Tenor Melvin Tan takes the stage again in his recital Night Songs, premiering no less than 3 song cycles in Singapore. He discusses with The Mad Scene on the importance of premiering new works here and advice to younger recitalists:
The Mad Scene: You tend to come up with some interesting programs including the one . What is your approach when it comes to programming a recital?
Melvin: For many singers, the often "easy way out" is to just pick pieces from what you already have sung elsewhere and throw it together, but this often leads to an incoherent, artistically jumbled recital.
I love to challenge myself and there are these significant almost-totemic or talismanic works of the Art Song genre (and also operatic roles) that I aspire to perform. So each year I have (and intend to continue) performing at least a couple of these works. Picking one of these works, I would then shape the rest of my repertoire choices along a theme that relates to it.
Last year the focal point was Vaughan William's On Wenlock Edge (which I will touch on later in this interview) and programming it with 3 of Britten's Canticles made sense as they each dealt with a form of love that transcended a particularly profound boundary: life and death, narcissism, God and Father and Child.
The themes of the pieces performed are important and they have to flow and gel coherently.
This year, I decided to challenge myself with Berg's sensuous and sublime 7 Early Songs as a starting point, and programmed Korngold's Songs of Farewell and Rachmaninov's Op 38 along with it.
Mostly set at night, these songs portray night as a time where the normal rules of day are inverted, where the sense of loss (especially of a loved one) is most acute but also the time when the potential of hopes and dreams are at their most powerful.
