A warm welcome to YST’s new concert season, Gravity and Light.
Situated amidst the weighty global events of the past and ongoing year, this season’s theme resonates keenly within the Conservatory. With ongoing COVID impacts on our students, teaching and programming, as well as performance halls that have not welcomed external audiences in over a year, the sense of masking (literal and metaphorical) continues to be present. With Prof Bernard Lanskey having left the Conservatory as Dean after 15 years of leadership here, we celebrate his legacy, but also contemplate a new phase in our growth.
Yet through this, we continue to see many reasons for optimism, not least:
Student agency and faculty/alumni activity
Across the season, we look forward to the numerous student-helmed concerts including our weekly Noon Recitals and ongoing student-initiated Soundbites performances, as our students hone their craft and artistic identities. Our First Year Sinfonia and Creative Project, typically the opening acts that officially introduce our Year 1s to kickstart the season, will be presented digitally later in the semester when COVID measures permit.
We are also excited to present a spectrum of faculty and alumni performances from Red Dot Baroque; Abigail Sin, Jonathan Shin and Joachim Lim (alongside Derek Koh) in a meeting of piano and percussion; and the T’ang Quartet, Qin Li-Wei and Brett Stemple (with the premiere of a tuba quintet by Adeline Wong).
Community support
Our sincere thanks go to our donors and partners for their support. Under the Ong Teng Cheng Professorship in Music, we welcome Shlomo Mintz and Nobuko Imai who will work with our students virtually. We mark the beginning of the Kris Foundation Viola Masterclass Fund series with masterclasses by Su Zhen, Sangjin Kim, as well as Nobuko Imai. Alongside these artists, it is our pleasure to welcome Mariko Anraku and Kam Ning for masterclasses in harp and violin respectively. We are also grateful for our continued collaboration in the Asian Civilisations Museum Lunchtime Concerts series, across live and virtual formats.
Perhaps this duality of gravity and light is best embodied in our eponymous first Orchestral Institute concert – an exciting programme spanning the effervescence of Haydn’s ‘Fire’ Symphony No. 59 and the tense, nervous energy of Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. This is possibly our first formal introduction of the YST Orchestral Institute (OI), which encompasses all large ensemble work, pedagogy and collaborations at YST (including Conservatory Orchestra and OpusNovus). Though large mixed-ensembles (alongside voice and wind/brass activity) continue to be particularly challenged in the pandemic, we look forward to showcasing the best of our ensemble music-making once possible.
At present, all of our events continue to be online-only until external visitors are permitted in the Conservatory. All livestreams are available via our season platform Spotlight, and details are updated via our website event pages. In these times, even as we miss the core connection of in-person audiences, we are grateful to still be sharing our music-making, and continue in hope of being able to soon welcome you, into the living, vibrant, gravity & light-filled spaces of YST Conservatory.
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YST CONSERVATORY
National University of Singapore
3 Conservatory Drive
Singapore 117376
