A short recall of a superb concert

I feel very tired after a very well received talk I gave on the relationship of between the brain and religion earlier this evening following closely upon another gruelling morning in court in Fanling, a lunch with 13 of my old classmates in Wanchai to welcome one just returning  from Canada, a lunch which never lasted long enough for me and then more paper work later at the office. My only consolation is the tip top result I got for my client this morning, one well beyond our wildest hopes. My client;s family was so grateful that both his parents, his wife and he shook my hands one after another for almost an entire minute! But it was such an exhausting day. So I shall only give the briefest concert notes about what I heard last Saturday evening at the Cultural Centre. It was a superb concert by composers from two very different countries and periods, 19th century England and 20th century Russia, linked by nothing except their common passion for art and music.

The concert opened with a work a young Russian composer Otto Nicolai, The Overture of Merry Wives of Windsor, based on a play by Shakespeare about Falstaff who was fooled by mock fairies in a garden. It was a delightful piece with a very catchy melody, lively rhythms and very imaginative use of the different sections of the orchestra. It's the first time I heard this piece. The performance by the HKPO under Oleg Caetani ( a Swiss-born Russian who first studied music under Nadia Boulanger and later at the Santa Cecilia in Rome and thendid a special study of Shastakovich's under Kondrasin at the Moscow Conservatory and later at the St. Petersberg Conservatory) was impeccable.

The next piece was the one of the two highlights of the evening. It was very happy Concerto for 2 Pianos written by Mendelssohn at age 14. It had a long Beethoven like introduction and then entered first one piano, then another. The concerto was first performed by Mendelssohn at his banker father's home with his sister Fanny. The pace was really fast. Mendelssohn is really a child prodigy. I like the delightful melody. It was so filled with vivaciousness and hope and sheer joy in life. There was never a dull moment. It was perfectly handled by a pair of Eurasian twin sisters Michelle and Christina Naughton from America who both showed musical talent early, studied at the Curtis Institute of Music and went on to become successful performers with such orchestras as the New Jersey Symphony, Philadelphia and the Milhaukee Symphony Orchestas. To avoid others being confused, one wore a blue bare back with a shoulder strap and the other without any straps. As twins, their anticipation and synchronisation were perfect and the piece gave ample scope for the display of their flying fingers because quite often, at any one time, only one piano would play the main melody whilst the other only the bass and chordal accompaniment and additional flourishes. Then the pattern would be reversed. Only occasionally would both pianos chimed in at the same time, playing with equal passion and power in the climaxes.

The last piece of the evening was again another Russian composition. It's the famous Shastakovich Symphony No. 5 written by the composer after he was criticized by Stalin for failing to show the glory of the working class but merely displaying corrupted bourgeois values in his earlier opera production of Macbeth . He wrote the symphony as a reply to criticism about him. But he was not without resources. He made fun of Stalin by putting in a march at an accelerated pace towards the end of which it seemed that the soldiers would be almost running instead of marching at a normal pace, as those jumping figures you see in silent movies! You just can´t order artists around like waiters. Shastakovich is simply brilliant, It must be one of his best. The piece has also been done by the HKPO before under de Waart. But under Caetani, the feeling is slightly different. The lower strings seemed to have been emphasized much more so that there was a much richer and less metallic sound. I like it very much. The winds and the brass were simply brilliant and blazed in glorious sound.

It was wonderful way to end a Saturday which started out for me in a black mood. Music transforms. Good music transforms magically. I am so grateful to the HKPO, the Naughton sisters and to Caetani for making that possible.