Perry' So's Symphonie Fantastique

Saturday night at the Cultural Centre was full of surprises, some good, some a little less than good and some indifferent. We had works from three different composers, Fung Lam, Ravel and Berlioz.

The concert began with the Asian première of Unlocking, a work by local composer, Fung Lam, which was commissioned by Radio 3 of the BBC for their Discovery Music program and was first performed in London on 6th May, 2008 by the BBC Concert Orchestra under Charles Hazelwood. According to the composer, it was inspired a multi-layered locked called the "Puzzle Lock" which he saw at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He says, "As the depiction of spiritual enlightenment is the common theme that permeates my serious musical output, it is designed to draw a parallel between the unlocking process and the spiritual journey towards the state of enlightenment."  He divides the work into three sections entitled "Locked" ", Unlocking" "and  "Unlocked". He intends in that work to simulate his step by step discovery through seven layers, rather as one might remove one layer after another of a Russian mitryoshka doll until one reaches the smallest doll at the core of its innermost layer and as he says, "a person often only realizes there is a greater level of enlightenment achievable when the person reaches the level before".  He explains, "The outer sections each used extensively one corresponding chord as the basic material, while the 'unlocking' section was constructed by combining seven unusual pentatonic scales in a certain order determined by a compositional system of my design" like the following 7 x 7  matrix:

              2 4 3 6 7 5 8
              2 4 5 6 7 3 8
              2 6 3 8 7 5 4
              7 4 2 6 5 3 8
              2 6 8 5 7 4 3
              3 7 4 2 8 5 6 
              8 5 2 6 3 7 4

According to Fung, the matrix occupies a role rather like that of the fundamental laws of physics governing an apparently chaotic world. "The system generates sequence of pitches during the compositional process which then in turn forms the basis of the entire final "unlocked" section " and is supposed to worked subconsciously and represents to him the "treasure within" i.e. self-awareness. I can certainly find the the exploration of certain tonal textures , which has been the direction modern compositions have been moving since the time of Schoenberg, Berg, Paart, Glass etc. but it'll probably take many listenings before I can decipher the subtle "hidden structure" that he was talking about. I wonder if I will ever get another chance to do so unless somehow, the concert is recorded and the recording is made available through the radio or some other media format. Whatever may be the case, I'm certainly pleased that some one from Hong Kong is doing some serious musical compositions. because according to the Program Notes, Fung, who was gracious enough to greet the audience at the end of the performance, just turned 32 and apart from this piece, he has also composed Illumination, first premiered in London in 2005, BE 2008 and Yong premiered at the Asian Music Festival in 2010 with the Tokyo Philharmonic and conducted by himself and finally, Rong premiered by Edo de Waart at Shanghai at the World Expo in September 2010.  

The next part of the program were three songs by Ravel from his suite Schéhérasade: Asie, La Flute enchante and L'Indifferent, sung by mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack, who has sung Rosina in Il Babiere di Siviglia, Isabella in L'Italiana in Alegeri, Angelina in La Cenerentola, Siebel in Faust, Idamente in Idomeneo, Lucienne in Die tote Stadt, Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro, Tamiri in Il se pastore with various orchestras around the world. The  pieces were based on three poems inspired by the Tales of the Arabian Nights given to Berlioz by one his fellow nightclub friends who wrote under the pseudonym of Tristan Klingsor, describing in Asie (Asia) images of what to the European mind is the exotic Orient, including its gently rocking ships, Arabian sultans, dusky maidens, greedy merchants, rich mandarins etc. According to the Program Notes, the La Flute enchantée  tells of the story of a young bride who fancies that she hears her true love beckoning her from afar on his flute whilst her husband was asleep whilst L'Indifferent tells of the charms of an adolescent boy. I do not know whether or not it was the acoustic or the nature of the songs she sang or some other reason, somehow I felt that her sound never really opened out. I was not alone in so thinking. My regular concert friends agreed with me.  

The final piece, Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, was by contrast, a truly resounding success and pleased my hi fi friends enormously. This piece has a rather checkered performance history. Because Berlioz did not play any music instrument, many musicians who first encountered it found it unplayable because of the almost impossible playing positions. It was based on Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater and was written after he was rejected by an Irish actress with whom he had fallen madly in love and might have wanted to drown his anger, frustrations and sorrows through this piece of biographical music,  originally entitled "Episode in the Life of an Artist" and was first premiered in Paris in December 1830.  The HKPO played magnificently and with perfect discipline under Perry So but I could hear that it proved rather taxing for the tuba players in certain fortissimo passages.The bell in the final movement was played at one of the entrances on the balcony at stage left!  Perry So and the HKPO drew well deserved thunderous applauses and the young conductor had to came back numerous times to thank the audience.