Unexpected Delight and Soul Searching (驚喜與內省)

It's not often that you find symphonic poems and dances by three different 20th century composers from three very different musical traditions all at the same concert. Yet, if you're lucky, you'll find that "rare" doesn't necessarily mean "impossible". It's a very strange feeling though to experience such a high concentration of musical styles. It does take quite a bit of mental adjustment. That's what I needed to do last Saturday. The HKPO had a new guest conductor, one Hugh Wolff. According to the programme notes, this lean and apparently highly-strung young conductor from Boston has appeared with orchestras in Chicago, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, LA and San Francisco and also in London, Birmingham, Paris, and Leipzig. 

He started off with the Valses nobles et sentimentales by Maurice Ravel (1875-1937), which premiered in 1911. The mood of these 7 waltzes plus an epilogue is  well described by Ravel's indications upon the score: modéré (even, not excessive) assez lent (rather slow), modéré, assez animé (quite lively) presque lent (almost slow), Vif (lively, vivid) moins vif (less lively, vivid) and epilogue: lent ( slow). Ravel has an ear for tonal textures of different orchestral instruments and for  rhythm which he fully displays in these 7 waltzes whose mood vary from medtative, to sentimental, to a fairy-tale like eeriness, to energetic longing, to excitement and agitation but throughout the music, you find a certain festive spirit and a certain joy for life underlying everything.

Next we had a very unusual piece from Tan Tun (b. 1957), an extraordinarily creative composer from Shanghai who is not afraid to explore the tonalities of the music instruments from China and the West, with innovative uses of musical motifs from these two vastly different traditions which he combines with his fondness for percussive effects, including the most unusual one of asking the musicians to use not just their mouths and hands, but their feet, by stamping on to the floor board of the musical stage! We had his Concerto for Orchestra, originally scored for various scenes in his opera Marco Polo, which premiered in May 1996, in which he mentally made three journeys, like his hero, Marco Polo: geographical (Persia, India, China), musical and spiritual. It was later adapted as a concerto for 12 cellos originally called "Secret Land", later renamed "Four Secret Roads of Marco Polo". The spiritual element refers to the way Tan Tun had to resort to the creative resources he finds deep inside the secret realm of his own soul: to explore the world in musical idioms of his own and yet not entirely his own.  The four movements of this extraordinary piece have got picturesque names: Light of Timespace (Europe), Scent of Bazaar (Persia) , he Raga of Desert (India), The Forbidden City (China). In this music, he tries his best to capture the feelings of Marco Polo as he journeyed East in time and space, evoking the atmosphere of the exotic local environment of each of the four civilizations he passed through until he came to Beijing.

The second part of the evening's programme was another collection of dances but this time by Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943), his Symphonic Dances Op. 45 in Non allegro, andante con moto (tempo di Valse), Lento Assai--allegro vivace, which premiered in New York in 1941. They were written after his last concert tour to Europe and finally settled down on Long Island in conditions of crippling athritis and lumbago. Originally the piece was collectively called "Fantastic Dances" , the 3 movements having such suggestive titles like "Midday", "Twilight" and "Midnight", which he intended to use in a ballet. Like Ravel and Tan Tun, Rachmaninoff was also interested in the sonic possibilities of different orchestral instruments. Thus the first movement, with its forceful, almost marching rhythm, concentrated on the sound of the oboe, clarinet, bassoon and bass bassoon and the alto saxophone. In the second, he made more use of the strings, but without forgetting the winds. In the third, he emphasized more the rhythm of music.

The evening ended with me pondering what is music all about and how difficult it is to be a composer when so many musical sounds and musical forms and musical rhythms have already been tried, some with more success than others, and especially how one might combine innovation with tradition without losing that most precious quality of a human being, his very unique and individual soul, the way he perceives and feels about this very complicated and yet in a sense very simple and basic world in which we find ourselves sharing with other people, other cultures, other civilizations . It takes time to digest what the different composers are trying to do. It was a musical journey not just for Tan Tun, for Hugh Wolff, for the HKPO,  but in my own way, for myself too.