As the second half of the 2018/19 academic year begins, we welcome an exciting 2019 within and around YST.

Our central theme for this season is Evolutions and Revolutions, inspired by a number of key collaborative events in our programming. As a new initiative, we have asked our current fourth-year cohort to plan our annual concert at the Victoria Concert Hall titled Springing (April). This is significant as they are the first to have gone through our new curriculum inspired by our guiding principle ‘Listen in New Light’ and focused on ever-emerging professional and artistic identities. In turn, the concert is itself inspired by concepts of evolution and a fitting anticipation of the artistic change they will go on to create. At the same time revolution often comes with upheaval, and Haydn’s Mass in Time of War (April) – written in the years immediately following the French Revolution – also epitomises evolving artistic identity late in life in quite revolutionary ways.

Two further projects influencing our choice of theme each have a British dimension and Singaporean resonance to their identity, a fitting nod to Singapore’s bicentennial commemoration. Our Conservatory Orchestra tour, Intersections (April), unpacks British composer, William Walton’s Violin Concerto (performed by Head of Strings Prof Qian Zhou), subdividing the orchestra in two for the other works in the programme. The strings perform Vaughan Williams’ homage to Thomas Tallis, while the winds, brass and harp form the tutti for a newly-composed triple concerto by Composition faculty member Asst Prof Chen Zhangyi that draws on Asian musical traditions and instruments. Finally, the British-based Aurora Orchestra (visiting as part of our Shaw Foundation Ones to Watch series) will engage 40 young musicians learning a second instrument from YST students as part of our Double Time initiative, and bring our season theme full circle with their exploration of temporal evolution and celestial revolution in the end-of-semester Music of the Spheres (April). In different ways, these events each stand as metaphors for the important transformations and shifts that have characterised Singapore’s own musical and sociological journey.