Twin Cinema
an album of string chamber music
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​What is Twin Cinema?
Twin Cinema is a Singaporean poetic form that features possible readings of separate and parallel narratives, or the choice of reading continuously across both columns of texts.
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It is also the title of the centrepiece in this album - Twin Cinema for string nonet (2022), which was written for two string quartets seated opposite each other, grounded by a contrabass between them. The nonet was originally written for the Stradivari Quartett and musicians of the Singapore Symphony, including Mr Guennadi on contrabass.
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Album Concept
The concept of this album arose in 2023, when T'ang Quartet, Espoir Quartet and Mr Guennadi gave the second performance of Twin Cinema. T'ang quartet also commissioned and premiered my second string quartet - Give and Take. Two of my pieces filled the first half of the concert, and on the second half T'ang quartet performed Ravel's String Quartet (no pressure at all!).
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​​Observing the mature T'ang quartet playing across the up-and-coming Espoir Quartet was like seeing a juxtaposition of time, as if seeing my current musical self and the reflection of a younger self. That's how I came up with the idea of pairing a more mature work Give and Take (2023) played by T'ang Quartet, with the youthful ​​first string quartet Echoes (2008-9) to be played by Espoir Quartet.
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Recorded by YST Audio Arts​
This album was recorded at Yong Siew Toh Conservatory's recording studio. Engineered, mixed and edited by Prof. Zhou Xiaodong, Calla Lim and assisted by the YST Audio Arts team, including Alvin Tan Jiang Minn, and Max Li Mingxuan.
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Album Artwork by Alvin Mark Tan​
I first came across Alvin Mark Tan's work through his illustrated book La Kopi at a cafe, when I was working on A Singapore Trilogy with L'arietta Productions. We contacted Alvin to illustrate the poster of the show as a triptych, and later on he turned it into the album artwork for the Trilogy albums - Laksa Cantata, Window Shopping, and Kopi For One.
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For the Twin Cinema album, I invited Alvin come to a rehearsal at the YST Recording Studio, where he filmed some Behind-The-Scenes footage, and began sketching (in his signature style) the nonet ensemble set up for recording. That sketch was re-designed as the album artwork, to reflect the contrast between the two quartets. A watercolour portrait of Mr Guennadi also made it to the back cover of the album.