Review: DRAGON LADIES DON'T WEEP – OZASIA FESTIVAL 2022 at Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre

Reviewed by Barry Lenny, Friday 28th October 2022.

New York-based, Singaporean pianist, Margaret Leng Tan's contribution to this year's Festival, Dragon Ladies Don't Weep, is built on a collaboration between Singaporean and Australian artists, including composer, Erik Griswold. It is directed by Tamara Saulwick, with dramaturgy by Kok Heng Leun. It had its world premiere at Asia TOPA in 2020 and won Best Work of the Year (Dramatic) at the 2021 Australian Art Music Awards.

This marks a move away from concert performances into the arena of theatre, and it includes short interludes with snippets of philosophy, brief elements of her path in music, her time working with John Cage, and compulsive counting. She began at the 'prepared' piano, in which various objects are placed strategically between the strings to create different sounds. This one occasionally sounded like a note from a gamelan bell, then from a temple block. She went on, counting to 76, her age.

I was fascinated by the way that her delicate fingers flashed over the keys, producing rapid runs and dense clusters of notes. Her dexterity was captivating. The sounds that she coaxed from her array of 'instruments' was remarkable, often played in combination with sampled, recorded parts.

She is well known for her use of a 51cm high toy upright piano in her works, first featuring it in her 1997 CD, The Art of the Toy Piano, showing that it was capable of much greater things than one would have expected. That, of course, featured often in this performance. Toy telephones, a Melodica, and a suspended cymbal were all brought into the performance, extending the musical palette.

Everything was done in subdued light, with projections onto the back wall, and onto a piece of scenery, a long strip of white going upstage, to another vertical strip. This all added to the ethereal feel of the evening.

Her achievements are many. She was mentored by John Cage, whom she met in 1981, they worked together for the last decade of his life, and she is acknowledged for her interpretations of his piano music. She was also the first woman to gain a Doctorate from the prestigious, Julliard School of Music.

The OzAsia Festival is to be commended for bringing some thought-provoking and immensely interesting works to Adelaide this year, and this one ranks highly amongst them.

It was not very surprising that my 1980s university lecturer in the analysis of 20th Century music was in the audience. We exchanged a few superlatives in a brief assessment of the performance. There were other Adelaide luminaries in attendance. Hurry to the performance on Saturday at 1:30.

Photography, Esplanade Theatres on the Bay.

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