Singapore's T'ang Quartet, playing in Cork next week, are not about to get stuck in a chamber music rut, they tell Michael Dervan
In Singapore, just as in Ireland, people complain about the weather. It rains a lot in the hub of South-East Asia. Singapore has more wet days than Ireland, and more than twice the Irish annual level of rainfall.
Rain or no rain, walking out of a building or getting out of a taxi can be a disconcerting experience. You leave an air-conditioned coolness to find your clothes sticking to you in a bath of hot, tropical humidity, with daytime temperatures averaging above 30 degrees and nights not that much cooler. The equator, after all, is just 135km away, and at this time of year it's the high humidity that people tend to gripe about.
Singapore's population (just over 4 million at the last census), island status, colonial past and high-performing economy (annual growth of over eight per cent) make for interesting comparisons with Ireland. But the country's total land mass amounts to only 683sq km (266 sq miles) - you can drive from one end to the other in less than 45 minutes.
And both the rapidity of the country's economic transformation (from genuine third-world poverty to EU-level prosperity in the four decades since independence) and the social engineering style of rule by the People's Action Party (which has been in power from the start) have no direct European comparisons.
One perhaps unexpected common thread between Ireland and Singapore is an increasing public resourcing of the arts. Singapore's National Arts Council was set up in 1991. The 96-member Singapore Symphony Orchestra (SSO) has been around since 1979. The SG$600 million (€298 million) Esplanade arts centre opened in 2002 with a 1,600-seat concert hall and 2,000-seat theatre, under a pair of landmark domes that have been likened internationally to armadillos and locally to the popular durian, a prickly-surfaced fruit so notoriously pongy it's banned on trains. The attempt to replicate the trademark-like status of the Sydney Opera House is very clear indeed.
More recent ventures include the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music (affiliated to the Peabody Institute in the US), so new it has yet to produce its first graduates, and the Singapore Arts School, due to open in 2008, when it will provide a six-year secondary level education with specialisation in dance, drama, music and the visual arts (there are already specialised schools for sports and science).
A PROFESSIONAL STRING quartet might seem like just another link in the chain of national arts infrastructure. But the T'ang Quartet has more in common with Apple Computers' garage origins than a state-assisted hi-tech startup.
The important bonding between the members of the quartet - Ng Yu-Ying and Ang Chek Meng, violins, and brothers Lionel and Leslie Tan, viola and cello - took place when they were young. The violinists and viola player all had the same teacher, Jiri Heger, and, explains Yu-Ying, "we used to hang out together at his place, and get together for a drink after lessons". But the actual quartet-playing didn't start until they'd all been abroad to study, and were back in Singapore as members of the SSO.
They got together, and, "We just clicked." Heger, says Lionel, "not only influenced us or taught us musically, but he also encouraged us to think a certain way and to express our emotions and passions. We even talked about philosophy, about beliefs in life, everything. We spent a lot of time learning a lot of things that had nothing to do with the instrument. Leslie was the first one back from his undergraduate studies in London, and he started playing in the symphony orchestra first. Our teacher knew Leslie was my brother, got to know him, and got him to participate in those chamber music reading sessions that we sometimes had. I think it started from there."
When they formed the group in 1992, says Chek Meng, "it was not so much to make money, but for fun. Our first public concert was successful, and it just grew from there." It wasn't just the playing that gelled. "We had a certain common idea," explains Lionel, "of how we wanted to market a concert, the kind of publicity shots that we wanted to do. These were all ideas new to Singapore at that time. When people did a chamber music concert they would take a simple shot of themselves in their tuxedos, and photocopy it onto a flyer. The attendances were poor. We were not going to do that. We had arty-farty shots of us bathed in shadows, all dark, and that caught the attention of the press. We got a whole page in a newspaper." No one brings it up in our interview, but they also later posed clad only in towels.
The goal, says Yu-Ying, was to establish a clear identity, and not just appear as another chamber group of players from the symphony orchestra.
And it's quite clear too that, temperamentally, orchestral life was not the life for them. Leslie sums it up, pointing out that "playing in any symphony orchestra, to varying degrees of course, is a pretty mind-boggling sort of job, like a production line, you're told what to do, you're programmed, you have to do certain things. You really can not express yourself, unless you have a huge solo, like the cello solo in Brahms's Second Piano Concerto, or the violin solo in Rimsky-Korsakov's Sheherazade. Even then, you're pretty much under the dictate of the conductor. That's the nature of being an orchestral musician. Being comfortable with not thinking is an occupational hazard.
"It was very apparent from the start that playing in a quartet would afford us the luxury of being able to express ourselves. And then we realised it's not enough to express ourselves in a chamber ensemble, but we needed really to market the music - how Beethoven is played by the T'ang Quartet as opposed to any other quartet. The way we marketed our looks was essential to how we would draw the audience in. Maybe they would come in to the concert hall for the first time because they would see these four young guys with very fancy clothes and fancy haircuts, or whatever, and they might be drawn to the music. Let's just draw them in to the concert hall first."
And draw them in they did, achieving audiences of 800 in a country where double digits would have been the norm for chamber music. They went out into schools, and have recently had the pleasure of being invited to play by teachers whose own musical enthusiasm was fired by hearing early T'ang concerts. As Leslie explains, "we introduced music to a whole generation who had never been to a classical concert".
The players didn't just sit on their laurels. They knew that, whatever their individual strengths were, they still needed specialist guidance as an ensemble. In 1997 they went back to college as a foursome, at the Shepherd School of Music in the US, and two years later went on to take the third prize at the Joseph Joachim International Chamber Music Competition in Weimar.
BACK IN SINGAPORE, the players haven't taken their international success as a licence to relax and settle into the mould of conventional quartet programming. The idea of yet another Beethoven or Bartók cycle seems anathema to them. They want to lead their audiences into new musical territory rather than rely on box-office certainties. So their first CD steered away from the classics and offered instead quartets by two neglected Czech composers, both victims of the Nazis, Pavel Haas (whose Sarlatan was produced at the Wexford Festival in 1998) and Erwin Schulhoff. Their latest features Dvorák, and includes a quintet collaboration with their mentor, Jiri Heger.
The T'ang's repertoire at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival gives a good flavour of their unusual taste. Along with the Czech music (Schulhoff, Haas, Martinu), there's Australian music (Sculthorpe), Chinese music (Chen Yi), one of Paul Hindemith's youthful indiscretions (Minimax, a send-up of military music), and Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik (with Malachy Robinson on double bass).
One of the big challenges for a group like the T'ang Quartet is the fact that touring within Singapore, unlike, say, touring in Ireland, is simply not feasible. Every concert is within reach of everyone in the country, as the widely-separated communities of most European countries simply don't exist.
The solution has been to work abroad and to teach. They've been on the faculty of the Tanglewood Institute in Boston, and they're currently quartet-in-residence at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory. Francis Humphrys, director of the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, caught up with them at the Wigmore Hall in London and was blown away by the players' exuberance.
He also thoroughly enjoyed their informal spoken introductions to the music, and is promising that, if they're on form in Bantry, "they will scorch the stage".
The West Cork Chamber Music Festival is in Bantry House, Co Cork from Saturday June 24th to Sunday July 2nd
[ www.westcorkmusic.ieOpens in new window ]
Rock me Amadeus: Cork festival highlights
It's a Mozart year, and the West Cork Chamber Music Festival has turned over this year's mid-afternoon slot to the genius from Salzburg, leaving the rest of the programme as a nearly Mozart-free zone.
Shostakovich, born 100 years ago, is celebrated too, with the premiere of a tribute from Dmitry Smirnov, and a selection of rarities, including the gorgeous song-cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry. Other highlights include a focus on leading Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki and a song recital by soprano Ailish Tynan. With around 70 musicians at work and more than a hundred pieces of music, there's almost bound to be something for everybody.