I wrote classical concert reviews, and a weekly music column for the Sunday Star for 15 years (1980s through mid-1990s), and was active in Kuala Lumpur’s amateur music performing scene from the 1960s and 1970s, culminating my performing career as a professional flautist with the MetroManila Symphony Orchestra in the late 1970s, so I should be in a good position to comment about the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra.
I am one of those bitterly disappointed with the MPO. Setting up a professional orchestra in Kuala Lumpur was a great idea, and to start it off with almost 100 percent foreign players may have been acceptable (wags in KL called the MPO the Mostly Putih Orchestra), but a decade on, and still the orchestra is overwhelmingly foreign (though with more non-White players, the orchestra is still the Mostly Pendatang Orchestra), and not even a Malaysian conductor at the helm, is all together too much to bear.
A symphony orchestra, anywhere in the world, reflects city, and/or NATIONAL aspirations, and that means basing the orchestra on LOCAL talents.
It maybe true that Malaysian classical musicians are “not up to the standards” of a “world class” professional orchestra, but who are we kidding when we have a “Malaysian” Philharmonic which is most certainly NOT Malaysian. Call it the Petronas Philharmonic. But, not, surely, the Malaysian Philharmonic.
Money can always BUY the best the world can offer. If that is the philosophy of Petronas, the MPO’s hundreds of millions of dollars would have been better spent importing foreign politicians to give Malaysia a truly world-class parliament! But no right thinking person would ever dream of such an idiotic idea. We get the politicians that we have in Malaysia, the good, and the mostly terrible (just look at your live television to see how the YB, from both sides of the aisle, behave!)
But yet, Petronas thought it was doing right by “Malaysia” to buy a mostly foreign orchestra, which has remained mostly foreign for over a decade. Yes, I know that the orchestra has in recent years attempted to train a young Malaysian orchestra, organised competitions for local composers, and occasionally gives concerts at Old Folks Homes, but that hardly makes up for the obvious fact that what Malaysia needs, perhaps even wants, is a MALAYSIAN Philharmonic Orchestra, warts and all. And, as it grows in its technical and musical competence, so too will national pride in our truly Malaysian orchestra.
The smart thing for Petronas to have done was to have seeded a Malaysian orchestra with foreign players (for example, there is the National Symphony, or the Penang Symphony Orchestra which was actually quite good when I last reviewed them in Kuala Lumpur in the early 1990s), and in that way raise Malaysian performing standards. And, as the Malaysians players grew in the self-confidence as instrumentalists and interpreters of serious music, the contract of the foreign players would be allowed to lapse.
When I played professionally with the Metro Manila Symphony Orchestra, way back in the late 1970s, I was the ONLY non-Filipino in the orchestra! The orchestra had lost its star principal flautist to work overseas, and I had just arrived after having finished training with Emil Opava, principal flute of the Minnesota Orchestra, and came at the “right time” to fill an “urgent” need. And as soon (5 or 6 months)as the orchestra (whose patron was Mdm Imelda Marcos) found a suitable replacement, I took my leave, and headed to Northern Philippines where I was researching what Mdm Marcos’ husband, President Ferdinand Marcos, was doing to the tribal people in the Cordillera mountains!
This is what is meant by NATIONALISM in classical music, where the orchestras, conductors, local serious music composers, and the players themselves, are all imbued with a sense of national purpose, and destiny, and they collectively contribute to national cultural heritage and pride.
Unfortunately, almost none of the words I have just written above characterise the “Malaysian” Philharmonic Orchestra. It is almost a mercenary musical outfit where foreigners are paid huge salaries, to play mostly foreign music, to an audience comprising mainly foreigners (expatriates) and their Malaysian friends, and a few like yours truly who genuinely likes Western Classical Music and who has been involved in developing the scene from the 1960s when I first joined the Kuala Lumpur Symphony Orchestra, through the 1980s and 1990s writing for the Sunday Star, to the present when, at my age, I only occasionally pick up my instruments in a vain attempt to persuade my children to carry on the “family tradition.”
Make no mistake, the MPO is a good orchestra. It just simply is not a Malaysian orchestra, something we Malaysians can proudly call OUR VERY OWN.
It is NOT too late for Petronas to do the right thing.
First, appoint a Malaysian permanent conductor whose brief has to be to start replacing the foreign players with Malaysian musicians. I accept that the “high” standards the the MPO currently attains may fall (slightly), but that is the price we as a nation must be willing to pay to build up our own cultural resources which, in the not too distant future, will then put Malaysia on the world’s concert stages with an orchestra all Malaysians, and the rest of the world, will instantly recognize as being genuinely Malaysian.
Richard Dorall
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