Jaap & Benedetti (梵志登與班娜德蒂)

Chinese New Year is almost upon  us. One can feel a certain pre-festival bustle in the streets as everybody quicken their steps in making final preparations for the celebration of this biggest family event of the year. So instead of holding its concert on Fridays and Saturdays, the HKPO advanced its performance one day ahead. That's why I found myself at the Cultural Centre last night. After an absence more than a month, Jaap re-appeared but this time with the famous Scottish-born Italian violinist Nicola Benedetti who won the Best Female Artist award at the 2012 Classic BRIT Awards and is now an MBE.

The concert started with an atmospheric piece, The Prelude to Act I of Wagner's (1813-1883)  romantic opera Lohengrin, which started almost in a whisper from the strings and ended the same way with some tempestuous passages in between. Act 1 is about how Elsa, the sister of Duke of Brabant must have her honour avenged by a duel because she's been accused of murdering her young brother, how she dreamt a knight in shining armour would appear to help her and how at the last minute, after the time for the duel is announced twice by clarion call, he did appear in a boat drawn by swans and asked that he be given the honour of defending her on condition that she would not ask him who or from whence he came, a condition she agreed. The duel took place and the mysterious knight won but spared his opponent Telramund and proceeded to ask for her hand in marriage amidst the cheer of the crowd.

Then we had Nicola Benedetti, who appeared in a bare shoulder black gown to play another popular romantic piece, Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D, Opus 35. She had a beautiful violin, the Gabriel Stradivarious (1717) which had a subtle, subdued but very warm sound but one of its strings broke during the first movement and she had to switch violin with our principal first violinist and concert master. Her play was rather restrained and sensitive, not at all like the kind of brash sound that one gets from a Heifetz. She encored with what I believe to be one of Bach partita for the violin.I am not so sure.

The second part of the concert was a completely different kind of music: Bartok's (1881-1945) Concerto for Orchestra divided into Introduzione: Andante non troppo: allegro vivace; Giuoco delle coppie: Allegro scherzando; Elegia: Andante non troppo; Intermezzo interrotto: Allegretto and Finale: Presto, written at a low point in his later life when he was suffering from an incurable disease and his type of music was losing public interest. Is that why we had two passages in the Interrotto where the brass sound seem to interfere and mess up the string melodies as a kind of force of chaos and destruction which the composer was then feeling?  According to the Programme notes, this is how Bartok describes the concerto; "apart from the jesting second movment, a gradual transition from the sternness of the first movement and teh lugubrious death-song of the third to the life assertion of the finale". Bartok's will to life triumphed.  Jaap had the HKPO under his complete control, especially in the softer passages, which are absolutely marvelous. I hope like Bartok, the music will resume soon, exploding with life.