Friday, 26 August 2022
Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music Conservatory Concert Hall, 7.30pm
$15
Available here
YST Alumni Orchestra
LIEN BOON HUA, conductor
PROGRAMME
JEAN-PHILIPPE RAMEAU
Selections from Les Indes galantes
IGOR STRAVINSKY
Pulcinella
“Pulcinella was my discovery of the past, the epiphany through which the whole of my late work became possible.” – Igor Stravinsky
The Voyage Festival 2022 opens with a brilliant display of orchestral colors, featuring two masterpieces by Jean-Philippe Rameau and Igor Stravinsky, performed by the alumni of Yong Siew Toh Conservatory.
Composed in 1920, Stravinsky’s Pulcinella launched the neoclassical movement in music, paving the way forward (ironically) by looking to the past and shunning the compositional advances of the modernists as well as the excess of his own earlier work with one fell swoop. Instead, he looked with equal parts nostalgia and wonderment to works of the past as an alternative way forward to the future.
Rameau’s second opera, Les Indes Galantes (1735), tells four stories of love in exotic places with strikingly original and adventurous music that was criticized by its audiences as being “noisy and jarring”, largely because of its depictions of what the European world would have deemed “savages”. With a nod to reclamation and to Stravinsky’s appropriation of older music to chart new futures, six alumni composers reimagine Rameau’s original suite, in an arrangement specifically commissioned for this Festival.
A contributing editor at TBP.