SCHUBERT’S DIE SCHÖNE MÜLLERIN

New Opera Singapore

The Chamber @ The Arts House

20 December 2012

 

By Chang Tou Liang

 

This review was published in The Straits Times on 22 December 2012 with the title "Sing, don't dance".

 

    Almost everyone knows the prohibitive costs of staging an opera, so New Opera Singapore has exercised the option of appropriating a Schubert song cycle for the basis of a production. Why not, as all good vocal music deserves champions, and it is vanity to split hairs over what talented young singers should or should not sing.

   

    Franz Schubert composed no great operas, but his three major song cycles are matchless. Die Schöne Müllerin (The Fair Maid Of The Mill), 20 songs set to poetry by Wilhelm Müller, was composed around 1823. It is not the bleakest of the three but in certain ways is the saddest. The predictable plot of young love cruelly unrequited does not end in aimless wandering, as in the darker Winterreise (Winter Journey), but instead in suicide.

 

    Five male singers, three tenors and two baritones, undertook the task of musical story-telling. Tenor David Charles Tay was the very able narrator, guiding listeners to the action and the protagonist’s ever-shifting moods. Transliterations in English were helpfully provided, and there was to be no excuse for not knowing what was going on.

 

    The younger and less experienced singers took on the earlier and less gloomy songs. Tenor Shaun Lee opened the cycle with Das Wandern (Wandering) in a hearty spirit, but his brash earnestness could have been served with better intonation for Mit dem Grünen Lautenbande (With The Green Ribbon). Baritone Lim Jingjie, who sang three songs including Wohin? (Whither?)  and Danksagung an den Bach (Thanksgiving to the Brook), has yet to attain the gravitas and experience to be truly convincing.

 

    Baritone Jeremy Koh, armed with superior pronunciation and intonation, made a good case for the contrasting emotions of Ungeduld (Impatience), Tränenregen (Rain of Tears) and Mein (Mine), and the cycle was taking on a definitive direction and shape. It was little surprise that the final five songs, the emotional core, climax and denouement of the cycle, were shared by Tay and his twin brother Jonathan Charles Tay who as relative veterans both stole the show.

 

    The paired songs on greenery, Die liebe Farbe (Favourite Colour) and Die böse Farbe (Hateful Colour), were wonderfully delineated as hope rapidly turned into despair. The cycle’s greatest items, Trockne Blumen (Withered Flowers) and Der Müller und der Bach (The Miller and the Brook), from David and Jonathan respectively, were coloured with a shuddering vividness and ultimately beauty beyond mere words.

 

    The final song Des Baches Wiegenlied (The Brook’s Lullaby), gentle but an immovable force, rang like a requiem with ever-steady chords from pianist Albert Lin, who as a collaborator was a tower of strength throughout.