Apotheosis of the Dance

It's been a while now since I last attended a HKPO concert because I was away.  I did so last night. I had two surprises. The first related to a rising violinist star from Chengdu called Feng Ning and the other to a young German guest conductor called Andreas Delfs. According to the programme notes, Feng was the winner of the Premio Paganini 2006 who learned violin first in Sichuan and then the Royal Academy of Music at London and Hochscule fur Musik Hanns Eisler in Berlin Delfs studied with Christoph van Dohnanyi and Also Ceccato at the Hamburg Conservatory and then at the Juillard and now works mainly in America, having been the Music Director and its Laureate Conductor for 12 seasons.

The night's programme started with a work I never heard before. It was a piece with some very insistent theme, played by various sections of the orchestra sometimes alone, other times in the background and all together at the climaxes and  mini-climaxes, with a peculiarly Spanish rhythm of the Fandango, after which the piece was named and of course with the very typical chord progression of the flamenco sometimes, with the full complement of percussive instruments like drums, timpanis, cymbals and rapid hits of the castanets. When I looked at the programme, I discovered the composer. R Sierra, a Venezuelean who learned music in Paris. I like the color of the music of South American composers. You will never find their music dull. Sierra is in the excellent tradition of Piazzolla.

The next piece was a popular violin concerto, the Violin Concerto No. 1 of Paganini which hardly needs any introduction. But although formally it was supposed to be in E flat major, yet in practice it is played in D to facilitate fingering for the strings. Feng is a youngish musician with a very Northern Chinese face,  fair skin,  extremely round features with a similarly shaped body, a bit like Lang Lang except that his eyes are not so big. As the man, so the music. He plays a smooth silky sound, never shrill nor fierce, always controlled although I wish that he would have played with a bit more fire in certain passages. I particularly like the way he played Alhambra, one of his encore pieces ,originally written for the guitar. But I suppose it would have been well nigh impossible to produce the bass counterpoints as strongly as they are plucked by the thumb in the guitar version. 

The last piece was a bit of surprise because the orchestral accompaniment to the violin concerto was not particularly impressive. I think Delfs really put his all into this piece. You can see him getting all excited about the piece, Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 in A. Op 92, one of the favorites of  music lovers. Delfs would tense his body up, squeezing himself into a dwarf in the soft passages and then jabbing  his fingers at the relevant section of the orchestra in lightning like speed to signal their entry, raising both his arms to wave in the air in the climaxes and swaying his whole body in sync with the intensity and rhythm of this powerful piece of music by Beethoven. He really kept the structure of the music extremely well. I like in particular the way he conducted the soft sounding passages. They were soft without losing the clarity of the lines. He marshaled the HKPO like a combination of Celibadache and Kleiber. Well almost. It was close enough. Needless to say, the audience were ecstatic about the rousing and forceful ending. A very good concert indeed. But there will probably be another superb concert tonight. I am all excited now about this evening' performance by the visiting Vienna Philharmonic.