Colours of Marima

Marimba is an instrument much used in South American music. it's not that often that we find it in a "classical" concert. But we did, at the HKPO concert at the City Hall Saturday evening. The programme that night is not the kind we are likely to get everyday. We had a piece I heard for the first time that evening. It's Bright Sheng's Colours of Crimson.

According to the Programme Note, Shanghai-born Sheng entered the Conservatory of Music there in 1978 to study composition, then emigrated to America in 1982 and has since written operas, symphonies, chamber, instrumental, choral and vocal pieces. The composition we had that evening was commissioned by the Luxembourg Philharmonic Orchestra and was composed for Evelyn Glennie, the famous drummer, first premiered in Luxembourg in September 2004. The piece was written whilst he was in Qinghai using local folk melodies. I don't know why he used the mirimba as its solo instrument in this piece, whose sound he enriched by using orchestral accompaniment. It sounds a bit strange to my ears. Apart from its novelty, it didn't sound particularly appealing to me. But it's good that someone tried to think outside of the box of tradition.

We next had another very lively piece, Bartok's Dance Suite BB86a. It also employed traditional folk song elements, but this time, such materials came from Hungarian folk music. Bartok didn't actually use any melody but merely used certain motifs in such music. The result is a very powerfully rhythmic.One feels the force of eeriness and even darkness in the piece. Some has suggested that the dance concerned is the dance of elves and gnomes. I don't know about that. But it certainly elicited different kinds of moods in me.

The mood of the next piece was entirely different. It was light and fun. We had Darius Milhaud's Le boeuf sur le toit (The ox over the Roof), actually the name of a bar in Paris and was originally composed as the background music to Jean Cocteau's pantomine of the same name. it is full of South American liveliness because Milhaud was then the cultural attaché to Brazil at the time he wrote it. Milhaud actually gave the piece a sub-ttile "Cinema-Fantasie on South American Themes". It is supposed to reflect Cocteau's slaptick of a huge black boxer being knocked out by a tiny looking bookmaker, a tall transvestite who picks up a black dwarf and carries him into the billiard room for you know what, and a police coming into the bar to enforce Prohibition laws being beheaded by a falling ceiling fan after dancing a tango! It was completely mad, as the title suggests.
 
The last piece we had was an American jazz standard; Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue but with a twist: pride of place was given to the marimba, played by Pius Cheng, who is excellent and obviously enjoyed himself thoroughly.  The conductor of the evening was a new face to me, Singapore's Johua Tan who says that "there is a tantalizing and kaleidoscopic array of styles in this concert". I can't agree more with him. The HKPO was excellent as usual, especially the brass and percussion sections. Although I was a bit tired after having seen a movie in the morning and did some photographing in the afternoon, it was well worth my while. I enjoyed the music.