Cockaigne & Chinautriche

I was busy reading Chinese poetry Sunday and had to attend a talk on hypnotherapy last night, so the Cockaigne, Chinautriche and Chinglish experience at the Cultural Centre last Saturday had to wait till this morning. The HKPO concert was again conducted by Atherton. He started off with a piece with a rather unusual name by the English composer Edward Elgar: Cockaigne, which the Programme Notes says was supposed to depict various scenes seen by the composer in London, Cockaigne being Elgar's own way of making the familiar local dialect of the London's Eastenders' sound a bit French! To make the title less obscure, he subtitled it "In London Town". It was a very colorful piece with a full range of soft, romantic passages with grand, solemn and ceremonious sounding passages and interspersed with light humourous and fun filled passages to record various aspects of daily life in a London at the height of the Empire upon which it is claimed the sun would never set, like lovers having rendezvous in churches, children following military bands around and the street cries of pedlars in London's busy streets.

Next we had Franz Joseph Haydn's Keyboard Concerto in D, Hob. XVII:11 with the three movements in Vivace, Un poco adagio and Rondo all" Ungherese (Hungarian) or Allegro assai. This piece was written by Haydn for the daughter of Hartenstein, the Imperial Chief Postmaster in a private concert in Vienna on 20th February, 1780. The first movement started with the strings playing the main theme followed quickly by the piano, played this time by another rising star from the PRC, Ran Jai, a solidly built fair skinned young Chinese lady who appeared in a bare top rose red dress with a smattering of black polka dots who entered the stage in wide confident steps. She started to learn the piano as a hobby at age 3 in Sichuan, grew to like it,  then studied at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and later under Gary Graffman at the Curtis Institute of Music, was sensitive to the composer's intentions which she would study (her father Jia Da-qun, being a noted Chinese composer) and thought that music will help her both to understand her inner self better and to give joy to the audience. The second movement was very melodious whilst the third definitely had some Hungarian fire in it, being in fact taken from a Croatian folk melody. As always, there is that typical Haydn's gaiety in the piece. Ran Jai's play was quite powerful but can also be delicate if needed. 

Haydn's keyboard work was followed by Mozart's Concerto Rondo for piano and orchestra, also in D, K382.This is one of Mozart's most popular short pieces. It's a piece based on a simple motif which is endlessly repeated but with 10 variations. I wished that the sound were less loud  in places to produce rather more dynamic contrast. To me, somehow, there seem a slight imbalance in the sound with rather too much bass and cello sound and not sufficient sound in the higher registers making the music bottom heavy. I would prefer a lighter treatment to give that Mozartian sparkle to the music.

The final piece of music that evening was by Ralph Vaughan Williams.This was the first of his symphonies without a title, the first three being "Sea", "London" and "Pastoral", first performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Sir Adrian Boult on 10th April, 1935: the No. 4 in F minor in Allegro, Andante moderato, Scherzo in allegro molto and Finale con Epilogo Fugato in Allegro Molto. According to the composer, the symphony was his continuation of Beethoven's No. 9. He made use of the four notes of the discord in the opening of the fourth movement of Beethoven's No.9  as the basis of his entire symphony. But it was a powerful opening. The second was a bit more reflective and the third has been described as "fantastic and uncanny" but I don't think so. The fourth is a rousing march like movement full of energy and bombasts.

It was a bit lonely to be sitting at the back without any of my usual friends but I suppose I was not alone in feeling so. When I cast my eyes around, many of the familiar faces in the balcony were not around either. But overall, the peformance of the HKPO was much better than theirs last week. I can't complain.