Bird-like flautist & the HKPO

The Saturday evening HKPO concert under de Waart was an altogether exceptional experience in more ways than one. None of the evening's pieces were the kind of works one hears at the more "popular" concerts. De Waart has chosen for us: Barber's Adagio for Strings, Op 11. Guo Wenjing's Bamboo flute Concerto No. 2 ( Wildlife) Op. 51 and Copland's Symphony No. 3.

The American composer Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings started life as part of a string quartet and was only later adapted for the orchestra upon the suggestion of Arturo Toscanini who premiered it in New York at the end of 1938. It has since been used as the song of mourning upon the death of two American presidents Roosevelt and Kennedy and has also been used as the theme song of two films David Lynch's The Elephant Man and Oliver Stone's Platoon. It has a slow steady haunting three phrase melody which was repeated at progressively higher notes, each time one tonal interval higher and then another  4 notes higher and then descends again and then repeats itself again with minor variations but never seem to quite reach its home note, thus giving a sense of hope amidst sorrow, opening towards something on high like the kingdom of heaven. And its broad and steady sound gives one a sense of looking out from the top of the mountains over the broad and rolling plains of the American mid-West before they reach the Rockies after a natural calamity like a hurricane or a disastrous flood. A most haunting piece which has a way of lingering in one's brain long after one has heard it.

The next piece has a completely different feel. It was a piece by one of the most versatile modern Chinese composers called Guo Wenjing (郭文景) , who already had 50 other pieces of works under his name to date, including some 40 odd scores for films and television shows e.g Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles (千里走單騎) by Chang Yimou (張藝謀), In the Heart of the Sun (陽光燦爛的日子) by Jiang Wen (姜文). But his music sounds less like melodies, more like phrases than sentences. There are constant contrasts between the bamboo flute parts and the orchestras which seem to play more against than with each other. It is by no means an easy listening piece. It has a  very "contemporary" feeling.  All I can say after listening to it is that it takes a bit of time to digest what the composer is trying to do. It is certainly not a love at first sight kind of music.The flute was played by Tang Jungquio (唐俊喬), a dizi (bamnbo flute) virtuoso who featured as the solo flutist in Tan Tun's (譚盾)Crouching Tiger Concerto (臥虎藏龍協奏曲 ) and Yang Qing's (楊青)Cong (蒼), a dizi (笛)concerto for the Chinese folk orchestra and Tang Jiangping's (唐建平) Feige (飛歌) , dizi concerto and Zhu Shiri's (朱世瑞)  Tianwen (天問) another dizi concerto. She has already played in Guo's First Bamboo Flute Concerto(竹笛協奏曲,) one of the most played concertos the Chinese folk orchestra. She has already played with many world famous orchestras like the BBC Sypmhony, London Symphony, Royal Philharmonic, Orchestra National de France, Hambourger Symphoniker etc. She manages to use the flute in some very novel ways which I never heard before. Apparently she is not using the traditional pentatonic type of flute and is certainly a master of the instrument. This is apparent in the encore piece she played in which she was trying to imitate the sound of birds. I like her dresss, an bare top evening gown of Chinese silk in lake green with big floral pattern. She is obviously an expert player and manages to coax some very different sound from this basically very simple instrument by the speed and the force with which she injects air into the instrument.

The final piece of the evening was Symphony No. 3 by another American composer Aaron Copland written by him between 1944 and 1946. It was Copland's masterpiece. According to the Programme Notes, he abandoned the usual sonata form in the first movement and used three arch-like distinct themes by first strings, then violas and oboes and finally one by trombones and horns. In his premiere, he described the slow movement, with the direction Andante quasi allegretto, as being the 'freest of all in formal structure. Although it is built up sectionally, the various sections are intended to emerge on from the other in continuous flow, somewhat in the manner of a close-knit series of variations’. The final movement, which I like best, follows the traditional sonata-allegro model again. It opens with a grand announcement of the theme by the magnficent brass sections and then develops into a cacophony of almost jazz like sounds, which is a complete constrast to the grand slow and solemn main theme and then develops into a rousing finale. Listening to the piece convinces me yet one more time, that one really has to go to a concert hall to feel the full impact of music. No matter how good one's hi fi system at home is, it's simply not the same thing to listening to a symphony involving more than 80 players with full range of brass in a concert hall. It is difficult for any hi fi system to properly handle so many instruments playing at the same time. The immediacy and the "in the face"  feeling of the music is simply gone! I do not know whether or not it is true. It seems to me that America seems to inspire composers to write melodies in which the notes are long, steady, sustained, broad, grand instead of short, delicate, with tiny twist and turns. I got this feeling listening to Barber's piece as well as Copland's piece and even Dvorak's New World Symphony. That is certainly the feeling that I got when I visit the Grand Canyon and the Yellow Stone Park country. Everything is simply huge, primitive, simple and appear limitless!