The HKPO concert on 19th was entitled "Spirit of the Sea". The sea has always fascinated me. There is nothing in this world as gentle as the sea as it washes the sand and pebbles of a tiny beach on a calm day. Yet there is nothing as violent as the sea at the height of a storm in the Pacific or the Atlantic with waves pounding against the sides of ships in waves 15 to 20 feet or more high as our biggest vessels bob up and down like tiny corks in a whirlpool. We had bits of both at the "spirit of the sea" concert at the Cultural Centre, The first sea bit came from the talented Benjamin Britten. It's from his opera, "Peter Grimes", about the sad fate of a Suffolk fisherman of the same name who was accused of causing the death of his young apprentice at sea owing to his negligence and has since lived as an outcast in his community. The opera, based on a poem by George Crabbe on Suffolk, opened in London in summer of 1945. We had the four "Sea interludes" of the opera, depicting programmatically respectively Dawn, Sunday Morning, Moonlight and Storm. They were amongst the most popular of Britten's works. Let's hear them again.
With the second piece, we got a complete change of mood by that master of atmosphere and programme music, the "impressionist" Debussy with his depiction of the different moods evoked in him by the sea in three different movements of La Mer (The Sea) : de l'aube a midi sur la mer (from dawn to midday over the sea) Jeux de vague (play of waves) and Dialogue du vent et de la mer (dialogue of the wind and the sea) with his typical ambiguous half tones to simulate the fuzzy boundaries between the end of one musical phrase and the start of the second, so that they appear to merge together in a hazy intermingling and interweaving of the waves allowing only the play of light upon their surface in either the morning fog or heavy mist or the shimmering of light reflected from upon the surface of the restless sea.
In this first movement, we get an impression of the ceaseless undulation of the waves and the light bouncing off the surface of the sea shimmering in millions of tiny pellets of unsteady light, the sound growing steadily stronger as we reach midday to simulate the tide getting stronger.
At the concert and as written there is no break between the first and second movements. Here in the first movement, Debussy imitates the glistening surface of the sea through the bright sounds of string, the harp and celesta and the second movement continued right after the "end" of the first without any breaks at all
In the third movement the brass seem to be used to imitate the agitation of the sea represented by the sound of the strings, under the sun
Then we had Brahm's first Piano Concerto in D minor Op 15,first performed in January 1958. It began quite dramatically and then carried on a long time, waning soft and then strong again before the piano enters almost quietly to answer to the theme in the introduction and then develops it, not without its own drama. Then the second movement in Adagio harps back to the opening theme and in the third movement in Allegro non troppom in Rondo form concludes magnficently in D major.We had Johannes Wildner as guest conductor and Garrick Ohlsson as the piano soloist. Wildner is a very experienced conductor and got the HKPO to produce the kind of sound he wanted and Ohlsson a huge man who surprised me most with the delicacy of his touch and tones in some passages. I was so grateful for the music the two of them brought to me that evening.
Then last weekend, we had something completely different. The first piece that evening, under our new resident conductor Japp was a famous piece by Respighi, "The Fountains of Rome"., another piece of programme music in the form of the so-called "symphonic poems", depicting in that order the Fountain of Valle Giula at Daybreak, the Triton Fountain in the Morning, the Trevi Fountain at Midday and The Fountain of the Villa Medici at dusk. Again 4 very different moods.
Our next piece in that evening was a most rarely heard piece, a flute concerto because the flute has not been very popular musical instrument until Debussy made it more so with Après midi d'un faune but since then the French seem to have adopted it as one of their most popular musical instruments in that country and certainly the French had a superb flute player in the form of Jean Pierre Rampal. In any event, as far as I recall, the only flute concerto I previously heard was one by Mozart and that was a really long time ago. Our solo flautist that evening was a lady called Marina Piccinini from Toronto, who studied there and then at Juillard before going to Switzerland. According to the programme notes, she is a 36th generation of Shaolin Fighting Monk! I wonder if she learned chi gong and if so, whether that helped her to be so flexible with that easy to learn but most difficult to perfect musical instrument requiring very subtle micro-movement of the muscles of her oral cavity and her lips. She was simply incredible. The piece she played for us was the Flute Concerto by the French composer Jacques Ibert, who wrote one concerto for each of four instruments cello, oboe, alto saxophone and flute. The flute piece was first premiered in 1934. I don't know much about flute playing except the complaints my younger daughter about how difficult it is to coax from that instrument the kind of sound that one wants. But Piccinini certainly seem to have no difficulties at all and produced some very fast notes without any interruption to catch her breath, an absolute virtuoso(a?)! . And she played with beautiful tones!
The final piece of the evening was a completely different kind of work. It was Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 3 in 5 instead of the usual 4 movements: Moderato assai (Tempo di marcia funebre)--allegro brillante, Alla tedesca (Allegro moderato e semplice), Andante elegiaco, Scherzo (Allegro vivo) and finally Allegro con fouco--tempo di polacca. Perhaps because the last movement has elements of the Polonaise in it, the symphony has sometimes been called Tchaikovsky's "Polish" Symphony. It was a symphony which took Tchaikovsky only about a month to write in the summer of 1875 whilst he was with friends in the Ukraine. Its movement traces the passage from gloom and doom to breaking forth in joy, opening with a funeral march and got lighter as it moved along. The second is in the form of a German dance music, the third a sad and calm movement, the fourth has elements of playfulness of depression in it whilst the final is definitely cheerful,and getting faster and faster and more and more powerful until it slows a little to catch it breath just before final few bars so that one can leave the concert hall feeling as if its sounds were still continuing despite the end of the concert. It was a wonderful performance. We had to clap our approval for a really really long time!
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