After the funeral shortly before the Saturday night concert at the City Hall was amost certainly a very pleasant experience. Because of the need to go through all the fomalities of the "farewell" bows, the subsequent condolences and the time it took for me to find the MTR station in the unfamiliar environment of Taikoktsui, when I arrived at the City Hall, the concert had already started. So I had to stand at the back. From there, I saw the profile of a lady who looked amazingly like a female version of Prince Charles of Wales, in a tricolor gauze-like dress of red, purple and black, sitting in front of the grand piano, playing away in the decorous and measured counterpuntal rhythms of a Bach "keyboard" concerto. The form belonged to the long awaited Canadian born pianist Angela Hewitt. She played well. She conveyed the quiet bubbly mood of Bach's work. But somehow, I could not help saying to myself that probably that might not be the kind of sound that Bach had in mind when he wrote it. It was originally not intended for the piano. So perhaps she ought to try to imitate the sound of maybe the harpischord, with a much lighter, silvery and wispy sound. Instead, she played it in a very "romantic" way, with slightly more force on the keyboard and more frequent use of the rubato than was usual in the more controlled baroque style, thus producing rather more resonance for the notes than what I thought the music justified. Angela Hewitt is not the first to play baroque pieces with a "romantic" tinge. She is in good company. Lang Lang does it too. Sometimes I do feel sorry for artists. They got to constantly figure out ways of doing old things in new ways and for the pianists, to play a piece which has been played thousands of times before by previous artists in a way which "personalizes" the music without doing too much violence to the score and sometimes even despite such violence. Otherwise, we would probably be bored stiff listening to the same pieces being repeated endlessly in exactly the same way over and over and over again! Anyway, she got tremendous applauses for this Keyboard Concerto in G minor. It was well deserved.
Her next piece was Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 27 in B flat. This was one of the most popular of Mozart's piano concertos and came at the end of a long line of the same. As in most of Mozart's works, there is that perpetual delight in the joy of living. It was a very lyrical chamber work for the flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns and strings, lasting roughly half an hour. There was a simplicity and a directness which came straight from Mozart's mercurial heart and mind, and an undiluted delight in coming up with good melody and the sheer fun of playing around with music notes which I like very much in Mozart's music. Angela Hewitt was able to convey that too. But again, somehow I wished that she would have played with a slightly lighter touch to convey the kind of uninterrupted "flow: and the "sparkle" which I think is the hallmark of Mozart's music and which lingering on the sonic qualities of individual notes would destroy. If it were slightly briskier, slightly more flowing, slightly brighter, with slightly more "shine", it would have been perfect. Of course, it is not true that life is always joy and delight, even for a Mozart. There might be moments of sorrow foo, when a slower tempo and darker sound would be more appropriate. I certainly do not have any training in music and wouldn't know whether Angela Hewitt did it right. But I cannot help feeling what I felt. I told my friend how I felt during the intermission. He too agreed with me. However, as it is, it is already very very good and I had little to complain about.
In the second half of the concert, Angela Hewitt played Bach's Keyboard Concerto in F Minor and the Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor. My friends told me that for some reason , she announced at the start of the concert that she had decided that it might be better to switch the two scheduled Bach pieces around. I do not know whether or not it was because having heard her play one Bach and one Mozart in the first half of the concer, my ears had thus grown accustomed to her sound. I found in fact that the two pieces she played in the latter part of the concert to be much better than those in the first. Perhaps she might have completely warmed up by then. Whatever the true cause might have been, I like her encore very much when she played alone and could fully concentrate on what she was doing. Perhaps having to conduct from her piano seat might have distracted her concentration in her earlier performances.
When I flipped through the programme notes, I discovered that Angela Hewitt began learning the piano at age 3, also studied the violin, recorder and ballet, gave her first piano recital at 9, and had since gone on to win a number of important international awards and won many honours from music magazines and also the BBC Listener's Award and had played Bach's Well-Tempered Klavier in some 30 major cities around the globe between 2007 and 2008 and has held an annual Trasimeno Music Festival on the shores of Lake Trasimeno in Malta since 2005. Certainly a very energetic and talented musician.
Wow. Just discovered Angela Hewitt's red hot impressions of Hong Kong and on the players of the HKPO, published on 29.04.10 . She may be accessed at http://www.angelahewitt.com. I hope she does not mind my copying and pasting. Here it is:
We just had a spectacular downpour in Hong Kong. It perhaps wasn’t the best decision to take the ferry from Kowloon (where I have been rehearsing all day with the Hong Kong Philharmonic in a rehearsal hall in the Cultural Centre) back to Hong Kong Central. There were no taxis when I got there, and I got soaked waiting for one. But it’s so much nicer to get on the boat rather than get stuck in the terrible traffic in the tunnel. I took the photo of the very grey skies during a quick lunch break when I went out to get some air—such as it is here. Hong Kong is endlessly fascinating—but also a bit hellish. I can only imagine what it would be like in extreme heat, and am glad this is April and not July. But don’t get me wrong: I’m enjoying it a lot. It was great to have three days just to practise in a small studio (which I shared with 10 timpani, a marimba, and a harp) and have some time to myself to catch up on some writing projects that have imminent deadlines. I also went to a dress designer I know and got three new concert gowns which I need if I am not to be seen wearing the same thing time in and time out! Plus I did some TV and radio interviews. The guy hosting the TV one told me his name was Ben Pelletier…I said that was very Canadian-sounding, to which he replied that Wilfrid Pelletier (the conductor after whom the hall where the Montreal Symphony plays is named) was his great-grandfather. Small world! In the orchestra most of the string players are Asian, but the excellent wind players come from France, England, and I don’t know where else. We had fun (at least I did, I hope they did, too!) working on four piano concertos in one day—2 Bach, 2 Mozart. They hardly ever play that repertoire, and at first I thought it was going to be hard going, but very quickly they caught on, and by the end of the day I felt they were really listening beautifully and responding accordingly. The concerts I am told are sold out already. Everybody wants to get their money’s worth and hear four concertos at once! Now I must cook my dinner (I have a small kitchen and found a supermarket around the corner that has everything you could ever want—typical of Hong Kong), go and pick up my new dresses (if the rain has stopped), and continue writing some CD notes.
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