Vadim Repin in HK

Saturday, 2nd April 2011 was a day whose coming I had long anticipated. It was the occasion for the coming to Hong Kong of a noted violinist Vadim Repin. That evening, he played for us Brahm's Violin Concerto in D. Op 77 with the HKPO  under guest conductor Rossen Milanov, the Music Director of the Princeton Symphony Orchestra. But it was then also HKIFF time. I had to see several movies earlier that day and also many other films in the final days of the film festival and then write about them and so did not have time there and then to record how the concert felt to me. 

The violin concerto by Brahms first premiered in Leipzig during the new year concert of 1879 after it had been revised by the greatest violinist in those days Jospeph Joachim. There are 4 themes in the introduction, a lyrical second movement with a dialogue between the oboe and the violin, a third movement with elements of Hungarian music. Repin gave a professional performance but his play appeared a little too restrained for me. I do not know if I was too tired and therefore misheard. Somehow, I felt that he played some notes slightly off and therefore a bit disappointed. He could have played with a little more feeling but he did play with force and energy and control over this very difficult to play violin concerto full of double stops.

The second half of the concert opened with a rather unsusual work by a talented Chinese composer Zhou Tien called The Palace of Nine Perfections, first premiered 2004 by the Curtis Sumphony. The symphony was inspired by certain feelings Zhou experienced whilst watching a 1691 Chinese ink painting by the Chinese painter Yuan Jiang. In this piece, Zhou made use of some fairly contemporary composing techniques like silences, dissonances and plenty of percussions, a cross-over of Chinese feelings and imagery in a Western musical garb. It is an interesting work. However it is always diffcult to be moved by such contemporary music because its sound may not always be intended to convey continuity but discontinuity and rupture more than just connection, discord as well as harmony. My friends liked it much less than I did.

The final piece was Dvoraks'  Nature, Life and Love, written by him in 1892, actually a set of three overtures which were published as Opus 91, 92 and 93. It has a very lively rhythm and is bursting with energy and power. According to Otakar Sourek, Dvorak's biographer, In Nature's Realm, originally called Solitude, represented "Man's gradual awareness at the end of the day of the vibrations of the inner voice of Nature." .The next item was The Carnival Overture which is said to depict a man having fun at country fair but then realizes that true joy can only come from the beauty of Nature itself but still cannot abandon the fun at the fair and who then returns to it. It is a sonata with a slow movement between the exposition and the development. The final piece Othello is based on Shakespeare' play of the same name and there are various themes representing Othello's jealousy, Desdemona begging Othello to believe that she has not been unfaithful, the rage within the breasts of Othello, his passion and finally his remorse for having killed Desdemona. Overall, the music was full of verve and energy. Milanov conducted the HKPO quite well. But listening after having seen three films earlier that day, there were occasions when my mind wandered away on its own. However the forceful ending of Othello was sufficient to wake up any man.