A Triple Beauty

The HKPO concert tonight was one I went to with great expectations. It introduced one relatively and one absolutely new piece of music to me and one very familiar piece. The relatively seldom heard piece was Leos Janacek(1854-1928)'s Taras Bulba, the absolutely new piece was Sebastian Currier's Time Machines, in fact, its Asian premiere.The familiar piece was Felix Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E Minor Op 64 but it was played by one of my favorite violinists Anne-Sophie Mutter. Everything happened under the baton of Michael Francis.

The first piece, Taras Bulba, was a programmatic sort of music about the deaths of three Cossacks during the Cossack-Pole war of 1628 based on a romantic nationalist tale about Cossacks written by the Russian writer Gogol. Bulba has two sons, Ostap and Andrey, who fell in love with the daughter of a Polish nobleman, the governor of Kovno.The cossacks under his father were then beseiging the Polish Dubno Castle but Andrey's Polish girl friend led him to see how her compatriots starved. As a result of that secret visit, he brought them bread and joined their cause against his own father because he was horrified by what he saw. He encountered his son at a wood and then killed him by a bullet at point blank range. After killing many of the Jewish merchants
at the Sich, the Cossacks set off on a campaign against the Poles.The battle continues and Ostap is captured by the Poles. Ostap was torn by a wheel but didn't make a sound but at his last moment called out for his father, who hiding amidst the town crowd at the public square, answered and then slipped away. Taras  Bulba continued to fight the Poles and met his death at a ruined fortress. He's nailed to a tree and then burnt alive. In the music, the first death was that Andrei, the son who in love with a Polish gir The second describes the death of Ostap, Taras Bulba's second son, captured and tortured by the Poles and then executed at the town square, a death witnessed by his father who mingled amongst the crowd seeking to help his son but left in sorrow after he died. The third death was that of Taras Bulba's own, who himself was captured by the Poles, nailed to a tree and then burnt alive. The music in three movements were sad, violent, boisterous and meditative by turns, interwoven by brief passage of tenderness. It's a very atmospheric piece mingled from time to time by jarring percussions and disharmony.

The second piece by Currier was a fairly short intellectualist piece about the composer's reflections upon the different ways in which time could affect our lives. It's in 6 movements respectively called Fragmented Time, Delay Time, Compressed Time, Overlapping Time, Entropic Time and Backwards Time, playing on the harmonics of violin at often breakneck pace, with different rhythm, tone textures, with movement forward, backward, accelerated, slowed, compressed, concentrating and disintegrating or flowing etc in complex interaction with other parts of the orchestra. It was not a piece for those accustomed to music with traditional introduction, development, variation, recapitulation and resolution etc.

The second half of the programme was a favorite of Mendelssohn and one familiar to all music lovers. The violin concerto, Mendelssohn's last, was first premiered in 1845 in Leipzig where he was conductor of its Gewandhaus Orchestra. Mutter appeared in her by now trade-marked bare back gown but this time in bright red. She remained as beautiful as ever, like her violin and her sound. I just wonder how she is able to manage to keep in such good shape for so many years. She played with delicacy, subtlety, balance and absolute control, yet not without passion. It was a riveting experience. Mendelssohn became alive for me again. I am truly amazed by the versatility of The HKPO under Michael Francis in its ability to produce music of so obvioulsy different styles. It's getting better by the day. Another most satisfying evening.