Margaret Leng Tan, hailed as the "queen of the toy piano" by The New York Times, returns to Singapore to celebrate her 70th birthday as both pianist extraordinaire and multi-faceted performer.
Cabinet of Curiosities, co-produced by CultureLink Singapore, is a programme of music-theatre works performed on pianos large and small, as well as toys and sound objects, some newly invented. Encompassing the miniature and the monumental, the programme opens with American composer David M. Gordon's Diclavis Enorma, engaging keyboards, microtonal call bells and tape playback. In electro-acoustic pioneer Alvin Lucier's Nothing is Real, the Beatles' Strawberry Fields Forever wafts from a teapot - now a musical instrument. Further invoking the Mad Hatter's tea party is the Alice in Wonderland inspired Hatta from young English composer James Joslin. Celebrating Alice's 150th birthday, Tan takes us down the rabbit hole as Joslin's miniature music drama unfolds on toy pianos, amplified chess and tea sets, an electric kettle and an alarm clock, all presided over by the Cheshire Cat!
Wrong, Wrong, Wrong!, by Shanghainese composer Ge Gan-ru, is a Peking-opera inspired melodrama for voice, self-accompanied by a 16-piece toy orchestra. Ge's musical portrayal of lost love, sorrow and everlasting regret gives dramatic utterance to Lu You's famed 1155 A.D. poem.
Commissioned by Singapore International Festival of Arts, Curios by Chinese-American composer Phyllis Chen is a multimedia work that draws the audience into a musical and theatrical Cabinet of Curiosities (a Wunderkammer), revolving around the bizarre, bewitching world of the carnival.Chen was inspired to create the piece for toy pianos, toy instruments and other oddities by a haunting, rather grotesque 1920s photograph Tan gave her of three Kassino clowns. Whether it be a roomful of carousels or a magic lantern, Curios invites us into a novel visual and sound world with Tan as our guide.
(Source: Arts House Limited Programme)