We first had Mozart's chamber music like Piano' Concerto No.18 in Bb Major K 456 written in 1784 for a blind pianist Maria Theresa von Paradis, one of the 15 he wrote in the 3 years 1783-1786. The piece begins with a very long orchestral introduction before the piano comes in with its gentle lilting theme . Likewise the second movement had another long introduction with a rather wistful theme which at places sounds a bit Slavic and plays around its principal theme by the piano which alternates with variation thereon by the string and wind sections but the mood changes again in the final. How can we expect a Mozart not rebounding with joy and delight. We had a French piano soloist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet. When the piano sounded its first few passages, I thought there was something wrong with its tuning, perhaps having something to do with the humid weather condition(?) The sparkle and flow we have come to expect of Mozart's music seemed to be missing: everything seemed a tad too soft and restrained, too "feminine"? I really don't know. Somehow, it doesn't sound Mozart-like. The orchestral accompaniment in the concerto also sounded a bit heavy, with rather too much middle and lower notes, thus taking away some of the spontaneous jauntiness and crispness and the angelic delightfulness off Mozart's music when he's taken by unpredictable flights of fancy. But Bavouzet shone in his two encores by Debussy and Greig as his fingers flew and pounded on the keyboard just at the right time with the right tempo and the right texture in the complex music.
After the interval, everything changed dramatically. We had a rather heavy piece, Shastakovich's Symphony No.11, The Year 1905. This is a piece the composer was commissioned by the state to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the October Revolution of 1917 which swept the Russian Communist Party into power. Curiously, Shastakovich chose to write about the 1905 bourgeois revolution, which occurred shortly after Russia was crushingly defeated by the Japanese in the Russo-Japanese War. He concentrated on the events called "The Bloody Sunday" when some 300,000 Russians led by an orthodox priest Father Gapon marched toward the Winter Palace in St Petersburg to petition to the then Russian Emperor Nicolas II to improve working conditions but the palace guards opened fire on the crowd, resulting in 200 to 1000 deaths. As the news broke, widespread demonstrations occurred in various parts of Russia, forcing the Emperor to proclaim a new constution in 1906 which established a new multi-party Russian Duma (Parliament). In this symphony, each movement is given a title: The Palace Square, The Ninth of January, In Memoriam and The Tocsin. There's a certain grimness in the music with its insistent marching rhythm which accompanies almost all 4 movements: slow and subdued in the first, with muted and foreboding percussions and the cellos and doublebasses stirring with menacing power underneath and from time the time, the trumpet sound hinting at the presence of waiting soldiers. A prison song "The Autumn Niight is as Black as Treason" is played by the flute whilst the cellos and basses play another "The Night is Dark". In the second movement, Shastakovich adapts another Russian song "O Thou Our Tsar, our little father" no doubt meant ironically. This was followed by the horrendous massacre of the people when the troops opened fire on them, portrayed in the third movement by harsh melodies and cacaphonous sound of the orchestra and then it quickly returned in the fourth movement to sadness and sorrow, first quiet and then exploding again and ending with the tocsin (bell toll signifying danger and death) played by one of our young percussionists on two huge copper bells at the left of the stage. It was a rivetting performance by the HKPO, which conveyed extremely well the quiet tension, the air of anticipation, the grimness of the paces of the marchers, the eventual confusion of the massacre and the deep sorrow which followed under the baton of Scaglione. It was a magnificent performance which left all my friends and the other audience applauding loud and long.
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