Opera Siam and the Siam Sinfonietta are in Bayreuth, Germany, home each year to the famous Wagner Festival, for the European premiere of Somtow Sucharitkul's opera The Silent Prince, which forms part of the Bayreuth Annual Young Artists Festival. Before the opera opens members of the ensemble have performed concerts in Bayreuth and some small Bavarian towns nearby.
At the festival's opening ceremony late last month, featuring musicians from many countries, the Siam Sinfonietta started the programme with the Thai National Anthem, sung by the chorus of Opera Siam, in honour of the presence of Ploypailin Mahidol Jensen, granddaughter of His Majesty the King, and of the Thai Ambassador to Germany H.E. Dhiravat Bhumichitr. This was followed by two excerpts from The Silent Prince, beautifully sung by Nadlada Thamtanakom and Jak Cholvijarn.
A few days later singers from the opera gave a concert in the historic Schlosskirche in the centre of Bayreuth. The recital featured some of the very talented young singers in the opera's chorus. Especially notable were Raphael Ayrle in the treble solo Chi M'in Segna from Handel's Alcina, who sang with great purity and control; the popular Thai song White Lotus by Puangroi Apaiwong, charmingly sung by Areeya Rotjanadit; Schubert's Du Bist Die Ruh, sung by John Tneh; and a beautiful performance of Mendelssohn's Blumenstrauss by Patcharanat Aunkaew. Finally, Colleen Brooks, from Milwaukee's Skylight Theatre, sang Dora's aria from Somtow Sucharitkul's opera The Snow Dragon, a role she sang both at the work's premiere in Milwaukee in March 2015 and in Bangkok in July of that year. She gave a powerfully sung and nuanced interpretation of Dora, the complex child counsellor.
Instrumentalists from the Sinfonietta gave two concerts in nearby small towns, Bischofsgrün and Speinshart. In Bischofsgrün an audience of 300 squeezed into the town church. The programme was the same in both venues, and started with the wind quintet of Pannita Chalermrangroj, flute, Ratchanon Intarasahit, clarinet, Kijjarin Pongkapanakrai, oboe, Thanapak Poonpol, horn, and Tanakan Theerasunturnvat, bassoon, playing Jacques Ibert's jaunty Three Short Pieces with technical excellence and great élan.
Next came an unusual item. Richard Strauss wrote his famous tone poem Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks for an orchestra of more than 100. The Austrian composer Franz Hasenörl created an arrangement, Till Eulenspiegel -- Einmal Anders, for just five instruments, which requires top-class players to "impersonate" the whole orchestra, and lasts eight minutes rather than the original's 15. The sinfonietta quintet of Chalat Limpisiri on violin, portraying the prankster Till's more romantic side, Pongsathorn Surapub, whose double bass takes on most of the music for both strings and percussion, Thanapak Poonpol, who played the very difficult horn solos immaculately, Kijjarin Pongkapanakrai on oboe and Tanakan Theerasuntornvat on bassoon gave a witty and enjoyable account. The Bavarian audience greeted this highly accomplished performance of a piece by their fellow Bavarian Strauss with great enthusiasm.
The final, and most substantial, item in the official programme was Shostakovich's Eighth String Quartet, played by the Shounen Quartet of Chot Buasuwan and Pittaya Pruksachonlavit on violin, Atjayut Sangkasem on viola, and Wishwin Sureeratanakorn on cello. This dark work was written by Shostakovich in three days in 1960 when he was in a deep and suicidal depression, having just been coerced into joining the Communist Party, and discovering he had an illness (later realised to be polio) that prevented him from playing the piano.
Both in Bischofsgrün and in Speinshart, the mutual understanding and the maturity, intensity and empathetic playing of these remarkable young musicians engaged the audiences profoundly in both venues, and in both they received prolonged ovations.
In Speinshart the concert took place in the Baroque splendour of the 17th century chapel of a large (and still functioning) monastery, where the demand for places was so high that the chapel was already full to the seams with several hundred people half-an-hour before the start. At the end of this concert, such was the sustained applause, and to lighten the mood on what was a glorious summer's evening, the sinfonietta's string players played as encores three of His Majesty the King's charmingly lyrical love songs, received with great warmth by the Bavarian audience.
Michael Proudfoot is a British writer on opera and classical music and a former head of the School of Humanities at the University of Reading.
