★★★☆☆
Sounds of the East is Manchester International Festival’s collaboration with the Hallé, Manchester’s landmark orchestra, hosted at the iconic Bridgewater Hall.
I arrived come early enough for the pre-concert talk between Chinary Ung, a Cambodian composer based in the USA, and Kahchun Wong, a Singaporean conductor. I learnt a lot about the importance of a type of music called Gamalan Music. I had some prior knowledge, knowing about the Javanese type of Gamalan music especially as it is set to Wayang, a type of puppetry-cum-music art, traditional to Indonesia. Gamalan went further than that with suggestions that Debussy incorporated a building block element of Gamalan in his La Mer pieces. Knowing this knowledge, you can feel and hear a South-East Asian tone in classically European music. Gamalan, whether Javanese, Sundanese or Balinese, was a recurring word of the pre-concert talk, and recurring tone in the music.
Kahchun Wing, Principal Conductor of the Hallé, spoke of his time working in covid where he reconnected with artists who played Chinese and Indian folk instruments. Coming from Singapore, these two cultures and their instruments are instrumental to the make-up of Singapore’s demographics.
Chinary Ung also joined the talk, speaking about his experience composing the first act of the Sounds of the East show, Grand Spiral (Desert Flowers Bloom) (1991), hoping that we, the audience, hear the energy in his piece, a feeling of old and new. This was definitely apparent with the thumping and sometimes stringy, sharp notes of Ung’s Grand Spiral creating a vast ocean of emotions in the audience who rapturously applauded.
Concert etiquette always feels strange to me, being much more unspoken and subtle for when it is apprtoairate to clap, how the instrumentalists interact with the conductor. The music, too, has a strange quality.
The show consisted of Ung’s Grand Spiral (Desert Flowers Bloom), La Merby Claude Debussy and finished by the musicians of the Hallé are joined by the soloists from the Singapore Chinese Orchestra, playing Wong’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. This was the most fusion type music played for me.
The pre-concert talk was hugely useful in grounding myself in what type of music to expect what the conductor and composes were thinking and incorporating. The talk really elucidated the music that followed. If more concert and music performances were preceded by an optional talk, it would really contextualise an artform which rarely is understood technically or even emotionally well.
Manchester International Festival runs until July 20.
Photo: Bill Lam
JADAR 