Concert review: SSO’s new season off to easy start with Hans Zimmer programme
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Conducted by Gerard Salonga, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra's evening of film music picked up pace in the second half.
PHOTO: JACK YAM
Mervin Beng
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SSO Pops – The Music Of Hans Zimmer
Singapore Symphony Orchestra
Esplanade Concert Hall
Friday, 7.30pm
The line between classical and popular music has always been grey and fuzzy.
If film and video had existed during their time, Mozart and many other “classical” composers would have been writing some of the most innovative music to accompany them, just as they did for opera, dance and daily life.
The Singapore Symphony Orchestra (SSO) has been increasing its popular offerings noticeably in the past five years.
An SSO Pops concert opened the orchestra’s 2023 season, featuring the music of Oscar- and Grammy-Award winner Hans Zimmer.
Directing the programme was Gerard Salonga, resident conductor of the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra, who is as much at home in theatre as on the classical stage.
Most great composers in theatre, film and even pop music find their niche after a good deal of classical music training.
Zimmer, on the other hand, thoroughly disliked his early music lessons.
He loved music though, and from the 1970s, he played in a number of bands, getting increasingly drawn into arranging and composing, where he built a reputation of combining orchestral with electronic sounds.
The two halves of the evening featured two faces of his music.
In the first half, Salonga picked more lyrical and atmospheric music, from Driving Miss Daisy (1989), The Thin Red Line (1998), The Last Samurai (2003), The Da Vinci Code (2006), Inception (2010) and Interstellar (2014), while the second half had music from animation and epic superhero movies.
Salonga provided extensive narration of the music and background to Zimmer’s work in an affable, if somewhat academic, style.
He highlighted Zimmer’s breadth of styles, including the use of persistent repetition (ostinato) and massive crescendo on a simple motif, much like what is heard in Ravel’s Bolero, as aspects that would shine in a symphonic concert such as this evening’s.
Listening to SSO clarinettist Tang Xiao Ping’s theme in the opening piece Driving, accompanied by the SSO’s percussion and strings, certainly offered a more expansive and “live” experience compared with the ultimate theatre sound system – such is the human brain’s response to live acoustics.
And yet the original soundtrack, with its extensive studio mixing and closely recorded clarinet and piano, conveys the essence of the driving scene from the movie in a way that the live performance could not. In fact, the first half was slightly subdued.
The second half was much more successful, opening with Zoosters Breakout from the animated film Madagascar (2005). Played with gusto by the SSO strings and percussion, Salonga seemed to finally let his hair down, and to draw the swing from the musicians.
His comment that it was fine for the audience members to be less restrained and respond more freely changed the mood in the hall. The message also seemed to get across to the musicians. If only he had said this early in the first half.
The music also gained impetus, thanks to the more upbeat selection of pieces from The Lion King (1994), Gladiator (2000), Man Of Steel (2013), The Dark Knight Rises (2012) and Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice (2016).
The sound was closer to theatre volume, and the SSO’s percussion section had a great time, especially in the superhero scenes.
Traditionally, a major orchestra’s season-opener signals the great music to look forward to for the coming year.
Whether SSO’s opener was programmed around Beethoven, Rachmaninov or Zimmer, it needed to announce to all who attended that 2023 will be a vintage year for the orchestra.
Salonga left audiences smiling and happy, but not spellbound, and yearning for more.
