Spanish Night

It's been a while since I attended a concert. I did so Satruday night. Whilst there was a violin concerto by Sibelius, the bulk of the night's programme by the HKPO under guest Finnish conductor Hannu Lintu was Spanish music, although only one of them was by a Spanish composer.

The first piece was  the Hong Kong premiere of Magnus Lindberg's Feria (meaning festival in Spanish), composed for the BBC Proms and first performed in the Albert Hall by Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Jukka-Pekka Saraste in August 1997. The music opens magnificently with a five-note motif by the brass section, which keeps recurring from time to time with slightly different variations but always no less rousing, accompanied by some almost jazz-like percussions. It is soon joined by the strings which plays with a more intimate melody. But the music always returns to the brass motif which ends the piece in full force. One feels in this piece the excitement of the colorful Spanish town festivals with its admixture of the grotesque with the serious, with its huge effigies, boisterous singing, uninhibited dancing, boozing and merry making. The music captures with almost cartoon like exaggeration a little of that strange weirdness of the mixture of Spanish and Nordic imagination, with huge contrasts matching the size of its outlandish effigies in a very big sound and always with a strong rhtythm, with softer echoes from time to time.

The second piece was a piece rather seldom played in Hong Kong. It was the famous Finnish composer's Sibelius's Violin Concerto in D minor, first premiered in 1904 originally for Burmester. In many ways, it was a very unusual violin concerto, not easy to play at all. It opens with a rather unusual theme, which was answered by the orchestra. One can feel from the moment one the piece starts its unusual Nordic sentiment which gradually builds up to a climax, followed by long cadenza and then resumes it energetic close. The slow second movement was a complete contrast, being quite soft and personal. The third movement was fast,  energetic and again rather brusque, noisy with rather strained and stressed part for the violin, full of unease and tension, evident from the accompaniment which jolts along along in a rather ominous rhythm which moves faster and faster until its heavy and sudden climactic conclusion. The violinist of the evening was the young Min Lee, who appeared in an emerald green bare shoulder night gown with her hair tied back into a ponytail which would swing to and fro as she moved her head along with the music. The programme note says that she is "Singpore's poster girl of classical music,". She gave her first public performance at age 5, is a student of Rick Friedman who took lessons from both Jascha Heifetz and Nathan Milstein, two very different styles of playing the violin. She graduated in 2000 and  has since appeared with the Royal Philharmic, Vienna and Prague Chamber Orchestras, NHK Symphony and St. Martin in the Fields, the Russian Philharmonic, Malaysian Philharmonic, the Singapore and Adelaide and San Diego Symphony orchestras. Her playing was energetic and passionate and brought out well the feeling in the rather jerky work. She played as an encore a variation on an American folk song.

The second half of the programme was Manuel de Falla's Three Cornered Hat Suite No.2. consisting of the Neighbor's Dance (in Seguidillas), the Miller's Dance (in Farruca) and the Final Dance (as an Jota) and then Ravel's Rhapsody Espanole which starts with Prélude  á la nuit, followed by Malagueña, Habeñera and Feria.

The music was supposed to be for a ballet by the Russian ballet producer Diaghilev. The music took the form of three types of Flamenco dances, the seguillas, the farruca and the jota. Hi Fi enthusiasists in Hong Kong are all familiar with both the Three Cornered Hat Suite No, 2, Ravel's Rhapsody Españole because they were the subject matter of two of the hottest hi fi discs amidst the older generation of those who are fascinated with sound quality. The two pieces need little introduction because of their very rich sonic effect, huge dynamic range and the brass in full blast. Under the baton of Hannu Lintu, the HKPO gave an absolutely stunning performance, with complete control of the soft passages and the bombastic passages, performing with almost absolute precision. Lintu has a very vigorous conducting style, with huge arm movements and abrupt switches of his almost rigid body posture. No wonder he managed to coax from the HKPO the kind of sound that he wanted. I seldom heard the HKPO perform with more vigor. It was an absolute delight to hear the concert hall filled for the evening with the hot flamenco sound of Spain, with its A minor, G, F and E flamenco chords, meandering romantic melodies and the twinge of melancholy of the flamenco style of music with its castanets and its full complement of percussions. Lintu is the current artistic and chief conductor of the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra and a regular guest conductor of the Finnish Radio Symphony and Avanti Chamber Orchestra. really look forward to him conducting the HKPO again.