A Royal Feast from the land of tulips and windmills

For others, Valentine's day may mean candlelight dinners. Not for me. It meant a night at the Cultural Centre. I don't think the quality of the night is any worse though. It was one of the most satisfying concert experiences that I have had for quite some time. It was a sonic feast from the land of tulips and windmills. The Royal Concertebouw Orchestra, one which I first heard in the 1960s in vinyl, had come to Hong Kong. Under the tense baton of Myung-whun Chung, it gave us a perfect rendition of Zoltán Kodaly's best loved pieces, Dances of Galánta. The piece was written to commemorate 80th anniversary of the Budapest Philharmonic and made use of some beautiful folk melodies from Galánta, a part of Hungary in which the composer spent some of his happiest childhood moments. And it tells. It has that typical Hungarian folk rhythm which is so full of freedom and zest for life. Once could literally feel the warmth of the sun and the smells of the prairie,flowers, streams and other surprising and vigorous rural delights of the that dreamland in the music. It has plenty of woodwinds and brass which adds both to the atmosphere and the bombastic joys that the composer felt. The programme notes says this type of music is called verbunkos. Whatever it is called, I love it. It's so full of the joie de vivre of the Magyars.

We next had another favourite concert pieces, Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E performed for us by Janine Jansen which the composer wished to write for his close friend since childhood, Ferdinand David, a violin teacher, who gave him plenty advice. I was so surprised in general by the height of all the members of the Dutch orchestra when I saw them enter but this was nothing until I saw our violinist of the night. I have absolutely no doubt that she would qualify even as a basket ball player. Her violin looked so tiny by comparison. But never be fooled by size. Her rendition of the piece was one of the gentlest that I have heard as she swayed her huge frame, puckered her face and drew away the bow after with force after a particularly passionate passage. Her play was delicate and sensitive. It was a wonderful choice for Valentine's Day. She played for us a piece by Bach(?) as an encore.

The final piece of the evening was Bela Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, a piece of music written at a very unhappy moment in the composer's life. It has extreme contrast between the low and high sounds, both in terms of frequency and intensity of the volume. There are constant switches between the insistent and persistent melody played by the low strings with which the piece opened in soft and slow sound and variations of such a melody by other parts of the orchestra often bursting out suddenly in full force which makes for tremendous tension. Normally, we find concerto only for one principal instrument which would play against the orchestra but in this piece, no one musical instrument predominate and we have a concerto for each of the instrumental sections, something like the concerto grosso of the Baroque period. I like the very atmospheric playing of the orchestra in the slow passages. I like even more the frenzy in which the whole orchestra burst out in full blast in the very discordant sounds of the piece. The programme note is probably right in saying that the piece has lost nothing of its freshness more than 70 years after it was composed in the 1940's.  The applauses at the end was unending. But there was no encore from this orchestras with brilliant wind and brass section more than fully complemented by its strings. It was a truly world class performance with the whole orchestra breathing as one. Simply wonderful!