The HKPO's Farewell Concert of the Season

If something is good, nobody ever wants it to stop. For me, one of the best decisions I make every year is to buy the tickets for the entire concert season of the HKPO and unless I was not in Hong Kong, I'd go to every one of them. It's really value for money because the concession rate is not something one can easily ignore. The concert last weekend was the last concert of the season.  So it's with mixed feelings that I attended that "last" concert.
The evening's programme was a mix between three countries separated by the English Channel.
We had Brahm's variations on a theme by Joseph Haydn. There's a story of how the "variations" came about. A German music historian writing a biography of Joseph Haydn who found certain musical manuscripts for a wind octet believed to be by the composer and brought them to Brahms. He was thrilled and immediately wrote down the main theme and then proceeded to use it for two works, one as a piano duet and the other for the orchestra. Modern scholars think that the German historian, Carl F Pohl,was wrong and argued that the work was really a work by one Ignace Jospeh Pleyel, Haydn's pupil. But whatever the truth may be, we got 8 variations and a finale: the main theme in Andante, followed by 8 variations and a finale as follows: 1.Poco piu animato 2. Piu vicace 3. Con moto 4 Andante con moto 5. Vivace 6. Vivace 7. Grazioso. 8 Presto con troppo and Finale. The main theme is a rather catchy theme which I am sure everybody must have heard but I'm not so sure they heard all the variations. Here it is.

We next had the Piano Concerto in G by Ravel.It's a very carefully written work by Ravel, done when he was already 53. This is what he said about it: "I conceived  it as a concerto in the strict sense, and composed it in the spirit of Mozart and Saint-Saens". It's a very light-hearted, and beautiful and almsot magical piece with some usome lilting rhythm and also a bit of solemnity in the second movement which the composer said was a dedication to "scholasticism",perhaps a reference to certain middle age style of music or filled with musical reference to earlier genres. Whatever it means, it's still in the traditional three movement format but with his characteristic feel for tonal textures with a fast first movement, a really slow atmospheric second and a jaunty, joyful and festive third..

This was followed by another virtuoso piece by the same French composer, his Piano for the Left Hand in D major, written specially for a musician who lost his right arm during the first world war. The piece premiered in 1932. It's a bit heavy at the start , perhaps to portray the horrors of war, but as it progressed it became lighter and finally burst out in joy.


The last piece also has an interesting story. It's Elgar's Variations on an original theme, popularly known as "Engima". It's said that Elgar first wrote the piano version in which he would use one variation to indicate the emotional temperament of one of the people his family was familiar with and would ask them to guess who it was. Hence the title "Enigma". He wrote 14 of them. Most of the people of the "puzzle" have since been identified .As far as we are concerned which variation was intended to represent which family friend is not something terribly important. What is of far more important is the variety in mood and rhythm and texture to the variations of the main theme. There's indeed a great deal of mood variation from heavy to light, from joy to sad, sunniness and darkness. steady and flighty and frolicking, solemn and light-hearted  etc.

The evening's guest conductor was Lawrence Foster and the pianist Huseyin Sermet. The applauses said it all. They were both strong and long.The Enigma left me guessing whether the next season's offerings will be as great as those of this season in terms of variety and quality. I already booked the tickets for them. I'll have to keep my fingers crossed, come what may But according to the programme, we'll have Dvorak Cello Concerto in A, his Violin Concerto, Brahms's Symphony Nos.! & 2 and his German Requiem, Mendelssohn's No. 3 and his Violin Concerto, Beethoven's Nos 5 &. 7, Prelude to Wagner's Lohengrin, Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto and his Piano Concerto No.1 Rodrigo's Concerto de Aranjuez, , Shastakovich's Nos.7 & 9  , Sibelius No. 5, Liszt's Piano Concerto Nos 1 & 2, Haydn's No. 90, Saint Saen's Piano Concerto No.2 Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances, Schumann's Symphony No. 4, Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 4 and his Symphony No.1, Mozart's No. 31, Holst's Planetary Suite, Vaugh Williams's Symphony No. 7 (Antartica) and plenty of works by Chopin etc