the SSO’s programming philosophy from the very beginning under Choo Hoey, who was Music Director from 1979 to 1996.

Under the Music Directorship of Lan Shui from 1997 to 2019, the SSO has performed in Europe, Asia and the United States. In May 2016 the SSO was invited to perform at the Dresden Music Festival and the Prague Spring International Music Festival. This successful five‑city tour of Germany and Prague also included the SSO’s return to the Berlin Philharmonie after six years.

In 2014 the SSO’s debut at the 120th BBC Proms in London received critical acclaim in the major UK newspapers The Guardian and The Telegraph. The SSO has also performed in China on multiple occasions.

In the 2020/21 concert season, the SSO welcomes renowned maestro Hans Graf as its Chief Conductor.

Notable SSO releases on the BIS label include a Rachmaninoff series, a “Seascapes” album, three Debussy discs “La Mer”, “Jeux” and “Nocturnes”, and the first-ever cycle of Tcherepnin’s piano concertos and symphonies. The SSO has also collaborated with such great artists as Lorin Maazel, Charles Dutoit, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Neeme Järvi, Gustavo Dudamel, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Diana Damrau, Martha Argerich, Lang Lang, Yo-Yo Ma, Janine Jansen, Leonidas Kavakos and Gil Shaham.

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NG PEI-SIAN PL AYS SH OSTAKOV IC H | 8 JAN 2 0 2 1

H A N S G RAF Chief Conductor

Hans Graf is a frequent guest with major orchestras around the world including with the Boston Symphony, the Cleveland and Philadelphia Orchestras, the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw and Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestras, the London Symphony Orchestra, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the Budapest Festival Orchestra, the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, the Sydney and Melbourne Symphony Orchestras, the Seoul, Hong Kong and Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestras.

Hans Graf’s discography includes all symphonies of Mozart and Schubert, the complete orchestral works by Henri Dutilleux and the world premiere recording of Zemlinsky’s opera Es war einmal. His recording of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck with the Houston Symphony won the ECHO Klassik 2017 award and the Grammy 2018 for Best Opera Recording.

The Austrian conductor Hans Graf is the Chief Conductor of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra from the 2020/21 concert season.

He held the role of Music Director of the Houston Symphony Orchestra 2001–2013, making him the longest-serving Music Director in the orchestra’s 100 year history.

Prior to this, he was Music Director of the Calgary Philharmonic and of the Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine. He has also held the post of Music Director at the Mozarteum Orchester Salzburg and the Basque National Orchestra.

Hans Graf has been made Chevalier de l’Ordre de la Légion d’Honneur by the French Government (2002) and was awarded the Grand Decoration of Honour of the Republic of Austria (2007). He is also Professor Emeritus for Orchestral Conducting at the Universität Mozarteum in Salzburg.

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N G P EI - S I A N PL AYS SH OSTAK OV IC H | 8 JA N 2021

N G P E I -SI AN cello

Š TIMOTHY TEO

Ng Pei-Sian was Commonwealth Musician of the Year in 2007, winner of the Gold Medal and First Prize at the 55th Royal Over-Seas League Music Competition held in London.

He has performed concertos with the major Australian symphony orchestras, Singapore Symphony (SSO), Malaysian Philharmonic, Hong Kong Philharmonic, Estonian National Symphony, Oulu Symphony, Sinfonia ViVA, City of Southampton Orchestra, Philippine Philharmonic and the Orchestra of the Music Makers and performed around the world in venues including Royal Festival Hall, Wigmore Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room, Konzerthaus (Berlin), Lincoln Centre and Carnegie Hall.

International Cello Festival. Ng performed Tan Dun's Crouching Tiger Cello Concerto with The Festival Orchestra under the baton of the Academy Award-winning composer and also performed with Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble, Cho-Liang Lin and Renaud Capuçon.

Born in Sydney in 1984, he began studies in Adelaide with Barbara Yelland and later with Janis Laurs at the Elder Conservatorium of Music before winning the prestigious Elder Overseas Scholarship to study at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. Ng Pei-Sian completed his studies under Ralph Kirshbaum during which he was awarded the RNCM Gold Medal, the highest prize given by the college.

Ng is currently Principal Cellist of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra and a faculty member at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, Singapore. He performs on a 1764 Giovanni Antonio Marchi cello, Bologna.

Ng has had appearances in important music festivals including the Brighton, Edinburgh, Manchester International Cello Festival, Kronberg Academy, MecklenburgVorpormmern Festival and Adelaide 7

SECO N D VIOL IN

T HE ORC HE S T R A

Michael Loh Associate Principal Nikolai Koval* Hai-Won Kwok Chikako Sasaki* Margit Saur Shao Tao Tao Wu Man Yun* Xu Jue Yi* Yeo Teow Meng Yin Shu Zhan* Zhao Tian*

HANS GRAF Chief Conductor JOSHUA TAN Associate Conductor ANDREW LITTON Principal Guest Conductor

VIO LA

CHOO HOEY Conductor Emeritus

Zhang Manchin Principal Guan Qi Associate Principal Gu Bing Jie* Fixed Chair Marietta Ku Luo Biao Julia Park Shui Bing Janice Tsai Wang Dandan Yang Shi Li

LAN SHUI Conductor Laureate EUDENICE PALARUAN Choral Director WONG LAI FOON Choirmaster

CELL O Ng Pei-Sian Principal, The HEAD Foundation Chair Yu Jing Associate Principal Guo Hao Fixed Chair Chan Wei Shing Jamshid Saydikarimov* Song Woon Teng Wang Yan Wang Zihao* Wu Dai Dai Zhao Yu Er

FIRS T VI OL I N Kong Zhao Hui# Acting Concertmaster/ Associate Concertmaster Chan Yoong-Han Fixed Chair Cao Can* Chen Da Wei Duan Yu Ling Foo Say Ming Jin Li Kong Xianlong Cindy Lee Karen Tan William Tan Wei Zhe Ye Lin* Zhang Si Jing*

D O U B LE BAS S Yang Zheng Yi Associate Principal Karen Yeo Fixed Chair Olga Alexandrova Jacek Mirucki Guennadi Mouzyka Wang Xu

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FLUTE

TR U M P ET

Jin Ta Principal Evgueni Brokmiller Associate Principal Roberto Alvarez Miao Shanshan

Jon Paul Dante Principal David Smith Associate Principal Lau Wen Rong Sergey Tyuteykin

PICCOLO

TR O M B O N E

Roberto Alvarez Assistant Principal

Allen Meek Principal Damian Patti Associate Principal Samuel Armstrong

OBOE Rachel Walker Principal Pan Yun Associate Principal Carolyn Hollier Elaine Yeo

B A SS T R O MBONE Wang Wei Assistant Principal TU B A

COR ANG L AI S

Tomoki Natsume Principal

Elaine Yeo Associate Principal TIM P A N I CLARINE T

Christian Schiøler Principal Jonathan Fox Associate Principal

Ma Yue Principal Li Xin Associate Principal Liu Yoko Tang Xiao Ping

P ER CU SSIO N

Tang Xiao Ping Assistant Principal

Jonathan Fox Principal Mark Suter Associate Principal Mario Choo Lim Meng Keh

BAS S OON

H A RP

Liu Chang Associate Principal Christoph Wichert Zhao Ying Xue

Gulnara Mashurova Principal

BAS S CL AR I NE T

C EL EST A Shane Thio^

CONTRABAS S OON Zhao Ying Xue Assistant Principal HORN Gao Jian Associate Principal Jamie Hersch Associate Principal Marc-Antoine Robillard Associate Principal Hoang Van Hoc

* With deep appreciation to the Rin Collection for their generous loan of string instruments. # Kong Zhao Hui performs on a J.B. Guadagnini of Milan, c. 1750, donated by the National Arts Council, Singapore, with the support of Far East Organization and Lee Foundation. ^ Musician on temporary contract.

Musicians listed alphabetically by family name rotate their seats on a per programme basis.

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W ECHA T 新加坡交响乐团

I II III IV

Allegretto Moderato Cadenza Allegro con moto

Shostakovich burst onto the Russian musical scene as a bright youngster full of potential in the early 1920s, but his brush with Stalin’s wrath caused him to live almost two decades of his life in fear of negative political opinion. His opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was panned by Pravda in 1936, marking the start of the Great Terror that swept through Russia’s artistic circles, with many ending up dead or in the gulags. Concerned with avoiding the same fate, Shostakovich rehabilitated his image during the Second World War, writing a string of rousing successes, though his chamber music continued to show him at his ambivalent, grotesque best.

a concert staple despite its difficulties.

Listeners who are familiar with the sunny Second Piano Concerto should expect a diametrically opposed world: the first movement is jittery and nervous, and even the calmer mood of the second is nothing like an oasis of peace, but a quasi-lullaby filled with painful dissonances. (Listen out for the ghostly duet between cello harmonics and celesta toward the end.)

The third movement is for solo cello alone, essentially a massive cadenza — like the one bridging the final two movements of the First Violin Concerto from a decade earlier — and reuses themes from the first two movements. It charts the same path as the first movement, starting low and rising throughout its five-minute duration to several climaxes, eventually leading to the finale.

This strange dance, announced with big orchestral chords, faces down some real horrors while looking back over its shoulder at earlier moments, eventually turning into a headlong rush towards a harsh and abrupt end.

His life was not all smooth sailing after that, however, and he was dismissed from his teaching positions not long after the war, in a long series of tussles with Soviet officials.

Things only improved after Stalin’s death in 1953, and by the time of the first cello concerto, Stalin was six years dead but not forgotten. The music shows how familiar Shostakovich was with balancing on the line between tonality and dissonance, between anguish and barbarism, between terror and excitement.

Instrumentation 2 flutes (one doubling on piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons (1 doubling on contrabassoon), horn, timpani, celesta, strings

A cello part packed to bursting with vertiginous feats of technical wizardry is contrasted with extremely light orchestration, lending this piece an almost chambermusic feel. Written for Rostropovich, who memorised the whole concerto in only four days for the premiere, it has remained

World Premiere 4 Oct 1959 (Mstislav Rostropovich, cello) First performed by SSO 23 Oct 1987 (Truls Mørk, cello) 17

N G P EI - S I A N PL AYS SH OSTAK OV IC H | 8 JA N 2021

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906–1975) Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat major, Op. 107 (1959)

NG PEI-SIAN PL AYS SH OSTAKOV IC H | 8 JAN 2 0 2 1

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770–1827) Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, Op. 55 “Eroica” (1803) I II III IV

Allegro con brio Marcia funebre. Adagio assai Scherzo. Allegro vivace Finale. Allegro molto

The Eroica symphony was first performed to extremely mixed reviews. Contemporaneous accounts showed audiences divided into two clear camps, with Beethoven’s friends on one side trumpeting the work’s genius and calling it a masterpiece, and the other denying it had any artistic value. What was agreed upon was that the whole symphony, lasting around 50 minutes, was far longer than symphonies were expected to be at that point in time. More than 200 years on, with audiences now familiar with the gigantic works of Bruckner and Mahler, that charge seems faintly ridiculous, but it is undeniable that Beethoven broke new ground when writing his Third Symphony, with innovations in instrumentation, form, and content.

climax after a turn towards a fugue passage, where the instruments imitate one another in succession. The long drawn-out return to the original mood is very thoughtfully composed, and the movement peters out into nothingness.

The orchestra chugs back into life with the super-fast Scherzo, a third movement of relative brevity. Beethoven shows admirable restraint in keeping the volume low for a while, projecting bubbling excitement before a full fanfare. This lighter mood continues throughout and eventually spills into the optimistic final movement, which is a happy set of variations on a dance-like theme.

Beethoven had used this theme before on several occasions, including a similar set of variations for the piano, and it proved to be the only theme he would reuse so many times in his life. Other than serving as a piano piece, it had its origins in a set of orchestral dances before being co-opted to function as the finale to a ballet. The symphony takes a much more dramatic approach, however, and even though the piano variations are longer than this Finale movement, the formal weight of the symphony had to be balanced accordingly.

To this end, Beethoven employed wideranging modulations, two fugues, a slower section in a completely different tempo, and several different kinds of dances before sweeping up the full force of the orchestra

Mozart’s own famous E-flat major symphony (No. 39) was only 15 years in the past, and the Eroica’s first movement shows Beethoven’s familiarity with that particular work, being constructed along largely similar lines. However, the devil is in the details, and Beethoven’s confidence in his compositional prowess allowed him to come up with several unexpected turns of harmony and interpolate additional passages, including the famous “early return” of the main theme in the horn that confused many of the first listeners.

The second movement is a long and stately funeral march, justifiably celebrated for its Beethovenian touches: a suddenly dramatic 18

N G P EI - S I A N PL AYS SH OSTAK OV IC H | 8 JA N 2021

Drawing of Beethoven by August von Kloeber, made in the summer of 1818 in MÜdling Š Beethoven-Haus Bonn Source: beethoven.de in a rousing ending, with punchy E-flat major chords tying the package up neatly.

Instrumentation 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 3 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, strings

Programme notes by Thomas Ang

World Premiere 7 Apr 1805, Vienna First performed by SSO 28 Jun 1979 19

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# H e lp Us P la y O n Mus ic fo r a l l t i m e, th e m us ic of h o p e — During our absence from the concert halls since Circuit Breaker, you welcomed the SSO into your homes as we performed our new digital concerts for you. We are now working hard to put up live concerts in front of a live audience in the coming months. If you miss the SSO, please #HelpUsPlayOn by responding to this appeal.

“I miss the excitement of catching a live concert, online concerts aren’t quite the same…”

More than 700,000 people across Singapore enjoyed SSO concerts for free during Circuit Breaker - that’s seven times the number of people who would normally encounter the SSO in concert in a year

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“…my biggest heartache was foregoing Beethoven’s Gala Concert this year!”

The SSO is an arts charity and depends on donations and matching grants, which we need to survive. We need your help. Your donation unlocks matching grants that we need to sustain our digital operations. For every dollar donated, we will receive another from the Cultural Matching Fund. So your donation will make twice the difference.

These are challenging times for many, but if you are able to help, please #HelpUsPlayOn and consider making a gift to the SSO. For tax and other patron benefits, please visit www.sso.org.sg/support-us/patron-benefits

Ways You Can Donate: - Visit giving.sg/sso/HelpUsPlayOn or sso.org.sg/donate to make a donation via Credit Card - Scan the QR code in PayLah! or PayNow For more information, please contact: - Ms Nikki Chuang at nikki@sso.org.sg - Ms Charmaine Fong at charmaine.fong@sso.org.sg

S UPPOR T E D BY

PATRO N S P ON S OR

MATCHE D BY

M A JO R D ON OR S

Mr & Mrs Goh Yew Lin

S E A S O N PA R TN E R S Official Community Partner

Official Outdoor Media Partner

Official Airline

S EA S O N PATRO NS

Christopher & Rosy Ho

Aquilus Pte Ltd

The mission of the Singapore Symphony Group is to create memorable shared experiences with music.

Through the SSO and its affiliated performing groups, we spread the love for music, nurture talent and enrich our diverse communities.

The Singapore Symphony Orchestra is a charity and not-for-profit organisation. You can support us by donating at www.sso.org.sg/donate.