Joshua Bell and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields in HK

Yesterday was doubly happy for me. I got a mid-week break. Then I heard one of the best sounds I have had for a long time. That was made possible by a young violinist Joshua Bell and The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. The concert was held at the Cultural Centre Concert Hall. What's more, I was sitting with my friends on the 5th row right before the centre of the stage, where we could hear the warm sound of the 4 cellos and the double basses and the most subtle changes in the wonderful sound from that Stradivarius bestowing its magic between the neck and shoulder of Joshua Bell not more than a dozen feet from from where we were sitting! It was heaven. But before heaven, there was purgatory. I thought we were sitting at our usual seats on the balcony. I was wrong.  I realized that error to my horror only when I presented my ticket to the gentleman at our usual entrance to the balcony just 2 minutes before the scheduled start of the concert. So I had to rush down all the way from there to the mezzazine floor through two flights of steps located quite some distance from where I started. I nearly missed the opening! But I was lucky. I was just in time but had to excuse myself through 6 or 7 pairs of shuffling feet from the young ladies sitting to our right. 

 

I still remember how surprised I was when I first heard the golden and a bit silky sound of this band of excellent musicians from London. The sound came from a pair of huge JBL horn speakers placed near the entrance of the storeroom of the drug store below the flat where our family were then living. They belonged to the manager of the drug store on the ground floor of our building, long since torn down. The manager, nicknamed "Pony" probably because he got a long face, was a veritable hi fi nut. He used tube amplifiers and had a collection of hundreds of vinyl all neatly stacked up on specially constructed wooden shelves at the side of that storeroom which had been partially converted into his personal hi fi kingdom. I remember spending hours fingering and looking at the beautiful vinyl covers of his disc collection there and transporting myself in my imagination to that mysterious and distant continent with quaint buildings and people with strange looking faces portrayed on the record covers called Europe. I was then a Form 1 student. The speakers were then delivering the magic of Vivaldi's Quattro Stagiones. My mouth was left open in a permanent stare throughout the performance. I was stunned. I was asking myself: "How on earth is it possible for the sound to be so smooth, so silky ? How could the players have played in such perfect synchrony?" Well they did. And they still do! That was when I first started to fall in love with classical music. According to the programme notes, the chamber orchestra was founded in 1958 by Sir Neville Marriner as a temporary ensemble! It is now one of the world's leading chamber orchestras and there are no signs of their wanting to relinguish such status any time soon.

 

The programme last night featured two works by that lion of a composer, Beethoven and one of the best loved violin concertos in the world, Violin Concerto in E Minor Op 64 of Mendelssohn. The two pieces by Beethoven were his very romantic Overture to Cariolan, Op 62 and the rather lively, forceful, happy Symphony No. 7 in A, Op 92. They are all popular pieces and would scarcely need any introduction. I was a bit surprised though how young Joshua Bell still looks.

 

According to the Programme Notes, Joshua Bell made his orchestral debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Riccardo Muti, when he was 14!  He grew up in a farm in Bloomington, Indiana, was an avid computer game player, was placed number 4 in a national tennis tournament at age 10, got his first violin at age 4 when his psychologist parents noticed how he was making musical sounds from some rubber bands stretched over his dresser drawer handles! He studied the violin under Josef Gingold from age 12 on, got an Artist Diploma in Violin Performance from the Indiana University in 1989 and has since been named an "Indiana Living Legend". He already got 35 CDs out! The notes say that he now plays the 1713 Gibson ex Huberman Stradivarius. No wonder the sound from his violin was so mellow, so rich in harmonics, so cultured and yet so sensuous. I simply love its sound, especially its G, D and E strings. They were so smooth, so complex, like the taste of vintage wines and they made Mendelssohn's violin concerto sound so tender, so wistful, so heart rendingly beautiful. I never heard such a performance of Mendelssohn's violin cocerto at such close quarters with the sound so immediate, so close, so literally in the face.

 

Joshua Bell is simply superb. I do not know whether it was his violin or him. He and his violin seemed to have merged into a wonderful instrument-man or man-instrument and they both spoke

one common language: music, nothing but music. And what music! When Joshua Bell played, he threw himself into the music. You would see the violent movements he made swaying back and forth, left and right, sometimes almost as if he were performing an unintended break dance and how he would bow down, at times almost to navel level, lifting his head back, his eyes looking at the air and yet not really at it. His mind was elsewhere. It was with the music. Sometimes, he would literally leap up a full two or three inches from the top of the long low footstool sofa where he was sitting in the lead first violin position as the ensembles's concert master/conductor(?) when he got to a passage which would call for a particularly forceful use of his elbow movements. And from time to time, you could see him sticking the tip of his bow high into the air to indicate the stop or start of the play of the other musicians. And when his solo violin passages ended, he would then revert to his role as the conductor, subsituting his bow for the baton and conducted from his bow which he would swing left and right, up and down and from time to time, he would jab it forcefully towards the back of the orchestra, You could see how much effort he used by observing the tiny beads of sweat on his forehead and from the fact that one of the strings on his bow broke, leaving it dangling listlessly in the air from the bottom of the bow and which he would try to remove once he got a break from bowing, by pulling it off in a quick forceful motion but which he never quite succeeded. You can see how annoyed he was having this string wafting in the air whenever he had to lift the bow up to do his conducting but unfortunately, he could never find sufficient time to remove this nuisance, adding further to his annoyance but he would never allow himself to be unduly distracted from his music.

Joshua Bell conducted and played with equal energy, with equal fervor and with equal devotion to the single minded task of bringing out the feeling in the music. He was simply wonderful. And The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields responded to his enthusiasm and his devotion and put in an equally engaged performance. And the audience responded too with their applauses. There were many cries of bravo, many loud whistles, many cat calls and many standing ovations. The audience's reaction spoke for itself.  It is not often that you could elicit such an effusive expression of their appreciation from the Hong Kong concert crowd. And Joshua Bell and the orchestra obliged, to our surprise, with an "encore". They played a very lively movement from one of Mozart's late symphonies. I'm not sure. I think it was from his No. 38 or 39 Symphony. Got to check. But whatever it was, I was so happy I was there despite the higher than usual price of my ticket and despite my purgatory! It was un unforgettable musical experience.