Singapore’s Got Talent! Three President’s Young Performers hit the jackpot

One dream of young classical musicians growing up in Singapore is a chance to perform a concerto with the national orchestra. Since the mid-1990s, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra’s annual President Young Performers Concert has made that dream come true for dozens of musical talents. After two consecutive editions that highlighted pianists, this year’s gala gave golden tickets to a saxophonist, clarinettist and harpist.

It was a pity that President Tharman Shanmugaratnam and his wife were not present to witness three excellent concerto performances with the SSO led by Associate Conductor Rodolfo Barráez. The evening opened with the Singapore premiere of Henri Tomasi’s Saxophone Concerto (1949), performed by 18-year-old Dante Tan Yu Jie, student at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts. Despite its date of composition, this was no avant-garde nasty, but a lushly orchestrated score which resembled those of biblical movie epics. Tan made most of his opportunity by crafting a rich, creamy tone which confidently cut through thickets of orchestral textures. The tricky cadenzas were very well negotiated, including one accompanied by harp, before energetically racing off in the jazzy syncopations of the finale, aptly titled Giration.

Another SSO premiere saw 22-year-old Chua Jay Roon, student at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory, take on the thorny challenges of Carl Nielsen’s Clarinet Concerto. Its angular dance-like main theme derived from folk music was very well projected, dominating much of the single-movement work. Her virtuoso credentials were established on the outset, handling the highly chromatic and convoluted passages with much natural ease. An ongoing duel with Jonathan Fox’s snare drum (echoes of the belligerence in Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony) ratcheted up the tension, before the concerto coming to a surprisingly peaceable close. Responding with a fist pump, Chua knew she had nailed it, and the audience responded with equal enthusiasm.

After the intermission, it was the turn of 19-year-old Renee Yadav, recent graduate from the School of the Arts, with her solo in Claude Debussy’s Danses sacrée et profane. Quite unlike the exuberance of the earlier wind concertos, this was a far more sedate affair but one lit up by Yadav’s grace and dignified poise. Clarity and purity of her lines shone through the light string accompaniment, first in the chaste opening dance before letting loose somewhat in the gentle waltz rhythm of the second dance. There was nothing profane about it, just a show of a little self-determination which came up trumps in the end.

Completing the evening was an ebullient reading of Mendelssohn’s Symphony no. 4 in A major, popularly known as the Italian. Barráez conducted with an easy authority, bringing out the Mediterranean sunshine of the opening movement, then maintained a steady but not strait-jacketed pulse for the second movement’s religious procession. The third movement’s dance had a more casual air about it, tempered by martial interjections from the winds. The finale’s Saltarello was taken at a furious pace, closing a very satisfying concert where the youths shone... with or without the President.