Maestro reformer

Yeh Tsung's overhaul of the Singapore Chinese Orchestra has made it contemporary and exciting

By Corrie Tan (Straits Times)

When conductor Yeh Tsung strides into the empty concert hall of the Singapore Chinese Orchestra, his resonant laughter wipes out all traces of silence.

Amid animated conversation, the 61-year-old conductor and music director takes his perch onstage for a photo shoot. The Straits Times photographer asks him to look beyond her.

'Look beyond you?' he booms from the podium of the hall in Shenton Way, 'Beyond you, into the future of SCO!'

Few might have guessed that the infectiously enthusiastic Yeh, his face remarkably free of wrinkles, once weathered the struggles of China's Cultural Revolution and overcame daunting challenges as a new immigrant in the United States.

His fluent English bears heavy traces of both an American accent, cultivated from 30 years of residence in the country of his citizenship, and a Chinese one. The Shanghai-born conductor is also a Singapore permanent resident.

This linguistic mix of East and West is a revealing portrait of the man himself.

Yeh, the professional orchestra's music director and conductor for 10 years now, has cemented his position as a musical reformer. And he is one of the rare conductors who is music director of both a Western symphony orchestra, one based in Indiana in the United States, and a major Chinese orchestra.

Under his baton, the 75-strong Singapore Chinese Orchestra has evolved from a traditional one to a daring new animal that revels in cross-cultural mash-ups, and even pop and jazz.

Yeh paired cellist Qin Li-Wei with horsehead fiddler Mai La Su, both from China, in a spine-tingling duet of Mongolian-inspired music last year. And in 2007, he invited Chris Brubeck's Triple Play jazz trio to play with the orchestra.

There was some opposition to his reforms when he first took the reins. Some musicians questioned his emphasis on Western works, others wondered if the Western-trained Yeh was qualified to helm a Chinese orchestra. But it looks like he has largely managed to win the orchestra over.

He says: 'If we stay the way we were before, we're going to be dead. We're going to be part of that museum in Chinatown. How many times can you hear the Butterfly Lovers' Concerto? A thousand? A million? You need something new.'

Musician Ling Hock Siang, 42, who has been with the orchestra since its inception, believes it is heading in the right direction under Yeh's leadership.

The orchestra's associate principal for erhu says: 'These experiments are a good thing. If we stick to traditional Chinese music and if we're not open-minded, we will not be exposed to a lot of things.'

Yeh's penchant for blurring the lines between musical worlds can be traced back to his early life.

His parents were part of the intellectual elite in Shanghai. His mother was a vocal professor of bel canto (a style of operatic singing) at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, where she still teaches today and his late father was a businessman who later became a professor at the Shanghai Institute of Foreign Trade.

It was his mother who started him on the piano at age five. Yeh says: 'Fortunately, piano was my talent. But there were conflicts with my parents. I did not like to do piano exercises, scales particularly. I liked to play beautiful melodies. That got me into trouble many times.'

He entered a music school affiliated with the Shanghai Conservatory when he was 10 and graduated from the conservatory at college level.

But this was not before his education and family life were rudely interrupted by the Cultural Revolution in 1966. Its attempts to strip China of capitalist, traditional and cultural elements destroyed thousands of years of heritage and history. 'It was devastating,' he says.

A 16-year-old Yeh returned home one evening to find members of the Communist Red Guard ransacking the house for alleged communication devices supposedly used to contact foreign agencies.

Though they did not find anything incriminating, the Red Guard took his parents away for several days, leaving Yeh with his five-year-old sister and her nanny. Thankfully, his parents returned, although his mother was placed under house arrest for a year.

At the conservatory, students were forbidden to play European music. Yeh, on a forced diet of revolutionary marches, was desperate to learn the works of Polish composer Frederic Chopin.

One of his teachers reluctantly agreed to give him private lessons in her home. Yeh says: 'The curtains were thick and sound-proof at her house, so no neighbour could hear what we played. You know what would have happened if they heard, they'd have called the police.'

Yeh graduated from the conservatory in 1972 and was sent to an arts college in Anhui, eastern China, to teach the piano.

It was there that he fell in love with the folk music of the area and befriended many musicians. He says: 'Things are quite strange, you know. You think this is punishment, they sent you to a terrible place but I think I was able to turn it into something quite positive.'

As an educated youth, he was sent for 're-education' in Dingyuan, an impoverished county in Anhui. Like millions of others, he was supposed to learn from the peasants by working with them.

He spent most of 1976 planting rice and learning the ways of the countryside, from killing a live chicken to drawing water from a well. He lived in a mud hut with two other faculty members from the arts college in Anhui.

Although he was bereft of music, Yeh found a way to fill the void. In the evenings, the villagers gathered in front of his hut. He says: 'I sang all kinds of songs that I could remember for them. I didn't have any music. But during that time, for them, this was the Metropolitan Opera.'

A malaria-stricken Yeh was sent back to Shanghai at the end of 1976. His mother wept when she saw how thin and ill he was. But the worst was over: Chairman Mao Zedong died that year and with him, the painful turmoil of the revolution.

Yeh says: 'That time was hard for me but now, when people talk about harsh life conditions, I understand. For an artist, it's good to have a wide range of experiences so that you can create music with depth.'

After Mao's death, China began to open up to the rest of the world and he was able to attend concerts by Western symphonic orchestras.

He says: 'Although the piano is one of the best instruments, I found an instrument that is even better - the orchestra. I wanted to play that instrument.'

So he re-entered the Shanghai Conservatory of Music but this time, as a conducting student.

But a great part of its library was destroyed by the Red Guard, who burnt music scores and Western literature. 'The teachers didn't have enough materials to teach, there were no recordings.'

In 1981, his visa application to the United States was approved: 'I was lucky. The door opened just a little and whooooosh, I flew out.'

Speaking barely any English, he arrived in New York City and fell in love with it, but auditions were closed for the Juilliard and Manhattan schools of music.

Mannes College was still holding auditions and it was there that his secret practice of Chopin during the Cultural Revolution paid off. The music school was so impressed that it immediately offered him a scholarship for a double major in conducting and piano.

He went on to win a full scholarship to Yale University, graduating with a master's in music. By then, he had met Saulan, his Hong Kong-born wife of 28 years, a business secretary turned homemaker. They met at church - she was in the church choir and he was accompanying them on the piano.

He won a three-year contract as a conducting assistant with St Louis Symphony Orchestra in Missouri, under American conductor Leonard Slatkin.

After stints with Florida Orchestra in Tampa and Albany Symphony in New York, he was appointed music director of South Bend Symphony Orchestra in Indiana in 1988, a post he still holds today.

In a significant nod to his talent, well-known conductor Daniel Barenboim chose him as an apprentice and in 1991, Yeh conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on short notice, replacing Barenboim who was ill.

The invitation to guest-conduct the Singapore Chinese Orchestra in 2001 was, at first, just another concert date.

He did not know it was in search of a new man at the helm and was surprised when the board asked him to consider the post, after a group of the orchestra's musicians petitioned for his appointment.

The orchestra's general manager Terence Ho, 42, says: 'Professional musicians work with many of the best conductors. They know even after the first few bars the standard of a conductor and how far he can go.'

After taking up the post, Yeh set out to expand its repertoire so that the orchestra would attract a wider audience.

In his first concert as music director, the programme included contemporary Chinese composers Tan Dun and Guo Wenjing. After that, he threw in transcriptions of Western works from Russia's Alexander Borodin or Hungary's Bela Bartok.

This overhaul of the orchestra and its repertoire did not always sit well with its audience. During a post-concert session with audience members, a disgruntled elderly man asked Yeh pointedly if he was 'Westernising' the orchestra.

Yeh explained that the Chinese orchestra of the present day is, in fact, a relatively new phenomenon, making use of instruments that borrowed heavily from other cultures - Western ones included.

Some musicians were not entirely sure of his focus and they, too, questioned his decision.

Yeh took these disagreements in his stride, accepting them as a natural part of change. He says: 'The Chinese orchestra is still evolving. You should not become stagnant. The most important point that we have to make, that many people don't understand, is that the Chinese orchestra is a result of reform, not tradition.'

He also felt the Singapore Chinese Orchestra needed to play more works written for Singapore or by Singaporeans.

It held its first Singapore International Competition for Chinese Orchestral Composition in 2006, to encourage composers to create Chinese orchestral work that reflect the South-east Asian identity. The inaugural contest attracted 60 entries from around the world and there were 146 entries last year.

So far, Yeh's formula seems to have worked.

The orchestra now enjoys robust attendances, averaging about 90 per cent a concert. It was the first Chinese orchestra to play at London's Barbican Centre in 2005 and received a standing ovation from Beijing's demanding audience at the Poly Theatre in 2007.

The orchestra has played with Hong Kong Cantopop doyenne Frances Yip and Singapore jazz musician Jeremy Monteiro, just to name a few.

But Yeh believes there is still work to be done, saying: 'People always have the misconception that Chinese orchestra is for older Chinese people. I think we are constantly fighting this and we still have a long way to go to make Chinese orchestral music accepted by everyone.'

He slogs at this battle day after day. His schedule is packed with rehearsals, meetings, outreach programmes and planning the orchestra's season.

He divides his time between Singapore and the United States, where his wife and three children live, and spends the rest of his time in Europe and Asia for other conducting and teaching engagements.

He says with a laugh: 'I'm afraid sometimes when I open the door to my home, my children will say, 'Who are you?' '

But there is a wistful edge to that jest. He cannot count the number of birthdays and anniversaries he has missed.

He chokes up slightly when he talks about his children. His elder daughter, Mona, 27, works at a youth media non- profit company in Washington DC. Melina, 18, is studying at Northwestern University and Joseph, 14, is still in high school.

Yeh points to a photograph of Melina, sighing: 'What broke my heart was that at her graduation ceremony, she was the salutatorian. Her speech was so good that they were all tearing. I wasn't there to hear it as I arrived the next day. Oh, it was terrible. But what can you do?'

And, because of a performance in Singapore, he could not be by his mother's side when she had breast cancer surgery about five years ago.

His mother, Professor Zhang Renqing, 86, says in Mandarin: 'He's the conductor, he couldn't just abandon the orchestra to come here. I'm a music teacher myself and I feel the job is incredibly important, it is what gives people great joy.'

She is now in complete remission, much to Yeh's relief.

At this point, he stops the interview and with eyes gleaming, says: 'Is that too much? Because with all this material, you can write a book.'

He glances at his watch - it is nearly time for an evening rehearsal. As I leave his office, he ushers a staff through the door with a hearty welcome.

General manager Mr Ho puts it best, perhaps: 'I consider him Superman.'

corriet@sph.com.sg