A Carnival of Magical Moments

Wednesday evening was magic. I went to another concert of the HKPO. I had waited for this concert for quite some time. After quickly grabbing a meat roll from the Maxim's on the ground floor of our office building and having it disappear within that hole in my face called my mouth before leaving the shop, I rushed towards the Cultural Centre. For once, I arrived a comfortable time before the commencement of the concert. I took out the evening's  programme on recycled paper which I retrieved earlier from our office printer shortly before my departure and read it on a seat on the foyer outside the entrance to the concert hall. As usual, the evening's programme was divided into two parts. In the first part, there would be Hector Berlioz's Roman Carnival Op. 9, then Beethoven's Piano Concerto No.1 in C Op. 15 and in the second, there would be Fauré's  Pelléas et Mélisande Suite, Op 80 and finally Liszt's Piano Concerto No.1 in E flat, S124, all familiar pieces. But we got a new conductor from France,  Stéphane Denève and the principal reason why I was prepared to pay three times my normal price for the ticket for the concert, Lang Lang. 

According to the programme notes, Denève has been the Music Director of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra since 2005 and will join as the Chief Conductor of the Stuggart Radio Symphony Orchestra September next year and made a number of recordings for Naxos concentrating on the works of Albert Roussel and in 2007 won A Diapason d'or for the first of that series of work. He started out at the Paris Conservatoire and acted as assistants for Sir Georg Solti, George Prêtre and Seiji Osawa. He is particularly fond of French and new music and conducted works by Grétry, Debussy, Ravel, Roussel, Fauré and Poulenc as well as premiering the works of a contemporary French composer Guillaume Connesson. So he should be very familiar with the two works he was going to perform for us last night. In addition, he has also performed with various orhcestras in Hamburgh, Florence, Milan, Barcelona, Denmark, Milan,  Rotterdam, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Philadelphia and Londo etc.

Lang Lang is a phenomenon. He's billed as "hottest artist on the classical musical planet" by the NY Times, performed at the opening of the Beijing Olympics, the 2009 Nobel Prize award ceremony, the gala opening of the National Center for Performing Arts in Beijing, the opening ceremony of the World Cup and the closing cerremony of the European Cup finals and performed with the Berlin Philharmonic under Sir Simon Rattle and won awards impossible to count. I heard him live before and on CDs I don't know how many times. Therefore, it is impossible not to hear him again, despite the price hike. Athough some of my friends would say that he romanticizes everything he touches, as if it were a sin. But to me, that is not a fault, but a blessing. Music must always be made new through the transforming magic of the artist's soul. We would then be able to hear old pieces with a new pair of ears!

The evening's programme opened with the Berlioz's Roman Carnival. He is a very idiosyncratic composer who regularly wrote pieces reguiring 125 players and some even 467 players, including 30 harps, 30 pinaos, 12 cymbals, 16 French horns! His Roman Carnival is one of his most popular pieces. It opened with some quiet strings with a slow melodious theme, then developed a romping pace with fun and joy, gradually growing stronger, and then quicker, louder, then exploded into a climax with timpanis and cymblas, quietened down again, and developed a second and then a third climax and then rushed towards a final explosive conclusion of sunny joy and exhilaration. Dèneve is a tall French gentleman with a round longish face on which sits a head of frizzy hair on his high forehead above his gold rimmed milk-bottle bottom lens as if it were a hedgehog with curly spines. When he conducted, he would hold his arms very very high above his long black swallow tail suit jacket and he made very huge body movements, bending his head, bowing his shoulder to one side and then to another as he wanted different sections of the orchestra to pay attention and when he wanted the relevant section of the orchestra to play quietly, he would raise his left hand gently to  his lips to indicate what he wanted from the orchestra. It was really quite funny to watch him acknowledging the applause of the audience. He would bow down his head many times and as he did so, he bowed so low that we could not see his face at all but only the curls of his brownish red frizzy hair bobbing up and down like the tentacles of a sea anemone being pushed here and there by some transient underwater currents. I was quite a spectacle to watch those undulating waves of frizzy curls from the hedgehog jerking up and down but not his face, which only periodically re-appeared when he raised his head high enough.

Beethoven's No. 1 Piano Concerto has been played I don't know how many times before by the HKPO . So they gave a very good performance under the baton of Dèneve. Though dubbed No. 1, it was in fact Beethoven's third and one of his most popular. The main themes of the first, second and third movements are all quite familiar to music lovers. The first had a fairly long orchestral introduction but when the piano appeared, it was as if suddenly a new focus had appeared. Lang Lang played in his impeccably flowing style, introducing huge contrasts between the powerful and soft passages. The loud passages were really loud and powerful but the soft passages are played with such soft touch on the relevant keys and with such well timed pauses at the right places that you literally dared not breathe for fear of ruining the magic. And the whole body of Lang Lang would swing into full motion too to help you catch the transient moods of the music between the heroic, the lyrical, the peaceful, the nostalgic parts. Some would say that his motions are too exaggerated. I do not agree. They are there for an artistic purpose. They help us get into the mood of the music so that the pianist's fingers, his body, his gestures, his body postures, the expressions on his face, sometimes lifted up, sometimes ducking low and almost touching the piano keys, and his hand lifted up above and suspended for a little while in the air above the front panel of the piano, beating time with slightly cupped fingers and tracing its melodies along with the swaying of his head, and sometimes all spread out like the wings of little birds in synchrony with the gradually growing volume of the sound and rhythm from the orchestra, are fused with the keys of the piano to become a unified audio-visual instrument for the production of pianistic poesy.The second slow movement opened with a spacious melody which opened up, expanding, expanding and radiating and then disappearing into thin air, containing some of the most beautiful melodies Beethoven has ever written which are endlessly repeated with different variations. So soft, so melodious, so peaceful, so lyrical.  I love it. And the orchestra gave him perfect support. The third movement has a quick and powerful melody and displays the confidence of Beethoven of his own powers with a lively chopping rhythm almost like marching and rapid runs along the keyboards. I like the way Lang Lang emphasized particular notes along a whole string of quieter notes to make them stand out and add a certain structure and to give it a particular rhythm to an otherwise amorphous string of notes. I was a wonderful performance. I expected no less.

After the short break, the music resumed with Gabriel Fauré's Pélleas et Melisande, a story by the romantic German writer Maerterlinck about how a hunter found a lady deep within a forest, married her but never really understanding her and then later killing his own brother Pelléas because he suspected an affair between him and his mysterious wife, who died grieving. The music has 4 sections:  Prelude, fileuse, sicilienne, La Mort de Mélisande. It opened with a slow string theme to depict Mélisande sitting by the stream in the depths of the dark forest and then a cello theme to indicate her discovery by the hunter, his falling in love with her. It's slightly sad with the kind of very subtle and wistful chord changes typical of the impressionist composers and rose and fell in waves of sounds. The second movement depicts Mélisande sitting with a weaver (Fileuse) on a spinning wheel to indicate domestic life and its quiet joy indicated by a lyrical oboe theme. I love the third movement, whose theme I have heard in numerous films before, with its haunting flute theme, answered by the lyre, which has haunted me more than 30 years when I first heard it on the radio whilst I was still a student in France. It's a theme which to me indicates a certain serenity, a little sad, but not too sad, a certain waiting for something, a certain longing for something but you did not know what, and then not having got it, you hope for it again and not getting it again and again and then you gradually learn to accept that condition, as if it were something of Nature, which though beautiful and nice to have but whose absence will not plunge you into eternal despair. It's a most Medieval type of feeling. In my mind's eye, I would imagine a beautiful lady, dressed in a coarse Medieval lady's dress, a bonnet on her head, sitting quietly by the window of a typical peasant's house built of huge greyish blocks with heavy wooden doors, looking at the flower and trees outside on a sunny spring day in a perfectly ordinary afternoon, waiting for the evening return of her husband or lover out on work. A most beautiful and haunting melody. Then there is the final movement depicting the death of Mélisande, here we hear the initial theme from the Prelude turned into the sound of a slightly heavy funeral march.  

The final piece was Liszt's No. 1 Piano Concerto. It's a most unusual concerto because it has only got one movement. Needless to say, Lang Lang probably loved it because it enabled him the fullest scope to display the prowess of his powerful and yet nimble and graceful fingers with its numerous runs, loud chords, powerful and soft sounds, romantic contrasts etc. The concert ended as expected in thunderous applauses. Lang Lang was very graceful in his acknowledgement. He waved and bowed to everybody, including those in the galleries and he gave some of the flowers he received to the lady members of the HKPO and played as an encore one of my favourite Chopin Etudes, during which Lang Lang's fingers coaxed from the piano sounds which ought to be heard only in heaven, as a birthday present to his 82 year old teacher! It was wonderful and to me, a carnival of magic moments! The HKPO under Dèneve was great. So was Lang Lang. And that spelt a very satisfied blogger!