Saturday Surprises

As I am never tired of repeating, life is really full of surprises for those with an open mind. I attended another concert of the HKPO on Saturday night and met with a number of surprises. One concerns an artist, the other concerns a composer and a third concerns the quality of the music and a fourth concerns my concert friends. All are equally pleasant except one.

The evening's programme at the City Hall consists of works by two Czech composers and a Finnish composer. They are respectively the Czechs Leos Janácek, Antonín Dvorák and the Finn Jean Sibelius. The HKPO under Perry So performed Janácek's Zárlivost (Jealousy),  Dvorák's Violin Concerto in A minor Op 53 and Sibelius' Symphony No. 2.

I have heard of works by Janácek before but it was the first time that I heard Zárlivost. This piece was originally the overture to an opera of the same name which however had been so completely re-written by the composer that it was no longer suitable to the actually completed work and was therefore again revised by the composer as an independent work. According to Horbrough, who wrote a study of Janácek's works, "It is altogether too forceful and self-contained to be a suitable introduction to the opera.". I agree. It was a very forceful and dynamic piece of music. The jealousy of the title refers to the story in Jenüfa, originally written by a Czech writer Gabriela Preissová, first staged at the National Theatre in 1890 , a story about an old woman who lives with her grandson Steva and his half brother Laca in a lonely mill deep in the Moravian countryside. The stepdaughter of the village sacristan, the beautiful Jenufá was pregnant by Steva and they were planning to get married but Laca too was passionately in love with her and slashed her face to make her unattractive to his half-brother. In the music, there is a constant five-note drumbeat to signal the turning of the village mill-wheel whilst the French horn and other winds play motifs to signify the tension between the two half-brothers in a pastoral setting. The piece figures the theme of conflict, repeated with variations, with the entire orchestra being engaged but always with strife and energy. It is a very colorful melody and is always very noisy. You get the sense of unrest throughout the piece although of course, the tension was higher and more explosive in some parts  than in others. But there is almost no respite to the tension. It was a very richly orchestrated melody and  my first surprise of the evening.

The second piece was Dvorak's Violin Concerto. The concerto was written between July and September 1879 but was substantially revised by Joseph Joachim, then the most respected violinist of the day. Therefore there were many virtuoso passages engaging to the full all the techniques of the violin. The first movement started with the orchestra announcing the principal and quite forceful first motif but almost immediately it was introduced, the violin took over centre stage and the process was repeated a number of times and similarly for the second much more tender and soft motif very far into the first movement. The second movement consists of one of the softest and most romantic motifs of the piece which the young violin soloist of the evening, a rising star from the PRC, Yang Tianwa, fully brought out. According to the programme notes, she said she was very impressed by the melancholic folk elements involved in this movement. Like Mendelsohn's violin concerto, the first and second movements were played without a break. The third movement was much faster, with a much stronger rhythm and figuring two different types of rhythms of Czech folk dances, the Furiant and then the Dumka which give it a very lilting quality. I do not know what kind of violin was used by Tianwa, it sounded to my ears to have a very warm sound. I like in particular the sound of its G and D strings but its E string seemed to lack a little sparkle. However, its sound was perfectly suited to this piece. I was surprised how well Tianwa played. I do not know the title of the encore piece she played. It sounded quite contemporary to me and involved numerous double-string playing and she played with much more verve. I like it. She was my second surprise of the evening.

The last piece of the evening was Sibelius's Symphony No. 2 in D. Sibelius is a Finn but his parents came from Sweden. Scandinavian music has a quality all its own, quite unlike music from say, Germany or even Russia. When I listened to the symphony, the images conjured up in my  mind were the deep fyords, stark cliffs rising abruptly from crystal clear water, rows and rows of coniferous trees lining the sides of snow covered mountain tops, the roundish fronts of glaciers terminating abruptly amongst sharp craggy rocks, interspersed occasionally by small green meadows and gushing mountain streams, with little bright red or yellow flowers in spring or summer, either clear sky of limitless blue or a sky full of constantly swirling clouds whose shapes would change according to the speed of high velocity winds of the upper atmosphere, pelted by sheets and sheets of snow or sleet, sweeping across the air in waves after waves according to the strength of the cuttingly cold gusts hurtling in from the poles, strange light of weird colors of the aurora borealis sweeping the horizons in unsteady waves, ice crystals or icicles hanging from the tips of pine needles or the finger-like fir leaves, boats rising and falling amongst the crests of thousands of bubbles and sprays of white foam, moving grimly forward amongst huge billowing waves in search of cod or lobsters in the blinding sleet or snow. You hear waves upon waves of sheet-like sound, coming from the various sections of the orchestra mostly together but sometimes with high notes which keep moving in the upper registers of the strings and seem never to touch ground and only occasionally from an oboes, the bassoons, the flutes and in the third movement the plucking or bowing of the double bass and/or cello cords etc introducing certain fresh motifs to punctuate the sheets of sound. Thus the first movement gives a feeling of the milder meadows and bliss of the countryside and the second supplies a rather more vigorous rhythm like those of movement of the clouds and elements. The third is more lyrical and the fourth more heroic.

It certainly seems odd that such huge sounds were produced by a tall and lanky Chinese conductor whose stature resembles more that of a cardboard figure than someone with a rather more substantial body.  But appearance is deceptive. He managed to produce some very solid and well controlled sound from the HKPO and in doing so, he would lift his heels a full 6 inches above the floor of the podium, with huge movement of his arms, and often would bow his body down almost a foot from his full height to indicate the need to play more softly and delicately. I like especially the climax of final movement during which the brass, the oboe, the clarinet, the horns were used uninhibitedly to blare to the utmost limits of its sound. It was a fitting dramatic close to the piece.

How well the HKPO played and how fresh the music from Finland sounded and how few of my friends came to enjoy the concert with me (just Hi Fi Chan and me) were my last surprises of the evening!