Magnetic Band – Ghost Opera & The Mad King
Date: 26 August 2007(Sunday)
Time: 4pm
Venue: Esplanade Recital Studio
Tickets: $15 & $20
For ticket information, please e-mail makemusic@yms.org.sg or call: 6332 5813
YMS presents the Singapore premiere of two arresting chamber works: Tan Dun’s Ghost Opera and Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King, brought to you by the Magnetic Band in their tenth concert.
Ghost Opera is a five movement work for string quartet and pipa, with water, metal, stone and paper. The composer describes this work as a reflection on human spirituality, which is too-often buried in the bombardment of urban culture and the rapid advances of technology. It is a cross-temporal, cross-cultural and cross-media dialogue which touches on the past, present, future and the eternal; employs elements from Chinese, Tibetan, English and American cultures; and combines performance traditions of the European classical concert, Chinese shadow puppet theatre, visual art installations, folk music, dramatic theatre and shamanistic ritual.
Eight Songs for a Mad King - The poems which form the basis of this work were inspired by a miniature mechanical organ playing eight tunes, once the property of George III. A scrap of paper sold with it explains that 'This Organ was George the Third for Birds to sing'. The composer then set these poems to music and devised them as a semi-theatrical work for male vocalist, piano, violin, cello, flute, clarinet, and percussion. The songs are to be understood as the King's monologue while listening to his birds perform, and incorporate some sentences actually spoken by George III. The resulting work was completed in 1969 and stands as one of the most distinctive, and arguably one of the most disturbing musical works from the twentieth century.
Magenetic Band in Concert
Date: 25 March 2007 (Sunday)
Time: 4pm
Venue: YMS Auditorium
Tickets: $15
The ninth concert of Magnetic Band presented the works of Asian composers - Goh Toh Chai, Chou Wen-Chung, Clarence Mak, Liu De Hai and Toru Takemitsu.
Chou Wen-Chung - The Willows Are New was taken from a poem by Wang Wei, the Chinese poet, painter and musician who flourished in the eighth century. Sprigs of willow, used in farewell ceremonies, are regarded as a symbol of parting.
Clarence Mak’s Su Qin (Plain Autumn) was scored for flute, clarinet, cello and piano.
Toru Takemitsu – It may be the kind of over specific notation that had done much to sour mains mainstream performers on contemporary music but one was caught up in the meticulous exploration. Wind and water imagery, presented in a stylized pointillism, pours forth from the evocative From far beyond Chrysanthemums and November fog.
Magnetic Band: Le Bal Masque & Pierrot Lunaire
Date: 10 September 2006 (Sunday)
Time: 3pm
Venue: Esplanade Recital Studio
Tickets: $15, $20 (15 minutes intermission)
For ticket information, please e-mail makemusic@yms.org.sg or call: 6332 5813
The Magnetic Band’s 4th anniversary concert featured 2 extended works for voice and instrumental ensemble, that have had lasting influence on the chamber music idiom: Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, and Poulenc’s Le Bal Masque.
Schoenberg’s groundbreaking work, written for mezzo-soprano and chamber ensemble, offers an array of contradictions – solo musicians that are also the orchestra, cabaret disguised as high art, theatre masquerading as concert music, and song that is also speech. A seminal work that has had a lasting impact on the contemporary music scene, it introduced sprechgesang (or speech-song) to vocal music and the “Pierrot ensemble” – a 5-player ensemble of 8 instruments (piano, flute/piccolo, clarinet/bass clarinet, violin/viola and cello) that were arranged differently in each of the 21 poems and produced an amazing variety of sound – to the chamber music genre.
Poulenc’s surrealistic Le Bal Masque, written for baritone and chamber orchestra, was intended to surprise (or even shock) the audience into laughter. Using quick and unpredictable shifts of mood and texture, and a lyricism repeatedly punctured by impertinent wrong notes, Poulenc plays along the edge between pleasure and pain, contentment and hysteria. The listener has to live ‘in the moment’.
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(sui mu), written specially for the Magnetic Band, based on poetry by 
