Ching in Berlin fete

The following review of Berlin’s mini-festival “Soundbridges” illustrates the significant role Filipino composers, particularly Jeffrey Ching, are playing alongside other Asians in the international scene.

The author, Walter-Wolfgang Sparrer, a musicologist, founder-head of the International Isang Yun Society, edits the journal Komponisten der Gegenwart.

Berlin’s Sixth Asia-Pacific Week last September 2007 included the exciting mini-festival “Soundbridges” with contemporary music by composers from the Philippines, Taiwan, Cambodia and Indonesia.

The opening concert on 11 September included Dw’gey by Ramon P. Santos, a composition for voice, violin, viola and percussion (2006), combining continuous flow with the rhythmic accentuation of traditional music from Mindanao, as well as a vocal part based on four poems by Rio Alma (pen name of Virgilio Almario, dean of the UP College of Liberal Arts).

The closing concert on 16 September was called “The Philippines today”, and began with Aguyoy (Gentle Wind) for seven players (2005) – a verbal score by Jonas Baes with the subtitle Punctuations and Dissolutions: The “dissolutions” might happen during periods of absolute silence (15 seconds to two minutes), while the “punctuations” refer to five-second-periods with subtle sound actions which break into the silence of the audience.

Dasal [Prayer] for alto flute, violoncello and marimba (1997) by Josefino Toledo starts with reduced material in a slow tempo: The musicians play single tones and short motivic cells, and then continue as if watching out how the music should go on. The tempo and sound events follow in different steps a process of acceleration and intensification.

The cello solo Paglingon (2002) by Tereza Barrozo is an etude of different types of sound production – long held “Asian” sound gestures are opposed to short pizzicato impulses and gestures. The piece was virtuosically rendered by Matias de Oliveiro Pinto from modern art ensemble Berlin.

Not easy to coordinate was the rhythm of the ensemble piece Ay (1993) by Alan Hilario who studied with Jose Maceda, Mathias Spahlinger, Mesias Maiguashca and has been living in Germany since 1992. Ay, an unusually radical piece, consists exclusively of short rhythmic points and cells.

Kochi (East-wind) for flute, clarinet, violin, violoncello, and piano (2002) by Francisco Feliciano seemed to reveal a structure of different rhythms and tempo-regions, soloistic phrases and tutti passages following one after the other, which, at certain moments, are also combined or overlap each other.

Pito for seven players (2007) by Conrado del Rosario was premiered at this concert. It uses elements of the vocal style of the Ulallim from northern Philippines as well as the kulintang music of the south. The result was a quiet piece, woven of rather homogenous material.

Jeffrey Ching composed for this concert a new piece which uses – and even quotes — in an original manner Western classical music as well as his own inventions. The three-movement Kunstkabinett (Cabinet of Curiosities) for soprano and seven players (2007), a smaller sibling of his Fifth Symphony Kunstkammer [Chamber of Curiosities] (2006), was premiered by the modern art ensemble Berlin with the composer’s wife Andion Fernandez (soprano). The first movement Minutiae in D (the title intermingles “minuet” and “minute”) shows esprit and musical wit. It is based on Mozart’s highly chromatic Minuetto (KV 576b, an unfinished piano piece. Ching starts with the quotation of the first half of the Minuetto on the solo piano and lets a string trio, 1/4-tone higher, continue and subtly deconstruct Mozart’s score. But the second part is introduced by the string trio, which is then confused and gradually destroyed by the piano part. The craftsmanship is so respectful [of the original] that “the distinction between ‘text’ and ‘commentary’ is eventually blurred” (Jeffrey Ching).

Ching’s second movement, March of the Ambassadors, corresponded ironically to what happened at the beginning of the concert (when, during the silence of the Baes piece, Philippine Ambassador Delia Albert marched off-stage through the small concert house looking for the entrance). The music is an arrangement for seven players of the symphonic entr’acte preceding the final scene of Ching’s opera The Orphan (2006-07). Three rhythmically disparate ensembles – symbolizing through characteristic idioms and musical instruments the embassies sent by Tibet, Korea and Japan to ancient China – are synchronized by a fourth ensemble using the alternating pitches E flat-A.

The third movement, Molihua for soprano, violin and piano, quotes the Chinese folk song “Jasmine Flower” from Puccini’s opera Turandot. The soprano sings with her back to the audience into the undamped strings of the piano, praising the transitory beauty and smell of the jasmine.