The King of Instruments (樂器之王)

Last Saturday, the entire Cultural Centre Concert Hall was
reverberating. It was thundering with reverberations of the sound of
what has been called "the king of instruments", one whose potential was
fully exploited by the father of modern music, Johann Sebastian Bach. I
don't know about the fate of that instrument since the days of the
Baroque. One seldom gets to hear it nowadays except during Latin masses
or perhaps in certain worship service at some churches or other. But
that instrument can also produce completely secular music. That's what
happened last Saturday. We had a total of 4 pieces that
evening, 3 of which feature the organ curiously all done not by German but by French composers. 

The
first piece was the fanfare of La Péri by Paul Dukas (1865-1935). La
Péri is a one-act ballet written by Dukas, which premiered in Paris in
1912, commissioned first by the great ballet dancer Serge Diaghilev and
when the ballet was cancelled, by the ballerina Natalia Trouhanova. The
ballet is about Prince Iskender's theft of  the Flower of Eternity, the
key to Paradise guarded by Péri. The prince stole it from her whilst she
was dozing off during the night but when she woke, she danced for the
Prince until she was close enough to him and then snatched it back,
leaving the Prince to his mortal fate. It's a great piece of music with very colorful dialogue between the brass,winds, the strings and the timpani,  .

Next we had another piece by the same composer, this time a most famous
piece and probably his best loved composition "The Sorcerers's
Apprentice", a piece about how the young apprentice, asked to do some
boring cleaning work, conjured the broom to help him bring in water from
the well. He succeeded to get the broom to work but didn't know the
spell to stop it working. As a result, he flooded the master magician's
house and his master to to intervene to stop the flooding. There's an
excellent video of this fairy tale by Goethe which Walt Disney vividly
portrayed in cartoon images in the 1970s film classic Fantasia, complete
with the music.

We finished the first half of the progamme by the Francis Poulenc's (1899-1963) Organ Concerto in G Minor, written in 1938 after the bohemian playboy pianist was shocked into doing serious work by the death of his best friend in a horrible motor accident three years ago and his visit of the house of his late father.  It was a magnificent piece. Some say that it's the best organ concerto since Handel's. The "religious" overtones of this piece can't be mistaken.

Then we had Camille Saint-Saëns' Symphony No. 3 in C minor Op 78, which some calls "The Organ Symphony". In adagio,, Poco Adagio, Allegro Moderator and Maestoso, is written in 1886 by this chief organist of the Eglise Madeleine in Paris for 20 years, commissioned by The Philharmonic Society of London. It's a symphony built on a two simple motifs which are used repeatedly by different sections of the orchestra, in bigger or smaller volume, with variations or modulations etc. The organ was used to produce the famous very low C major chord in the final movement. The symphony is one of Saint Saëns' most popular works. Where the organ is involved, the sound can only be majestic but there can be softer passages of the peculiar continuous sound of that King of Instruments. The concert marks the re-appearance of David Atherton, the Music Director of the HK Phil 1989 -2000 and the guest appearance of an superb Australian organist David Drury, a tall lanky guy who sits in front of the gigantic instrument and played it as if it was a delicate toy. But what sound!