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Against a backdrop of newly constructed skyscrapers and luxury resorts, Singapore is also home to a vibrant cultural scene, including ten full orchestras. What’s behind the boom?

Aerial view of Singapore’s Esplanade-Theatres on the Bay, where the Singapore Symphony Orchestra and many local and visiting orchestras perform

75a m e r i c a n o r c h e s t r a s . o r g

by Robert Markow

Against a backdrop of newly constructed skyscrapers and luxury resorts, Singapore is also home to a vibrant cultural scene, including ten full orchestras. What’s behind the boom?

Letter from

Perched at the southern tip of the Malaysian peninsula, just two degrees above the equator and sweltering year-round with temperatures of 85 to 90 degrees, Singapore has grown in its mere 45 years as a sovereign nation into an Asian tiger of formidable economic power and cultural stature.

No fewer than ten full orchestras flourish here: two orchestras per-forming traditional Chinese music and an orchestra performing tra-ditional Indian music; two amateur adult orchestras (the Braddell

Heights Symphony Orchestra and The Philharmonic Orchestra); the Singapore National Youth Orchestra, the Orchestra of the Music Makers, and an excellent conservatory or-chestra; and a festival orchestra in residence at the annual Singapore Arts Festival.

Then there’s the world-class Singapore Symphony Or-chestra (SSO), which in its 31-year history stands poised to become possibly the finest in all of Asia. “The growth of the SSO over the past decade has been phenomenal,” says Ameri-can percussionist Jonathan Fox, who joined the SSO in 2000. “People in this ensemble bring energy to each and every re-hearsal and concert. It’s really such a vibrant place to work.” Too Liang Chang, longtime music critic of Singapore’s Straits

Times, says that the government regards the SSO as a “prize possession,” symbolizing the country’s arrival as a modern city-state.

SingaporeAs of late 2010, Singapore had the fastest-growing economy in the world. The number of arts organizations in Singapore more than doubled between 2003 and 2009, from 302 to 672.

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Orchestra of the Music Makers performs at Singapore’s Esplanade Concert Hall

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This island nation of five million ex-udes surging energy and eye-popping brilliance. It features a striking skyline of slick skyscrapers, a high standard of living, and a well-deserved reputation for clean-liness, order, and efficiency. Fun-seeking locals and visitors (12 million are expected in 2011) descend nightly on more than 1,200 entertainment establishments (jazz bars, art bars, pubs, discos, and the like). The city boasts the world’s tallest obser-vation wheel, the Singapore Flyer, which takes riders to the dizzying height of over 500 feet. Last year, the world’s most ex-pensive stand-alone “integrated resort property” (read: casino), the $6 billion Marina Bay Sands, opened amid much fanfare and publicity. Its infinity swim-ming pool (three times the length of an Olympic pool) is set atop the world’s larg-est public cantilevered platform, 57 stories up. From a distance it looks like a set for a Star Wars film.

As of late 2010, the country had the fastest-growing economy in the world, with GDP growth of 17.9 percent charted for the first half of the year and the Min-

istry of Trade and Industry forecasting 13 to 15 percent for the full year. Phar-maceuticals, manufacturing, construction (especially of casinos), a surge in tourism, and various government schemes to sup-port businesses and employees during the recession all contributed to Singapore’s re-cent recovery in a world otherwise largely still stuck in the economic doldrums.

Amidst this building frenzy and eco-nomic expansion, Singapore is moving rapidly toward making itself the cultural hub of Southeast Asia. The number of arts organizations in Singapore more than doubled between 2003 and 2009, from 302 to 672. Among the leading institu-tions with strong music and arts compo-nents in their curricula are the Nanying Academy of Fine Arts, the Raffles Insti-tution, the Hwa Chong Institution, the Anglo-Chinese School (Independent), Methodist Girls’ School and, the latest to open (2007), the School for the Arts.

Music and arts education have enjoyed substantial government backing. A whop-ping 20 percent of the country’s annual budget goes to the Ministry of Education;

only the Ministry of Defense gets more. At the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory, part of the National University of Singapore, students receive full scholarships and, for those who come from abroad, hous-ing and a stipend as well. Yong Siew Toh was founded in 2001 through an agree-ment between the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University and the National University of Singapore; found-ing director Steven Baxter ushered in a high-powered faculty and a steady stream of visiting soloists like Leon Fleisher, Heinz Holliger, Emanuel Ax, and Barry Tuckwell. Yong Siew Toh Conservatory already has students winning awards in the international arena and positions in major orchestras. To date the conserva-tory has been funded with two private $25 million gifts and a matching $25 million grant in 2008 from Singapore’s Ministry of Education.

The city hosts an annual internation-al piano festival, a biennial local piano and violin competition, and the annual, month-long Singapore Arts Festival, which offers an eclectic international ar-

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ray of dance, theater, art, film, and music. The festival has played host to several of Singapore’s own orchestras, includ-ing its resident festival orchestra, as well as such Western ensembles as the Pitts-burgh Symphony Orchestra, the Russian National Orchestra, and the Academy of St.-Martin-in-the-Fields. These and other touring orchestras not part of the festival (the New York and Berlin Phil-harmonics were two recent visitors) per-form at the gleaming, bug-eyed iconic arts complex called Esplanade, Theatres on the Bay, which opened in 2002 with four performance spaces, twenty eateries, and of course lots of shops. (This is Singa-pore, after all.) Singapore also has a local dance company, a small opera company, several theater companies operating in the country’s four official languages (English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil), an arts radio station, and an HMV record outlet.

Who attends all this cultural activity in Singapore? The country’s National Arts Council reports that Singapore audiences are mostly between ages 15 and 40, with sharp dropoff at either end of the scale.

Too Liang Chang, the Straits Times music critic, notes that classical concerts are “still very much an elitist thing in Singapore,” with most audience members well edu-cated and in the middle to upper classes, a large proportion of them students, and also “very Chinese, which is 75 percent of the population.” But Singapore Sym-phony Orchestra General Manager Kai Jin Chng notes that “for the SSO, the spectrum of au-dience spreads over all age groups, from below 15 to over 70,” reflecting different concerts catering to different niche groups. “The love of Western classical music has grown over the years, and this has paral-leled the economic growth and education level of the country. There is a greater ap-preciation of other cultures, in particular Western culture, not just pop culture but also more serious culture of music and oth-er performing arts,” says Chng.

As to the broader question of why Western classical music enjoys popular and government support in Singapore, Tze Law Chan, associate director of the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory, says, “My suspicion is that this is an Asia-wide phe-nomenon, possibly brought about by the

two wealthiest cities embracing broadcast-ing during the birth of the recording in-dustry in the twenti-eth century, namely Shanghai and Tokyo. This became the most portable form of Western art, and via broadcasting became

the most accessible. It then became fash-ionable to appreciate high art from an-other culture. Perhaps, at that time, it was seen quite possibly as a superior or alter-native culture.” In the view of the Straits Times’s Chang, “To appreciate Western classical music is to be equated with be-ing classy, well-groomed, and successful in life.… The whole idea of SSO came from

“The love of Western classical music has grown over the years, and this has paralleled the economic growth and education level of the country,” says Singapore Symphony Orchestra General Manager Kai Jin Chng.

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Singapore’s then-minister of defense, Dr. Goh Keng Swee, who felt in the 1970s that it was a scandal that a modern city-state like Singapore had no orchestra of its own. So the formation of the SSO was a symbol that Singapore was arriving—but not arrived yet!—a vanity project that has finally borne fruit.”

Orchestras EverywhereThe newest orchestra here, the Orchestra of the Music Makers (OMM), formed in 2008, is a natural outgrowth of the country’s approach to education. This 90-piece orchestra consists almost entirely of young musicians who are pursuing ca-reers in other fields but who, upon leav-ing their secondary schools with strong music programs, want to continue play-ing in an orchestra. Their average age is twenty. The OMM is not to be confused with the Singapore National Youth Or-chestra (SNYO), whose origins go back to the 1960s and whose average age is about sixteen. Many members of the world-class Singapore Symphony once played in the

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leading cultural ambassador is the Sin-gapore Symphony Orchestra. The SSO gave its first performance in 1979, so it is still a youngster by the standards of most American and European orchestras. Yet it has already been abroad nineteen times, visiting more than two dozen countries on four continents. In addition to many of the expected venues—New York, Paris, Berlin, London, and Hong Kong—it has played in Athens, Istanbul, Cairo, Bang-kok, and at the famed temples of Ang-kor in Cambodia, where it gave a benefit concert with José Carreras for land-mine victims in 2002. It has released more than 30 recordings, including nineteen on the BIS label alone. Its budget is between $15 and $20 million, and it receives $5 million a year from the government, with lesser amounts from corporations; levels of in-dividual donations are low in comparison with U.S. orchestras.

The SSO has 95 members, of whom about two-thirds are either Singaporean by birth or acquired citizenship. The oth-ers, including five Americans, come from

SNYO. The president, prime minister, and members of parliament regularly turn up as guests of honor at concerts by Sin-gapore’s orchestras.

The Philharmonic Orchestra (TPO) is another of Singapore’s amateur orchestras operating on a near-professional level. Formed in 1998 by Lim Yau, who also serves as resident conductor of the fully professional Singapore Symphony, TPO regularly presents programs of unusual interest. These have included the first Beethoven symphony cycle given in the Esplanade concert hall (using Jonathan Del Mar’s edition); the first Schumann and Sibelius symphony cycles given in Singapore; and the Singaporean premiere of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony. TPO also serves as the pit orchestra for Singapore Lyric Opera, for major dance presentations, and in theatrical and cin-ematic collaborations. The National Arts Council has engaged the orchestra on several occasions to accompany soloists in the National Music Competition.

The flagship orchestra and the country’s

81a m e r i c a n o r c h e s t r a s . o r g

“In the Singapore Symphony Orchestra’s early days, our sound was much

thinner, it wasn’t well blended and there was no body to it,” says Associate Concertmaster Lynnette Seah. “We now have a distinctive sound and a vibrancy seldom found even in older orchestras.”

all over the planet. They enjoy a 52-week contract with six weeks of paid vacation. Pre- and post-concert talks are offered at selected events. As with many orchestras in America, they present children’s con-certs and community-engagement pro-grams, many of them free, given at the bo-tanic gardens, the zoo, the thoroughbred racecourse, and in schools and universi-ties. One particularly successful recent project was a production of Debussy’s La Mer accompanied by projections of su-perb underwater photography by one of the orchestra’s own violinists. The lineup of guest conductors includes names like Gunther Herbig, Kent Nagano, and Gen-nady Rozhdestvensky, and soloists such as Gil Shaham, Lang Lang, and Yo-Yo-Ma.

Reaching the Next StageIn the past decade or so, the SSO has grown into a world-class ensemble. On a six-city tour to England and Germany last October, the orchestra brimmed with pride and confidence, its sound warm, full, and well-blended. Compared with performances I had heard the previous

summer in Singapore, there was more tex-tural clarity, refinement, and sensitivity to colors and dynamics. Entrances were im-maculate. The final chord of the Overture to Candide, the SSO’s encore in Europe, was so precise it sounded like a rifle shot. La Mer sparkled and glistened, surged and roared, while the big climaxes in Rach-maninoff ’s darkly brooding tone poem Isle of the Dead all but overwhelmed through the orches-tra’s galvanic weight of sound. The string section is particu-larly impressive—in my view, one of the best in the world at the moment—with a powerful, energetic quality reflecting the dynamism that infuses Singapore as a whole.

Associate Concertmaster Lynnette Seah, a Singapore native, is the sole SSO

member to have played in the orchestra continuously since its first concert back in 1979. Trained in Germany, Seah could easily have left Singapore to join another orchestra, one far better than the SSO in its early years. What kept her? “I wanted

to keep the national flag flying,” she an-swered, “and I wanted my children to grow up in Singapore. As the years went by, I never really thought of moving.” Since the arrival of Music Di-rector Lan Shui—a native of China who studied at Shanghai Conservatory, Cen-tral Conservatory in Beijing, and Boston University—thirteen

years ago, Seah says the SSO has seen re-markable growth. “Many key players have been here ten or fifteen years now, espe-cially in the woodwinds and brass,” Seah says. “In the orchestra’s early days, our

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Pictured: Natalie Berg

with the renowned Cleveland Orchestra.ClassicalKidsLive.com

Singapore Symphony Orchestra Music Director Lan Shui

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sound was much thinner, it wasn’t well blended, and there was no body to it. We had half the number of string players we have today. The entire woodwind and brass sections came from Eastern Europe. But we matured very quickly. We now have a distinctive sound and a vibrancy seldom found even in older orchestras.”

Programming is of central importance to Shui. “I like a creative approach,” he says, a claim borne out both on the BIS record-ings he has made with the orchestra and in live concerts. One program a few years ago saw movements from Vivaldi’s Four Sea-sons interspersed with movements of Ives’s Holidays Symphony. Contemporary music remains a high priority. (Zhou Long and Christopher Rouse are among his favorite living composers.) Recordings include the symphonies and piano concertos of Alex-ander Tcherepnin, an all-Zhou Long CD, an all-Steven Stucky CD, a program called

“Seascapes” (Debussy, Glazunov, Frank Bridge, Zhou Long), and, most recently, a DVD of the Mahler Tenth Symphony in the Clinton Carpenter version.

For their most recent visit to Europe, Lan Shui eschewed many orchestras’ fa-vorite tour pieces in favor of works like Zhou Long’s visceral Rhyme of Taigu (it elicited cheers and whistles at every stop), Rachmaninoff ’s Isle of the Dead, and Tchai-kovsky’s Rococo Variations, where the or-

chestra demonstrated its ability to portray a world of classical elegance in transparent scoring. One leaves an SSO concert with a heightened sensitivity to the expressive capacity of music, much in the same way one feels after a performance by one of the world-class orchestras thousands of miles away in Vienna, London, or New York.

ROBERT MARKOW is a freelance music critic based in Montreal.