On the Road to Singapore with Oberlin Conservatory Orchestra
Violinist and Oberlin educator Lee-Chin Siow returns to her homeland to share a lesson or two
Lee-Chin Siow is a Singaporean with an international reputation.
Photo: Desmond Foo
It takes only a few minutes strolling the streets of Singapore to sense the energy and dynamism exuding from the very pavement of this Asian tiger of a city. Singapore boasts a striking skyline of sleek skyscrapers—it has the world’s tallest observation wheel (the Singapore Flyer, which takes riders 500 feet into the air, high enough to see Malaysia on a clear day), unemployment hovers around a mere two percent, and new construction projects are everywhere.
Last year, this island city-state of nearly five million enjoyed the world’s fastest-growing economy.
The classical music scene, too, is growing by leaps and bounds here. Spurring this growth was the 2002 opening of the city’s iconic arts complex, Esplanade—Theatres on the Bay. That growth got a boost in 2006 with the opening of a new conservatory with an enviable faculty and a curriculum modeled after the conservatory at the Peabody Institute of John Hopkins University in Baltimore. Singapore also boasts a major symphony orchestra whose rapid rise to international acclaim has been nothing less than extraordinary and a visionary government determined to make Singapore the artistic as well as the financial, commercial, and educational hub of Asia.
How better to begin the new year—and a new decade—than with a sold-out January 6 performance at Singapore’s 1,600-seat Esplanade Concert Hall featuring the Oberlin Conservatory Orchestra? The concert marked the culmination of a 13-day tour that had taken the musicians throughout China while still basking in the glory of having received the 2009 National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama.
The solo appearance, with the orchestra, of violinist Lee-Chin Siow, one of
Oberlin’s most distinguished alumnae and a Singaporean with an international reputation, cemented the Oberlin-Singapore connection. In her enthralling interpretations of Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending and Ravel’s Tzigane, Lee-Chin amply demonstrated why she is the first violinist from her country to win multiple international awards (capped by a Gold Medal at the 1994 Hynryk Szeryng International Violin Competition) and the first Singaporean to teach at Oberlin.
For this Asian sensation, who half a world away also heads the strings program at the College of Charleston, South Carolina, this tour marked a milestone. “Oberlin gave me some of my best experiences as a student,” she said, “and coming back to Asia to perform and work with current Oberlin students is such a meaningful way to give back to my alma mater.”
Said David Stull, the conservatory’s dean, “This tour was also about challenges, about working with what you have and developing a level of professionalism as musicians and as individuals. I watched these young people’s confidence go up under pressure. By the time they got to Singapore, they were different people.”
And challenges there were: eating unfamiliar food; coping with unheated concert halls and cold hotel rooms in some cities (though certainly not in tropical Singapore); dealing with lack of sleep; and facing a different concert hall and a new acoustical environment in every city on the tour.
Then there was the incident in Wuhan. Bad weather prevented one of the two flights on which the orchestra was traveling from arriving in time for the concert. The flight that did arrive left the musicians no time to eat or to change into concert dress. It was also the flight that did not have the trunk with all their music. So, what did these enterprising, 21st-century youngsters do? They downloaded and printed chamber music off of the Internet and entertained a highly appreciative audience with that revised program for an hour.
The tour was a learning experience for the young musicians in more ways than one. They discovered that the smallest city in which they performed in China (Wuhan, with a population of nine million) is still larger than New York City’s metropolitan area. In Singapore, they realized that, contrary to rumor, authorities really don’t throw you in the brig for chewing gum or jaywalking. Some Oberlin students attended a performance by the Singapore Symphony on their night off and heard an orchestra that is world-class by any standard.
The tour also was about connecting with other young people in Asia through music. An example of this took place at the Raffles Institution, one of Singapore’s most prestigious high schools. The morning after their final concert, as part of Oberlin’s outreach program, an ensemble gamely read through Strauss’s youthful Serenade Op. 7 with teenage student conductors from Raffles on the podium. “Playing music is more than just about mastering an instrument,” said Lee-Chin, who set the example at Raffles with a violin master class in which she coaxed, cajoled, and stimulated three teenage violinists into improving their performances through self-scrutiny.
“Try to communicate your expressive ideas with the intention of making the audience breathe as one with you,” she told one boy, while developing a rapport with the class as palpable as the connection she makes with her concert audiences. “You have to convey to your listeners that you are enjoying yourself, so they too will enjoy your playing.”
In both her master class and the two-week tour with aspiring musicians from her alma mater, this was perhaps the most valuable lesson this outstanding artist had to offer the Oberliners in their life- and career-enhancing jaunt to China and Singapore.
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