Trisdee's "Eternity"

Sunday night, at the Siam Philharmonic's concert titled "Unanswered Questions", Trisdee na Patalung's "Eternity" had its world premier. Closing the first half of the program, the audience, myself included, was mesmerized. The work is dedicated to the late HRH Princess Galyani Vadhana, advocate and patron of classical music in Thailand. The composer was inspired to write the work after witnessing monks chanting at the Princess's resting place in Dusit Mahaprasad Hall in the Grand Palace during a late night memorial service. Trisdee writes, "The chant was meditative and of haunting beauty. It was not until one week ago did I find out that what I heard was in fact Wat Rakang's Luen Luang chant, the melody of which I have decided to use as the composition's main theme." 

The work opens with solo violin presenting this theme. Then, slowly, it is joined by a 2nd violin, a viola, a cello, and lastly a bass, all staggered, playing the same melody in unison but with different ornaments and trills creating beautiful dissonance. The orchestra then enters with six full chords, as the solo violin soars above. I was reminded for a second of John Taverner's "The Protecting Veil." Everything moves forward with simple harmonic gestures and increasing sound to the piece's climax, at which point the pi java (a type of Thai oboe with a deep, bag-pipe like sound used at funerals) enters with a gorgeous solo. Hidden in the back of the large string ensemble, the audience was not expecting this entrance, and those squirming to catch a view of the player were soon subdued and put in a trance by the beauty of it all. Players on stage were visibly moved, and really, it all felt very religious in a way, the same way Taverner's music can make almost anybody believe in some sort of heaven or transcendence. The work ends as it began, simply and quietly with the Luen Luang chant melody working its way through the quintet of soloists, though this time the full strings joined the last cadence. 

The Philharmonic sounded excellent throughout the evening's interesting program, which began with Ives's "The Unanswered Question" and Ravel's "Le Tombeau de Couperin", and ended with Beethoven's Second Symphony. I last heard the group play in February and the improvement on Sunday was marked. I did recognize a few more Bangkok Symphony Orchestra faces than usual in the cello section in particular, but either way everything was more in tune and crisp; the ensemble really jelled over the last few months of steady concertizing. 

A brief tangent, relating back to Trisdee's "Eternity." I've met two other Thai composers this month who have pieces that in different ways draw on Buddhist chant. In Anothai Nitibhon's "Dukkha", for double bass and string quartet, "the bass musically emulates the way the harmonic series is harnessed in the original throat-singing style" of Tibetan chant, according to the composer. In Atibhop Pataradetpisan's 1999 work called "Three Prosodies of Chant for Sextet", the composer said he constructed the piece from the pattern of hard and soft syllables in a Thai chant. The last two composers actually both cite George Crumb as a strong influence in their work too, so go figure. The styles of all three pieces taken together end up being quite different though, despite the common link to chant melodies or breathing patterns or rhythms. Atibhop's work offers the least tangible reliance on chant to the listener, as he was mostly using the hard and soft syllables in a process, while Trisdee's is very overtly invoking chant by way of melody and atmosphere...Anothai's work is somewhere in between!