Music and dance will dominate JIFPA

By Gus Kairupan

JAKARTA (JP): JIFPA, a cultural event that shows every sign of being here to stay. Spelled out in full, JIFPA stands for Jakarta International Festival of the Performing Arts.

The opening of the third one was held last Sunday at Gedung Kesenian Jakarta, and as the director of GKJ said in her welcoming speech, this one is to last a month. A good sign, that.

The first one, held three years ago, lasted four months, which was far too long for a festival. Even one month can be considered a bit on the long side, although considering that the only venue is GKJ, the duration may be all right. However, maybe some thought could be devoted to widening the event by involving more performing arts centers -- remember TIM has four stages besides a number of smaller but very suitable auditoriums run by foreign representations here.

You'd be surprised at how many and how varied the kinds of stage productions which could be organized. As it is now, music and dance are the only types that fill the Festival's programs. But JIFPA, at the age of three, is still growing, and hopefully growing to a stage where all the performing arts are well and truly represented.

Foreign countries taking part this year are Japan, Germany, Australia, Austria, the Netherlands, the Philippines and China which is sending the Beijing Opera group. Now, that's something to look forward to. As far as I know, it could well be the first time that the Beijing Opera is staged here.

Simple event

The Festival opened with a simple event featuring the Jakarta Symphony Orchestra, followed by a gathering of the invited guests for "refreshments", as Ms. Feisol said. Of course, by now everybody knows that refreshments a la Indonesia constitute a full meal. When it comes to eating, we don't believe in half- measures.

The main feature of the evening, however, was the performance of the Jakarta Symphony Orchestra directed by Judianto Hinupurwadi. Participating as guest artist in the concert was Santiago G. Yangco, a flutist who is still in the midst of a distinguished career which includes performances in, among others, London, New York, Guam, as well as teaching at the College of Music of the University of the Philippines (that's where he hails from) and Sta. Isabel College of Music. He's also conductor of the Cabiao Symphony Band of Nueva Ecija. How he finds time to practice dentistry (his other profession) is anybody's guess.

Question: why mess about with the insides of people's mouths and make them scream when you're so eminently gifted to entertain them with the best there is in music? For Santiago Yangco is an extremely fine musician who gave depth to Mozart's flute concerto, a work often dismissed as superficial.

Yangco wasn't the only non-Indonesian taking part in the concert. There was bassoonist Noel A. Singcuenco, also from the Philippines, Soun Youn Yoon from South Korea who, I was told, occupied first chair oboe section in the Seoul Symphony Orches tra. Also Eric Awuy (brother of harpist Heidi Awuy), Indonesian, but still attached to a symphony orchestra in Montreal, Canada. It's seasoned performers like these that budding orchestras like JSO are in crying need of. In Indonesia's immediate neighborhood (i.e. the ASEAN context) the Philippines and Singapore are proba bly the only countries that are ahead of Indonesia when it comes to symphonic music activities. We could learn a thing or two from them, and this doesn't apply only to players in orchestras but also to conductors.

Creditable

The program included three works: the overture to William Tell by Rossini, Dvorak's New World Symphony and Mozart's Concerto for Flute in D-Major. Now, orchestras being what they are in Jakarta (developing stage, that is) one cannot expect too much from them in terms of musicianship. JSO at least did not overreach itself with this program (they have played excerpts of Dvorak's work before), and thus gave a creditable performance. First and second violins could have done with a more unified tone which is a bit odd considering that violins are usually quite strong here. A revelation however, was the cello section, which after a few wobbly seconds at the beginning of the William Tell overture, found its feet and its strength.

As for the symphony, director Yudianto should have created a deeper, richer tone for the entire work and more contrasting dynamics. The work belongs very much to the romantic period and must be treated as such. As it was, in the orchestra's timbre and tone, there wasn't much difference between Dvorak's symphony and Mozart's concerto which belongs to the classical period.

I am also inclined to think that it is the presence of the more experienced musicians that contributed a lot to the woodwind and brass sections' impressive performance, especially the oboe's very extensive solo part in the second movement of Dvorak's symphony. It's a pity that they're here for only a limited time, but then, these days you can't turn your ears in any direction without hearing such things like "globalization" and "transfer of technology". Well, something like that applies to music just as much as it does to making croissants or pumping oil out of the earth's belly.

JSO, to its credit, has not overreached itself, but the time may come that we would like to hear works by, say, Hindemith or Stravinsky or Messiaen.