Review of AWAKING
(13 Jun 08 | Victoria Theatre)

WHAT threatened to be a schmaltzy and over-the-top celebration of love across disparate historical and performance contexts turned out to be an almost transcendental meditation on love's impermanence.

awaking, a multi-disciplinary production, featured music from Shakespeare's romantic tragedies and Tang Xian Zu's The Peony Pavilion from the Ming Dynasty.

Gathered on stage were the Musicians of the Globe led by Philip Pickett, members of the Singapore Chinese Orchestra and the Northern Kunqu Opera Theatre, all conducted by Yeh Tsung.

Behind them, a Tim Burtonesque moonscape sloped upward towards a huge luminous moon, while shorthand, aesthetic gestures toward the contemporary manifested through a hanging chandelier and a white Philippe Starck chair that Chinese opera singer Wei Chun Rong sat on.

As the music by well-known composer Qu Xiao Song began, a drone and a low shimmering of cymbals introduced the solemn mood.

Wei, playing the protagonist in The Peony Pavilion, and Globe soprano Joanne Lunn, took turns to sing about characters mourning the fragility of love, with the musicians playing a supporting role to the singers.

The Chinese singer played Du Liniang, the daughter of an important official who dreams of a lover she has never met and dies before he can find her. She shone while pining for her lover, cooing and sighing inside her dreamlike realm.

Lunn sand the Shakespearean tunes in a bell-like soprano voice reminiscent of a younger Emma Kirkby, another singer specialising in music from the Renaissance and Medieval periods.

The Globe musicians, who perform using replicas of mediaeval instruments such as the recorder, cittern, lute, bandora and bass viol, did research in what songs had been performed during Shakespeare's time. Walsingham, for example, about finding true love, was derived from a melody and text made popular during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.

In his director's notes, Ong Keng Sen, who came up with the concept for the production and directed it, talked about collapsing boundaries between historical worlds, and the past and the present.

The performance focused on the differences between the musical backgrounds of the singers and their accompanying musicians.

Although these differences aptly demonstrated how the notion of love transcended history, there could have been more communication between the singers and their contrasting styles, so as to potentially create a new and exciting musical genre.

Overall, there could have been more intermeshing and dialogue between these styles and their cultural contexts.

Renaissance ensemble music and Chinese opera orchestrations were later connected most superficially by a melody from one of the Elizabethan songs that was rewritten to sound like a Buddhist chant, sung by Lunn at the show's closing.

As a result, the performance ended on a hyper spiritual note, which detracted from what was an otherwise haunting and moving reflection on love across time and space.

Published in The Straits Times, Life! on 16 Jun 2008