An Evening of Exhilaration (亢奮之夜)

It was a wonderful experience to be at the Cultural Centre last Saturday. We had works from three different composers all sharing in one common feature: youthful vigor and joy. The occasion was the HKP"s Donor's Concert of 2013 orchestrated to thank its various sponsors and patrons. Leading the event was Indonesian-born conductor Jahja Ling, the musical director of the San Diego Symphony for the past 9 years, who gave us first three very lively pieces from Bedriich Smetana (1824-1884), an ardent promoter of Czech music and a participant in the revolution of 1848 in Prague (when the greater part of Europe was ablaze with revolutionary fervour with uprisings in France, Germany, Poland, Italy, and the Austrian Empire etc) and a composer of revolutionary songs. But that's not what we had. Instead we had three short dances from his opera the Bartered Bride which had since become independent orchestral pieces: Polka, Furiant and Skocna(aka The Dance of Comedians). These are very energetic pieces, based upon Czech folk dance forms and melodies. The first is full of life, the second fury, the third speed but all of them were joyful. The Bartered Bride is an opera about how a Czech girl succeeded in fighting against the scheming ploys of a marriage broker and won true liberation for herself.

The second piece was the Cello Concerto in B minor by Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904) played for us by the iconoclastic British cellist Steven Isserlis who appeared on the stage with a head of frizzy hair radiating like the soft spines of the dandelion. The 1865 piece, written when he was just 23 was dedicated to his friend cellist Ludwig Peer and featured almost continuous playing by the cellist. On this occasion, it's obvious that Isserlis threw himself into it and throughout the piece, we see him using his entire body to add to the impact of the music and even when he was not playing as in the long introduction, he would sway his dandellion-like head of hair from left to right in line with the rhythm and flow of the music and when he was playing, we could see that dandelion bob up and down as if swept by gusts of wind. The version of played has been so substantially revised for us by Gunther Raphael after the manuscript was rediscovered in 1925 so that we really don't know whose work it is. But whatever the truth may be, it was a riveting performance. As encore, he played for us what must have been a contemporary composition more like European jazz than traditional classical music.

Then we had Brahm's (1833-1897) Symphony No. 2 in D (Allegro non troppo, Adagio non troppo, Allegretto grazioso, Allegro con spiritu ) written by him within a couple of weeks in 1877,  in contrast with his first, which took him some 20 years.  It was as he said to his friends and critic Eduard Hanslck, a "cheerful" and "lovely" symphony and one of his friends described it as all "rippling streams, blue sky, sunshine and cool green shadows.". Like the other pieces of the evening, it was all fire, gusto, joyful energy, and for Brahms, romance, something which Jahja Ling fully brought out from the HKPO. To me, the different sections and the structure of the different melodic motifs of symphony stood out so clearly that I jokingly remarked to my friends that it was like hearing a high-energy version of Celibadache conducting.  Needless to say, the mood when I left the concert hall was all exhilaration and joy.