Frenzy of Applauses at the Cultural Centre

I do not know why. In the past two weeks, the Cultural Centre was stirred into ecstasy. First by Joe Hisaichi and then last Saturday by Sumi Jo. I really ought to have written about this concert much earlier. On Sunday morning. But I was otherwise occupied. Hence the delay. In a sense such a delay is a sign, not of disrespect, but of respect. I wanted to do full justice to the artist. She more than deserves it.

Prior to Saturday, Sumi Jo was just a name. On Saturday night, she became for me, a truly stunning reality. And in more ways than one. She had a self-confidence, an assuredness,  a grace, a charisma, a presence, a technique and a voice of a diva. She appeared on the stage in three Barbie-doll type bare shoulder body hugging dresses, with plenty of folds, plenty of laces, plenty of bold flowers in purple, in gold etc,trailing a full five feet behind her, with heavy make-up, long eye-lashes and Dolly Patton style long curls. And after she finished a song, she would unabashedly but gracefully hug the sheepish conductor and acknowledge the enthusaistic audience's applauses with genuine pleasure. She was an excellent actress too. When she sang, she would seldom stay in one place with one posture, like so many operatic singers, with hand folded below their waist. She would move around, walk to one side, then another, turn her face first in one direction after another, shake or nod or lift her head, open her arms, put them around her heart, lean against the rostrum, look at the audience, the conductor or certain players according to the need. And when she was singing a song about a toy solder, she would  pretend to be and move her arm and her head with the mock rigidity of a meachnical doll requiring constant winding of the spring which the conductor would periodically supply by turning a device which produced a kind of clicking sound to mimick that of the turning of a mechanical spring winding key. Not only was she a singer able to sing in the difficult coloratura style doing vocal trapezes with triple somersaults, she was a first rate operatic actress. No wonder she was in such demand by leading orchestras all over the world and has has more than 50 recordings under her name, including 10 for Erato and many others for DGG, Decca, Universal etc. 

The evening's offering was rich and varied There were in that order Giaoachino Rossini's Overture to Semiramide, Gaetano Donizetti's Linda di Chamonix: O luce di quest'anima, G. F Handel's Rinaldo: Lascia ch'io pianga, Intermezzo of Giacomo Puccini's Manon Lescaut, Vincenzo Bellini's I Puritani: Qui la voce sua soave,  Giuseppe Verdi's Prelude to Act III of La Traviata, Adolphe Adam's Le Torreador: Ah, vous dirai-je, maman, Lehar's The Merry Widow: Vilja's song, Verdi's I Vespri Siciliana and Bernstein's Candide: Glitter and be gay and she gave three encores, including my favourite Bambina Mio. Sumi Jo sang in the piece by Donizheeti, Handel, Puccini, Bellini, Adam, Leha, Verdi and Bernstein.

Rossini's piece is about a complicated story in which a Babylonian Queen Semiramide murdered her husband with help from one Assur, fell in love with a young army commander Arsace, (actually her own son) but the jealous Assur plots to murder Arsace.  Upon discovering that Arsace is her son, the queen tries to stop the fight betwen the two but is by accident, stabbed to death by her own son! The conflict between Assur and Arsace is portrayed by the woodwinds whilst Semiramides's theme is represented by the oboe.

Linda de Charmonix., is the last of Donizetti's 65 operas. Its a story about love. A beautiful young peasant girl's father is offered a mortgage if she will agree to become the mistress of Marquis Boisfleury but he disagrees, sends her to Paris where she falls in love with Carlo, the Marquis's nephew, disguised as a poor painter and plans to get married. But Carlo's mother arranges for him to be married to a noblewoman. When she discovers this, she goes mad and the song is about her declaration of love for Carlo.

Handel's Rinaldo is a story based on Tasso's epic Gerusalemmne liberata at the time of the first Crusade 1096 in Palestine. It tells the story of Arimida, a sorceress who, wishing to protect Jerusalem from being taken by a Christian knight  Rinaldo, disguises herself as his fiancée Almirena, to distract him but  in the process actually falls in love with him and under a cloud full of fire breathing dragons, she captures the real Almirena, with whom her own father falls in love. The song sings of how Almirena, kept inside a garden by Arimida's magic, she expresses her sorrow in thus losing her true lover Rinaldo.

Manon Lascaut, Puccini's third opera, is another love story about the elegant Chevalier des Grieux, in love with a beautiful young student Manon Lescaut, sent to live with a wealthy government minister where she is rescued by Des Grieux but is caught and sentenced to be deported to America. Des Crieux begs the ship's captain to allow him to sail with her but was refused. He is desperate and sings his sorrows and torment in the passionate intermezzo. 

Bellini's I Puitani, is about how Elvira, the daughter of Lord Walton, Oliver Cromwell's  commander of a fortress in the naval port of Plymouth during the English Civil War, falls in love with Arthur, of the opposite camp and is about to get married with him, upon seeing him leaving the fortress with another woman (actually the Queen whom he is helping to escape from the Puritans but covered by a bridal veil as a form of disugise), thought that Arthur was abandoning her for another woman and thus became mad. This again allows ample scope for Sumi Jo to sing like mad!

Verdi's Interlude to his opera La Traviata (The Fallen Woman) talks about Violetta Valery, a Parisian woman who enjoys making love but does not believe in real love, discovers to her horror that she actually loves one of her admirers, Alfredo. The Prelude to the opera's final act describes how Violetta sleeping on her death bed  a few days before she dies from consumption, finally gets a little real peace from her troubled and tumultuous life. His I Vespri Siciliani: Spring portrays a ball to celebrate Spring in an city full of intrique because it was occupied by the French where the son of its French appinted governor, who himself was anti-French, is torn between filial loyalty and loyalty to his own anti-French cause, warns his father to escape from his impending assassination at the ball. The song is about the celebration of spring at that ball.

Adam's Le Torreador, his 56th opera, is about how Caroline, the frustrated wife of an old and ugly ex-metador, falls for a young flute player he meets whilst working as a singer in Paris. Her young lover follows her to Barcelona where he intends to elope with her. It's a comedy, unlike Bizet's Carmen. The song is a variation of the familiar French nursery rhyme on the alphabet we are all familiar with, "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star"  or "ABCDEFG", in which there is great scope for the display of the singer's coloratura style as the same theme is sung in a huge number of variations. In the song, Caroline is trying to tell her flute player in coded messages how she cannot live without him because her husband is around.

In Lehár's Merry Widow, Hanna, a recently widowed intent on finding a new husband attends a Parisian ball and there sings of her Montenegrin homeland and her lost love whom, unbeknown to her, she is about to meet again.

Bernstein's Candide is based on Voltaire's episodic satiric novel about the falsity of Leibnitz's mindlessly optimstic philosophy that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Here in this song, Candide is about to meet with his cousin Cunegonde who taught him the pleasures of the flesh but who was captured by the invading Bulgarians who killed off everyone in Westphalia and sold Cunegronde off as a prostitute in Paris. The song Glitter and Be Gay, is about a Parisian party where Candide will again meet up with Cunegronde and where the latter sang about her true lost love. 

The evening's song selection is an excellent kaleidoscopic display of the very different singing styles (from bel canto to all types of coloratura style of singing) for Sumi Jo, who obviously enjoyed every bit of the singing. She sang with passion, with obvious enthusiasm for every one of the songs she sang for us, animating each with her very rich facial expressions, gestures and stage movements. She has won the hearts of all and turned everyone who listened to her that evening. She drove us into an almost involuntary frenzy of applauses. It was a thoroughly enjoyable evening. It's what singing is all about! She too was so happy with her reception that she gave us three encores! The HKPO under Zhang Guoyong, the President and Artistic Director of the Shanghai Opera House and who studied under Huang Xiaotong and Gennadi Rozhdestvensky with a passion for the opera, gave a marvellous orchestral accompaniment to the superb singing of Sumi Jo. It was a wonderful evening of opera arias that magically banished in slightly more than two hours all the stresses of my work for the entire week!