The Alphabet Series 2015-16

(Season Pass)

The Sing Song Club and The Arts House present for the first time in Singapore The Alphabet Series, an ambitious series of 26 music recitals over five years. Beginning in March 2012 with the letter A, this series of thematically-conceived recitals will showcase out-of-the-ordinary programmes that will amuse, beguile, captivate, dazzle, engage, fascinate, gratify, hypnotise, illuminate, jubilate, knock out, lull and mesmerise all music lovers. We promise performances that will be nifty and out-of-the-box, pretty but quirky, revolutionary yet scintillatingly tantalising, full of songs that are urbane, and filled with valour, wit, X-citement, yearning and zeal!

Please note The Alphabet Series is eligible for the Tote Board Arts Grant subsidy.

R is for Roses
27 September 2015, 8pm, Living Room

This Sunday, the Sing Song Club presents to an autumn night of beautiful rosy blooms!

Imagine a night of art songs accompanied by garlands of the most resplendent roses, gathered from the very best of English and American gardens. Join us in this autumn special and enjoy a blooming night!

Rebecca Li, Soprano
Adrian Poon, Tenor
Shane Thio, Piano

G is for German Giants
13 November 2015, 8pm, Living Room

Art songs are the results of the perfect marriage of music and text— one cannot exist without the other, and both are shaped and influenced by the other half.  Very often, the author of the text is forgotten but the composer is recalled.

This evening, we try to address this imbalance with a recital that features the works of one of the greatest German writers, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose influence on the art song movement is not to be underestimated. This titan is matched by other German giants of the musical world tonight—Brahms, Mendelssohn, and Schumann.

Cherylene Liew, Soprano
Adrian Poon, Tenor
William Lim, Baritone
Shane Thio, Piano

P is for Poulenc’s Phone Palaver
30 January 2016, 8pm, Living Room

A woman, a telephone, her despair. These three elements make up Jean Cocteau’s enigmatic 1928 monodrama La Voix Humaine, expertly set to music by Francis Poulenc in 1958. This work presents theatrical conventions in their barest forms, and in so doing, strips the woman’s emotions to the very core, raw and painful, and all you hear is her voice, the true protagonist of the work. This evening, the Sing Song Club presents Poulenc’s final opera, La Voix Humaine, a woman’s final telephone conversation with her lover.

Su Yiwen, Soprano
Shane Thio, Piano

S is for Schubert’s Sagas
27 February 2016,
5pm – 6.45pm - S is for Schubert’s Sagas (Part 1)
8pm – 9.15pm - S is for Schubert’s Sagas (Part 2), Living Room

For the first time in Singapore, the Sing Song Club will present all three of Franz Schubert’s song cycles in one evening. These three pinnacles of the art song genre represent not just the best of lieder, but also of dramatic writing and insights into the human condition. This evening, we weave these three seemingly separate narratives into one saga, a tale of lost love, never to be found again.

Cherylene Liew, Soprano (Schwanengesang)
Peter Ong, Tenor (Die Schone Müllerin)
Adrian Poon, Tenor (Winterreise)
Shane Thio, Piano

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