In some ways, violinist Lynnette Seah's performance at the Singapore Symphony Orchestra's 30th anniversary concert last Wednesday was an apt reflection of her career.
As the soloist in the performance of Bruch's Violin Concerto No. 1, she took centrestage before the gala audience which included Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. The 2006 Cultural Medallion recipient's passionate, soulful performance earned her enthusiastic applause and a rave review in this newspaper.
Instead of an eye-catching gown, she wore black, the same colour she has worn at the thousands of concerts in which she has played as one musician among more than 90 others in the orchestra.
The message she seemed to be sending was that despite her status as soloist of the night, she is and always has been a member of the orchestra. In fact, she is the only musician to have been a full-time member of the orchestra since day one.
It is not that she dislikes colour. When she welcomes this reporter into her apartment in a condominium in the East Coast, which she shares with her two grown sons, she is wearing a floral dress which makes her look less stern than she normally appears on stage.
The cosy living room bears a decidedly feminine touch, done up in pastels and decorated with images of butterflies on cushions, paintings and various bric- a-brac.
'I think for me, butterflies signify freedom, a free spirit. I am Sagittarius and Sagittariuses are supposed to be free spirited,' the 52-year-old says in a thoughtful alto that belies her girlish appearance, taste in decor and topic of conversation.
'Now, I just think they are very beautiful and fragile.'
It would be tempting to compare Seah to a butterfly who has emerged from her cocoon.
When she joined the newly formed SSO in 1979, she was a 21-year-old teacher with the Yamaha music school, guiding children in the rudiments of playing the piano and violin.
'It was exasperating because most of the kids there never practised and were not very interested. So I was happy when the SSO started because I am more of a performer,' she says with a laugh.
'I was already so pleased to get a job at the SSO and then just two days before the inaugural concert, Choo Hoey, then the music director, came to me and said, 'Would you like to lead our first concert?' I just said, 'Um, yes?''
The leader or concertmaster of an orchestra, who is always the leader of the first violin section, is in charge of the technical aspects of the orchestra's music making, including tuning before concerts.
She remained as acting leader for about 11/2 years, until the SSO recruited more experienced violinists, but continued to serve as deputy leader and then associate leader.
She is now the co-leader of the SSO, sitting in the second chair next to Russian-born concertmaster Alexander Souptel, and also performs as soloist at least once every two years.
Her high status in the orchestra - only she, Souptel, the conductor and the guest soloist get their own dressing rooms - combined with her tendency to keep to herself before a concert has led to mutters in some circles that she is aloof.
'I think that's the perception that others may have of me because I'm not a vocal person. I'm more of a loner,' she says candidly.
'I don't like to have any mindless chatter before a concert. I like to be in my own zone. I like to just stay in my little room and collect myself before I get on stage.'
Says friend and fellow first violinist William Tan, 45, who has worked with her since 1980: 'I think that when she doesn't know you very well, she might be a bit quiet. But she takes care of her friends well, like how she takes care of her family. She cooks well and likes to invite people over to her place for dinner parties.'
He adds that she does not hesitate to speak up for her fellow musicians. He remembers an instance, shortly after he joined the SSO, when the conductor claimed that some of the musicians had made an error in pitch during a rehearsal.
'It was actually the other way around. However, what many concertmasters do is, they keep quiet, they don't want to get involved in a dispute with the conductor,' he says.
'But Lynnette stood up for us. She has her principles and she stands up for what she knows is right.'
Indeed, it seems inevitable that Seah will one day occupy the first chair for good; the only question is: When?
Seah laughs heartily when you put this question to her: 'That is for God to answer. I don't know, but thanks for asking because I can't ask that question myself!'
Turbulent personal life
While her career has been smooth- sailing, her personal life has been more turbulent.
She raised her two sons single-handedly after she divorced her husband, a German money broker, in 1988 when her sons were only four and six.
Her elder son, Maurice Simon, 25, is now a lawyer while her younger son Andre, 23, is studying at university.
Seah, who met her ex-husband at a Club Med resort in Malaysia when she was 22, says: 'We just couldn't get along. He had a lot of late nights, I was younger than him by about 13 years, and I just felt very lonely.
'So I thought it was better to be alone than to be alone in a marriage.'
Luckily, her schedule as an SSO musician was actually quite convenient for the single mother.
'I was blessed as SSO only had half-day rehearsals in the morning, so when my sons came back from school, I would be there for them from the moment they got off the school bus. I was away only on concert nights,' says Seah, who ran the household with the help of her mother and a maid.
Her son, Maurice, recalls: 'Every day when we came home from school, Mum would be in the kitchen cooking. She always made an effort to have dinner with us every night, to check that we did our homework, to talk to us. No matter how stressed she was, she always knew what was going on in our lives.'
Seah's ex-husband has since remarried and is not close to her or to their sons. Now that her children are grown, she says she hopes to 'find a real true companion in my life because my sons will leave me one day'.
She is currently seeing someone but prefers to keep that part of her life private.
Seah herself was raised by a single mother after her parents divorced when she was only a few years old. She does not know why they divorced.
The only child grew up with her mother, grandmother and some relatives in a flat in Tiong Bahru.
It is her late mother Lau Biau Chin, one of Singapore's first concert pianists and a music teacher, whom she credits for starting her on her career as a violinist.
'She was the one who inspired me as well as instilled in me the discipline to practise every day,' she says of her mother, who died last March at the age of 82.
'Even as a little girl of six, I practised two hours a day, one hour on the piano and one on the violin. I had to play for my dinner.'
Her mother started teaching her to play the piano when Seah was five and the violin at six. She later studied with prominent teachers Goh Soon Tioe and Alphonso Anthony.
Seah says that although she never resented her mother for making her practise, she did it largely at first to please her mother.
At nine, she gave her first violin performance, playing with her mother at the old National Theatre as part of the Television Talentime.
The duo also played at events: 'As a young girl I was not nervous about performing. My mum was more nervous than I was.'
She remained in touch with her father throughout her childhood and met him about once a year. Her father, an anaesthetist who has lived in the United States since the 1970s, flew in from Honolulu, Hawaii, last week with Seah's stepmother to attend the 30th anniversary concert.
'We're close and I visit him every two years or so in Honolulu. We have many similarities in character and personality, even the food we like and the way we like to be organised in our lives. I'm also like him in the way that we don't express much but we feel a lot,' she says fondly.
Found true love in Germany
In her youth, on top of spending much of her time practising music, she was an athlete at Methodist Girls' School, a cross- country runner and a school swimmer who was the breaststroke champion of the city district.
'I think being physically fit is very important for a performer. It helps you to have mental stamina, too,' says the violinist, who swims 30 to 40 lengths of the 30m pool of her condominium every few weeks.
Her favourite subjects were mathematics and physics and she hoped to study medicine at university.
'I actually wanted to be a doctor, so I was in the science stream, because my dad was a doctor and my uncle was a very famous doctor at Singapore General Hospital,' she says, referring to the late Professor Seah Cheng Siang, a pioneer in the field of gastro-intestinal medicine and a long-serving president of the Singapore Medical Council.
However, it was music that would take her places. She was 12 when she travelled abroad for the first time - she had won a scholarship to the National Music Camp at Interlochen, Michigan, in the United States. At 16, she represented Singapore in the South-east Asian Violin Competition and won a scholarship to study at the Hannover Hochschule for Music in Germany, a music academy.
Seah did not want to go to Germany - it was her mother who persuaded her to take the scholarship. In Germany, she took a three-month summer course to learn the language from scratch, then spent two 'very lonely' years studying the violin.
'I was young and naive. I had to look after myself and I had never done that before. I was living in a small room. It was hard and I was homesick,' she says softly.
She practised eight hours a day, attended student concerts at night and on weekends walked to the main train station to buy English books.
She recalls: 'It was a lonely, dismal lifestyle. I didn't really have friends.'
She also remembers being perpetually hungry as most of her scholarship money went to her rent and her violin, which she paid for in instalments.
'I ate two slices of bread a day, one in the morning and one at night. I could afford only a small packet of gummy bears. I practised eight hours a day and would reward myself after every hour by looking out the window and eating maybe two bears for energy,' she says, laughing.
The hardship paid off as it was in Germany that she discovered that she really loved playing the violin: 'It dawned on me one cold winter night that I really wanted it to be part of my life.'
Still, when she returned to Singapore after graduating with a diploma from Hannover Hochschule, she enrolled at National Junior College though she did not sit for her A levels.
'I couldn't get back into the mode of studying anymore. I was too immersed in music already,' she says.
She taught music for about a year and a half before joining the SSO, where she has been since. She has no plans to leave, despite the fact that some orchestras in the region pay better.
'Every time I'm away, I get homesick. I feel happiest when I'm home. I just have a lot of national pride,' she says.
But she hopes to start doing more guest performances abroad.
'I would like to get an artistic manager who will get me in concerts with other orchestras. But I leave things to fate. God plans things better than I do,' she says.
Cradling a mug decorated with butterflies, she adds thoughtfully: 'I have had a lot of hardship in my life but I always try to make my music richer for that, to make it positive rather than negative. Music has helped me in my life.
'Human beings can disappoint you all the time. But music has been my one true friend since I was a little girl.'
This article was first published in The Straits Times on Jan 19, 2009.
