CONCERT PROGRAMME
2016/17 SEASON
The Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO) gave its inaugural performance at Dewan
Filharmonik PETRONAS (DFP) on 17 August 1998. The MPO today comprises musicians
from 24 countries, including 7 from Malaysia, a remarkable example of harmony among
different cultures and nationalities.
A host of internationally-acclaimed musicians has worked with the MPO, including Lorin
Maazel, Sir Neville Marriner, Yehudi Menuhin, Joshua Bell, Harry Connick Jr., José Carreras,
Andrea Bocelli and Branford Marsalis, many of whom have praised the MPO for its fine
musical qualities and vitality.
With each new season, the MPO continues to present a varied programme of orchestral
music drawn from over three centuries, as well as the crowd-pleasing concert series.
Its versatility transcends genres, from classical masterpieces to film music, pop, jazz,
contemporary and commissioned works.
The MPO regularly performs at major cities of Malaysia. Internationally, it has showcased
its virtuosity to audiences in Singapore (1999, 2001 and 2005), Korea (2001), Australia
(2004), China (2006), Taiwan (2007), Japan (2001 and 2009) and Vietnam (2013). Its
Education and Outreach Programme, ENCOUNTER, reaches beyond the concert platform
to develop musical awareness, appreciation and skills through dedicated activities that
include instrumental lessons, workshops and school concerts. ENCOUNTER also presents
memorable events in such diverse venues as orphanages, hospitals, rehabilitation centres
and community centres.
The MPO’s commitment to furthering musical interest in the nation has been the creation
of the Malaysian Philharmonic Youth Orchestra (MPYO). It gave its inaugural concert at
DFP on 25 August 2007, followed by a tour in Peninsular Malaysia. It has performed in
Sabah and Sarawak (2008), Singapore (2009) and Brisbane, Australia (2012).
As it celebrates its 18th anniversary in 2016, the MPO remains steadfast in its mission
to share the depth, power and beauty of great music. The MPO’s main benefactor is
PETRONAS and its patron is Tun Dr. Siti Hasmah Haji Mohd Ali.
Fri 4 Nov 2016 at 8.30 pm
Sat 5 Nov 2016 at 8.30 pm
Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra
Grant Cooper, conductor
Dan Kamin, buffoon soloist
PROGRAMME
GLINKA
MENDELSSOHN
PROKOFIEV
STRAVINSKY
GRIEG
SATIE (arr. COOPER)
ROSSINI
BEETHOVEN
STRAUSS
Ruslan and Ludmilla Overture
A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Dance of the Clowns
Peter and the Wolf: Peter’s Walking Theme
Suite No. 2: Waltz
Peer Gynt: In the Hall of the Mountain King
Gymnopedie No. 1
William Tell Overture
Symphony No. 1: Scherzo
Emperor Waltz: excerpts
Interval 20 mins
COOPER
COOPER
COOPER
COOPER
Slick Moves 3 mins
Easy Street 23 mins
Roll Dance 1 min
The Immigrant 24 mins
The concert will last approximately 90 minutes with an interval.
All details are correct at time of printing. Dewan Filharmonik PETRONAS reserves the right to vary without notice the artists and/or repertoire as
necessary. Copyright © 2016 by Dewan Filharmonik PETRONAS (Co. No. 462692-X). All rights reserved. No part of this programme may be
reproduced in any form without the written permission of the copyright owners.
GRANT COOPER
conductor
Grant Cooper, composer of the music for performed with tonight's Charlie Chaplin
film screenings, has served as Artistic Director and Conductor of the West
Virginia Symphony Orchestra since 2001. He was formerly Resident Conductor
of the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra, for which he conducted over 600 public
performances over a ten-year span. He also serves as Artistic Director of the Bach
and Beyond Festival, and for several summers led the Anchorage Festival of Music
in Alaska. He has been a frequent guest conductor for many US orchestras, including
Houston, Buffalo, Rochester, Spokane, Kansas City, Chautauqua, Jacksonville,
Elgin and Wichita.
A gifted opera conductor as well, his recent repertoire includes Mozart’s Cosi
fan tutte and The Marriage of Figaro, as well as Rossini’s The Barber of Seville,
Puccini’s Tosca and Bizet’s Carmen.
As a composer, Cooper welcomed the special challenge of creating original
film scores for the Chaplin silent classics Easy Street and The Immigrant. His
commissioned concert works include A Song of Longing, Though... for soprano and
orchestra, with poetry by Tom Beal. Cooper’s popular works for young audiences
include musical versions of Rumpelstiltzkin and Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
His Boyz in the Wood features the unusual combination of rap singer and coloratura
soprano, and Song of the Wolf recasts the Three Little Pigs story with the wolf as
an environmentalist.
CD recordings of Cooper as conductor, performer, and composer are all currently
available.
DAN KAMIN
buffoon soloist
Dan Kamin is a popular guest artist with
symphonies worldwide, blending comedy with
classical music in his ‘Comedy Concertos’.
In addition to today’s programme, these also
include The Haunted Orchestra, The Lost
Elephant, The Horrible History of Music and Stop
the Music!
On film, Kamin created the physical comedy
sequences for both Chaplin and Benny and Joon,
and trained Robert Downey, Jr. and Johnny Depp
for their acclaimed starring performances. He
also played the wooden Indian come to life in the
cult classic Creepshow 2 and created the Martian
girl’s weird movement for Tim Burton’s horror
spoof Mars Attacks!.
Despite his impressive stage and screen credits, Kamin’s artistic beginnings were
humble. At 12, he began his performing career as a boy magician, performing
for audiences of hyperkinetic, sugar-crazed children at birthday parties. Seeking
a more stable way of making a living, he attended Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon
University to study industrial design. But when he saw the eye-popping movement
illusions practised by master mime Jewel Walker, then teaching in the school’s
famous drama department, Kamin’s hopes for living a normal life evaporated.
The great silent comedy films of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin added more fuel
to his fire, and soon Kamin was touring the country with his first original show, Silent
Comedy...Live!. Undeterred by the fact that vaudeville was long dead, he cobbled a
new vaudeville circuit out of colleges, theatres, and corporations, for whom he often
appears as a keynote speaker who falls apart. And as ‘Mr. Slomo’, he strolls through
arts festival crowds in eerie slow motion, terrifying the very children who tormented
him as a youth.
Kamin returned to his comedy roots to write Charlie Chaplin’s One-Man Show,
revealing the secrets of Chaplin’s comic art. Hailed as a breakthrough work, the book
boasted a preface by another Chaplin fan, Marcel Marceau. Kamin’s new book The
Comedy of Charlie Chaplin: Artistry in Motion, updates his earlier book and features
an account of how he trained Downey for his Oscar-nominated performance.
During recent seasons, Kamin has toured his solo show, Comedy in Motion,
throughout America and performed ‘Comedy Concertos’ with many symphonies
including Cleveland, Dallas, Milwaukee, Shanghai, Singapore and Macao.
PROGRAMME NOTES
The Surprising Art and Amazing Life of
Charlie Chaplin by Dan Kamin
Charlie Chaplin in Easy Street
Charlie Chaplin first strolled onto a movie screen early in 1914, one of many
actors featured in the short, crude knockabout comedies produced by Mack
Sennett’s Keystone Film Company. The public immediately took notice of him, and
he obliged by cranking out films at the phenomenal rate of almost one a week.
Within months he was able to leverage his growing popularity into artistic control,
and he began writing, directing, and editing all his own films. The films got sharper
and funnier, and Chaplin’s popularity soared. By the end of the year a second film
company hired him away from Keystone at nearly ten times his original salary.
The films got better still, and the following year a third company lured him away for
ten times more.
He was one of the first true superstars, and he remains a vibrant cultural icon.
This is partly because, more than any other artist of his time, Charlie Chaplin’s
life and art were intertwined with the signal events and preoccupations of the
twentieth century, including the rise of the film industry, the cult of celebrity and
growing obsession with the private lives of the stars, the two World Wars, the
McCarthy era, and the uneasy relationship between art and politics.
The popularity of his work helped establish cinema as a legitimate art form, luring
middle-class audiences who were leery of entering darkened movie theatres,
but who were unwilling to deny themselves the pleasure of seeing Chaplin’s
comedies. In 1919, he became, along with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and
DW Griffith, one of the founding members of United Artists, assuring himself of
complete artistic independence and enabling him to reap the full financial rewards
of his work. As Hollywood was establishing production-line standardization of its
product, Chaplin became his own producer, bringing all the elements of his art
under full control. His films were among the first to be universally recognized as
great art, and by 1916 they were being analyzed by serious critics in prestigious
magazines.
Part of their claim to greatness was that they expanded the limits of what subject
matter a film comedian could deal with. Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms, a comedy about
World War I, came out in 1918, while the war was still raging. An enormous risk
for Chaplin, it became an international blockbuster and a particular favourite with
the troops. The film accurately depicted the horrors of trench warfare in a series of
brilliant comic set pieces, and set a standard of social relevance that few comedy
films have matched since.
Chaplin himself surpassed it when he released The Great Dictator in October
1940. Capitalising on Hitler’s bizarre resemblance to the Tramp, the film featured
Chaplin in a brilliant double act. He allowed his beloved Tramp a swansong as
a soft-spoken Jewish barber, while savagely portraying Hitler as a preening,
gibberish-spouting buffoon. Released more than a year before the attack on Pearl
Harbor, this film represented a far greater risk, both financially and artistically, than
Shoulder Arms. Chaplin’s gamble paid off handsomely. The cinematic showdown
between the most popular man in the world and the most hated became his
biggest moneymaker.
But it also had an unintended side effect on Chaplin’s popularity. The film’s
overt political activism, along with Chaplin’s public espousal of left-wing causes,
earned him powerful enemies in America, and after the war he became a target
of McCarthy-era politicians and the FBI Chaplin couldn’t be blacklisted, since
he owned his own studio, but a media campaign was orchestrated to turn public
opinion against him. Suddenly Chaplin, who had never become an American
citizen, was asked why. No one seemed to care whether other prominent
Hollywood British expatriates, such as Stan Laurel or Alfred Hitchcock, took out
American citizenship (Laurel never did, and Hitchcock did so only in 1956). But
at the dawn of the Cold War Chaplin, one of the most successful capitalists in the
world, was suddenly suspected of being a Communist.
PROGRAMME NOTES
The inconvenient fact that he wasn’t didn’t deter his detractors. With the aid of
right-wing pundits such as Hedda Hopper, Westbrook Pegler and a pre-television
Ed Sullivan, as well as groups like the American Legion and prominent women’s
clubs, the smear campaign was a spectacular success.
Not that Chaplin himself was blameless. The universal appeal and availability
of the new medium made Chaplin an entirely new kind of celebrity. During his
heyday he attracted crowds in the tens of thousands when he traveled, and
his image was used to sell millions of magazines, toys, song sheets, and every
imaginable kind of novelty item. However, as we now know all too well, the
downside of celebrity is to have one’s every move - but most especially one’s
missteps - scrutinised by an eager public. And Chaplin, unfortunately for him, was
a pioneer in attracting the public’s prurient interest. Almost from the beginning he
tested the limits of public tolerance with a busy love life that became fodder for
the tabloid press. The 1943 paternity suit by the pitiable Joan Barry, which we
now know was stage-managed by the FBI in collusion with Hedda Hopper and a
variety of government officials, was particularly damaging to his reputation. That,
along with his marriage, at age 54, to the 18-year-old Oona O’Neill, contributed as
much to the reversal of public opinion as his unpopular political opinions. Chaplin,
who became famous for playing one of society’s outcasts, had become one
himself.
Charlie Chaplin in The Immigrant
Always a transparently autobiographical artist, Chaplin bravely tried striking
back with his art. He ridiculed his reputation as a womaniser by playing a literal
ladykiller in his 1947 black comedy Monsieur Verdoux. When that failed at the
box office, he responded with a comeback film about a failed comedian making
a comeback, the elegiac Limelight. But the film, released in 1952, failed to play
out a week in any American theatre. Large theatre chains such and Loew’s and
Fox-West Coast bowed to the boycott demanded by the American Legion, and
independent theatres caved as well. When Chaplin left the country to promote the
film in Europe, his reentry visa, which had been granted as a matter of course,
was revoked after he was at sea. While Chaplin would have had little trouble
re-entering, he had had enough. He left the country where he had earned fame
and fortune for good.
But the pendulum swung again. Twenty years later, with the Vietnam War raging,
Chaplin was invited back to receive an honorary lifetime achievement Oscar.
The occasion allowed a film industry politicised by the war to laud Chaplin’s filmic
achievements, and, by implication, rebuke the policies of the current regime.
Three years later, in 1975, the child of the London slums was knighted. He died
on Christmas Day, 1977, bringing to a close a rags-to-riches saga that would be
totally unbelievable, if it weren’t true.
Yet, in the end, his films transcend even the amazing story of his life, not just
because of what they say, but because of the way they say it. Charlie Chaplin
speaks the primal language of movement, and he speaks it better than anyone
else in the history of motion pictures. He creates a swirling comic world, and fills
it with magical surprises and choreographic comedy that are a wonder to behold.
He establishes an intimate rapport with his audience, and through his physical
eloquence he demonstrates, with bracing clarity, how deeply we can understand
what goes through another person’s head, and his heart. That’s why his films
still retain the power to mesmerise an audience today, just as they mesmerised
audiences the world over in 1914.
Adapted from The Comedy of Charlie Chaplin: Artistry in Motion by Dan Kamin
(Scarecrow Press, 2011)
MALAYSIAN PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA
PRINCIPAL
CONDUCTOR
vacant
RESIDENT
CONDUCTOR
Harish Shankar
Naohisa Furusawa
FIRST VIOLIN
Co-Concertmaster
Peter Daniš
Principal
Ming Goh
Co-Principal
Zhenzhen Liang
Runa Baagöe
Maho Daniš
Miroslav Daniš
Evgeny Kaplan
Martijn Noomen
Sherwin Thia
Marcel Andriesii
Tan Ka Ming
*Petia Atanasova
SECOND VIOLIN
Co-Principal
Timothy Peters
Assistant Principal
Luisa Hyams
Catalina Alvarez
Chia-Nan Hung
Anastasia Kiseleva
Stefan Kocsis
Ling Yunzhi
Ionut Mazareanu
Yanbo Zhao
Ai Jin
Robert Kopelman
VIOLA
Co-Principal
Gábor Mokány
Sub-Principal
*Eve Tang
Fumiko Dobrinov
Ong Lin Kern
Carol Pendlebury
Sun Yuan
Thian Aiwen
Fan Ran
Mahmoud Hussein
*Jieun Kim
CELLO
Co-Principal
Csaba Kőrös
Assistant Principal
Steven Retallick
Gerald Davis
Julie Dessureault
Laurentiu Gherman
Elizabeth Tan Suyin
Sejla Simon
Mátyás Major
DOUBLE BASS
Section Principal
Wolfgang Steike
Co-Principal
Joseph Pruessner
Raffael Bietenhader
Jun-Hee Chae
Naohisa Furusawa
John Kennedy
Foo Yin Hong
Andreas Dehner
FLUTE
Section Principal
Hristo Dobrinov
Co-Principal
Yukako Yamamoto
Sub-Principal
Rachel Jenkyns
PICCOLO
Principal
Sonia Croucher
OBOE
Section Principal
Simon Emes
Sub-Principal
Niels Dittmann
COR ANGLAIS
Principal
*Jennifer Shark
CLARINET
Section Principal
Gonzalo Esteban
Co-Principal
*Petr Vasek
Sub-Principal
Matthew Larsen
BASS CLARINET
Principal
Chris Bosco
BASSOON
Section Principal
Alexandar Lenkov
Co-Principal
*Thomas Fleming
Sub-Principal
Orsolya Juhasz
CONTRABASSOON
Principal
Vladimir Stoyanov
HORN
Section Principals
Grzegorz Curyla
*Steven James
Co-Principal
James Schumacher
Sub-Principals
Laurence Davies
Todor Popstoyanov
Assistant Principal
Sim Chee Ghee
TRUMPET
Co-Principals
William Theis
*Matthew Dempsey
Sub-Principal
*Jeffrey Missal
Assistant Principal
John Bourque
TROMBONE
Co-Principal
*Daniel Schwalbach
Sub-Principal
*Marques Young
BASS TROMBONE
Principal
Zachary Bond
TUBA
Section Principal
Brett Stemple
TIMPANI
Section Principal
Matthew Thomas
PERCUSSION
Section Principal
Matthew Prendergast
Sub-Principals
Matthew Kantorski
*Tan Su Yin
HARP
Principal
Tan Keng Hong
Note: Sectional string players are listed alphabetically and rotate within their sections. *Extra musician.
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Malaysian Philharmonic
Orchestra
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MALAYSIAN PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA – 463127-H