In the long procession of visiting international orchestras at this year’s Proms, it was the turn of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra to make their debut. Their reputation has gone before them in the form of their Rachmaninov recordings, so it was surprising and somewhat disappointing to hear them perform that composer’s Second Symphony with so little real feeling for its idiom or its ardour.
The orchestra’s Chinese music director, Lan Shui, seemed to be hauling the work along. The players were superbly disciplined, but their modus vivendi seemed to be obedience rather than enjoyment. Rachmaninov’s rubato — the great flexing of the muscle of his heart — felt preprogrammed rather than instinctive. And in the last two movements, the great Adagio and the finale with its own great song, there was too little sense of organic energy burgeoning and finally blooming.
The greatest disappointment, though, was in the new work the SSO brought with them. This was the European premiere of Postures, a piano concerto specially written by the Chinese composer Zhou Long for the evening’s soloist, Andreas Haefliger. Long starts from the premise that the piano is “a quite delicate percussion instrument”, and this determines the nature of the pianism, faithfully realised by Haefliger. The work as a whole reflects the movements of animal gestures in kung fu. So Pianodance is a shaman dance with animal masks, leaping and leering, and with episodes of deliquescent meditative lyricism. Pianobells has the piano strumming its inner strings like an angry harp, accompanied by micro-vibrations from the orchestra. And Pianodrums depicts the Monkey King of Peking Opera. In short, all ideas, all posturing — and too little musical substance or form of real quality or worth.