A Very Mozart Festival

by Michael Proudfoot

(from the Bangkok Post)

Three concerts commemorated the late and highly revered 'Patron Saint' of Classical Music in Thailand, Her Royal Highness Princess Galyani Vadhana

The most significant feature of the interesting and varied programme served up in the ninth "Mozart And More" festival at the Thailand Cultural Centre Small Hall was the display of talented young musicians taking part. Three concerts were staged over successive nights on Jan 4-6, commemorating the Day of the Passing of Her Royal Highness Princess Galyani Vadhana, the "Patron Saint" of classical music in Thailand, who died in January eight years ago.

The first concert started, appropriately, with Mozart. Trisdee Na Patalung, more familiar in his role as conductor of the Siam Opera and the Siam Sinfonietta, played Piano Sonata No.16 In C Major, deceptively known as the "Sonata Facile" and described by Mozart himself as being "for beginners". It is, in fact, far from easy to play well, which Trisdee did, with an especially expressive middle "lento quasi andante" movement.

In the rest of the first concert there was some brilliant piano and clarinet playing from Le Dai, the young Chinese clarinet player currently in the Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra, as well as the outstanding pianist Christopher Janwong McKiggan. McKiggan was born in England, with a British father and Thai mother and moved to Thailand aged seven. More recently he has been making a name for himself in the US. He and Le Dai played some show pieces for the two instruments. British composer Joseph Horovitz's 1981 jazzySonatina, the violin virtuoso Pablo de Sarasate's Carmen Fantasy (arranged for clarinet) and the American Robert Muczynski's 1983 spiky Time Pieces.

They were joined in the final item, Béla Bartók's Contrasts, by the popular Thai violinist Paye Srinarong, of VieTrio. The Bartók trio was commissioned in 1938 by the famous jazz clarinettist Benny Goodman and is a lively folk dance-inspired work requiring and receiving great virtuosity from the players, with the violinist and clarinettist each having to use and swap between two instruments. It was huge fun and received with great enthusiasm by the audience.

The second evening provided what for me was one of the highlights of the three concerts. It was a profoundly moving performance of Shostakovich's autobiographical String Quartet Number 8 In C Minor. It was played by the Shounen-Thai quartet, consisting of four section leaders of the Siam Sinfonietta, Chot Buasuwan, Pittaya Pruksachonlavit, Atjayut Sangkasem, and Wishwin Sureeratanakorn. They displayed a superb level of musicianship and a maturity beyond their years (they are all in their early 20s) in a deeply expressive interpretation of this dark work. It was written in just three days in 1960, just after Shostakovich had been coerced into joining the Communist Party and he had discovered he had a wasting illness that prevented him from playing the piano. The youthful quartet received an overwhelming response from the audience who repeatedly called them back to the stage.

The final evening was devoted to vocal music, with the Siam Orpheus Chamber Choir making their debut singing a collection of music celebrating Epiphany, the official last day of Christmas, including Peter Cornelius's wonderful Three Kings, in which the solo part was stylishly performed by Chaiporn Phuangmalee. The impressive choir showed great promise and versatility, singing in a variety of languages including Latin, French, Russian, Czech and German.

One of Southeast Asia's leading sopranos, Nancy Yuen, a welcome guest artist from Hong Kong and a regular over many years with Siam Opera, was the soloist in Schubert's glorious The Shepherd On The Rocks. She was expertly accompanied by Ratchanon Intharasathit (principal clarinet of Siam Sinfonietta) and Trisdee (piano).

In the second half of the concert Nancy Yuen provided another highlight of the Festival, with a brilliantly executed Exsultate, Jubilate, accompanied by the Siam Sinfonietta under Somtow Sucharitkul. (Older readers may recall Deanna Durbin, aged 16 -- the same age as Mozart when he composed the coloratura piece -- performing the final Alleluia section in the 1937 film 100 Men And A Girl.) The concert officially finished with the choir and orchestra playing Mozart's divine Ave Verum Corpus, but the enthusiasm of the audience encouraged three encores, which included (by special request of Somtow's mother Thaitow Sucharitkul) Nancy Yuen singing the Lullaby from Somtow's opera Mae Naak, a hauntingly beautiful piece for the role specially written for her.