Delightful News from a Musician Friend (使人雀躍的音樂好友最新消息)

It was a really long time ago. I had just returned to Hong Kong from the UK and was living alone on the highest building overlooking Yung Shue Wan, Lamma Island, enjoying the silence, the solitude, the sun, the cool breezes, the unobstructed vista of sea and sky. Back then, the power plant there had not yet been built. There were not very many foreigners or even locals living there in that epoque and one met a lot of them on the 45 minute-journey to and from Lamma and Hong Kong. I struck up a few friendships. On weekdays and especially on weekends, we'd meet for meals, drinks and chit chat. One of them was young Dale Wilson, the son of a Baptist pastor then working in Hong Kong. He loves music. So do I and a few others.  We'd gather in the home of some fellow music lovers and listen to or play music together. We didn't have a care in the world. The only thing which counted was that the music, the snacks, the beers be good. It was a time I recall with fondness. Today, one of them, Guy,  has become a professional jazz guitarist and a Shaolin Kungfu coach and Dale has become a professor in musical anthropology at Columbia University in New York and a well-known jazz composer on the side and whenever he passes by Hong Kong, we'd meet and have a meal together for old times sake.

Yuja Wang at the jazz keyboard (王羽佳之爵士鋼琴)

Yuja Wang (王羽佳) must be one of the most versatile pianists around.

Not only is she at home with  baroque composers like Scarlatti classical composers  like Mozart and Schubert, Romantic composers like Chopin, Brahms, , Schumann, Scriabin and Tchaikovky, Impressionist composers like Debussy, Faure, Ravel etc. and such radical innovative composers as Stravinski and Bartok she is equally at home with such jazz composer as Gershwin.

I really don't know if there is any kind of music from any country or period she can't play well  .Those from the hands of such minimalist composers like Arvo Pärt perhaps. But then it'd be such a terrible waste of her virtuosity at the keyboard. Maybe, the time will come when she will be tired of all her lightning fast fingerworks at the keyboard so like those of Art Tatum, whose effortless speed and inventiveness at the keyboard Rubinstein, Horowitz etc so admired  and in respect of whose skill Rachmaninoff is reported to have said, " if this man starts playing serious music, we'd  all be in trouble".

When will she settle down to the pure note? Who knows? I hope that won't be for a  long long time yet to come. No matter what, I really enjoy her playing of  Gershwin's Piano in F major(1925) in Allegro, Adagio-Andante con moto and Allegro agitato with elements of traditional "classical" music structure and jazzy elements like blues and ragtime piano built in. When comes such another?

The Finale (终章)

The HKPO concert last night was memorable. It was memorable for two very special reasons: not only was it the last concert of the season, it was also a very international evening. It shows in the clearest possible way in music there can be no boundaries, whether in terms of time, space, culture, race and nationality. We had 19th century music from a Hungarian pianist turned composer in what was then Austria and then a 20th century Russian who made revolutionary music in France and also 19th century music from Russian composer. To perform and conduct for us, we had a man and woman who were both half German and half Japanese.

The evening started off with Franz Liszt (1811-1886)'s Les Preludes, one of the first attempts to transcribe into music certain images culled from literary sources into a form which has subsequently been called "symphonic poems" which is a kind of 4 movement symphony compressed into one and incorporating a "programme". Liszt did 13 of them, three quarters of which were based on the French historian, novelist and poet Alphonse de Lamartine's (1790-1869) Nouvelles Meditations poetiques (1823), one of France's poets drunk with romantic visions of a brighter future for humanity who pushed for the abolition of slavery and the right of workers to work and was for several months the President of the Provisional Government of the 2nd French Republic after the 1848 Revolution which ended the ancient regime restored by the Treaty of Vienna 1815 which ended the Napoleonic Wars. To Liszt, a third order Franciscan who is strongly affected by religious mysticism, life is just a series preludes to a song "the first solemn note" of which is sounded by death. In fact, the Les Preludes was the third in the series of his symphonic poems but it was originally intended as an overture to another work he was thinking of writing, a mixed piano and choral piece "The Four Elements" (1844) (originally the Greek Earth, Air, Water, Fire) but which according to the poems given to Liszt by his friend Joseph  Autrans (1813-1877) in 1844/45, were named Les Aquilons ("The North Winds",) La terre ("The Earth"), Les flots ("The Floods") and Les astres ("The stars"). It was later rewritten for the orchestra by Liszt for the orchestra. In this piece the leitmotifs for the stars appear in the introduction, whilst the north wind, the earth, and floods appear as different themes in the piece.

Sherbets of Summer from Lio Kuoman (廖國敏的夏日雪寶)

It's rare to see a Southern Chinese face directing the HKPO nowadays. But last night, it happened. We had Lio Kuoman, (廖國敏) a Macanese who first trained at HKAPA and then went on to America and has now conducted orchestras in Philadelphia, Ottawa, Seoul, Copenhagen, Taipei and Macau. As part of the Denim Classics, he offered us some summer sherbets, a rich cocktail mix of pieces from Copland, Mozart, Pachabel, Barber, Tchaikovsky, Mascagni and Glazunov spanning three centuries and an equal number of continents.

The concert began with a short explosion of brass: Aaron Copland (1900-1990) 's Fanfare for the Common Man. It continued with another surprise: with Mozart (1756-1791)'s Rondo in A Major K 386 with the precocious 12-year-old Johnson Li (李仲欣) at the keyboard, who played with a kind of skill beyond his years. Then it switched further back in time with Johann Pachabel'(1653-1706)'s Canon in D major.  It fast forwarded to a work by another America composer Samuel Barber (1910-1981): his Adagio for Strings., the only slow and sad piece of the evening. Then it flew half around the globe and switch to a completely different mood again. This time, it's Russia's Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) 's tempestuous Polonaise from his opera Eugene Onegrin from which it calmed down with Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945)'s Intermezzo from his most popular opera Cavalleria Rusticana before finally fading off into the golden joy of a Russian season of plenty with Alexander Glazunov (1865-1936)'s Autumn from his ballet The Seasons. All the pieces were easy listening and have been favourites of the common folks but they were all conducted with verve by Lio, who gave them all a kind of lively festiveness seldom heard from the HKPO. And as desserts, he gave us more fireworks in the form of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture and the concert ended with the audience clapping their hands in rhythm with Johan Strauss Sr.'s Radetsky March, as if we had our own Vienna New Year Concert.

It was a most relaxing evening. It was so not only for us but I believe for the HKPO members and its guest conductor as well.  Everybody had fun.

A night of wonderful Russian Music from Pletnev & The Russian National Orchestra (一整晚的美妙音樂:柏尼夫與俄羅斯國家樂團)

Many have heard of Mikhail Pletnev (b. 1957) as a pianist but not everyone knows that he is a also composer and the founder and artistic director of the Russian National Orchestra (RNO), which started life in 1990 and which in 2008, was voted one of the top world orchestras  by a panel of international music critics by Gramophone. Before that, it got a Grammy Award for its rendition of Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf in 2004. From 2009 on, it holds an annual musical festival in Moscow in September of each year. In May last year, Pletnev came to Hong Kong as a soloist, playing excerpts from Bach's English Suite, two Schubert sonatas (Nos.4 and 13) and 24 of Scriabin's Preludes ( see http://elzorro927.blogspot.hk/).  Last night , Pletnev showed us what he could do with the RNO but again, it's not his first tour of Hong Kong with the RNO.  They first  brought us some vocal and orchestral from Rimsky-Korsakov and Rachmaninoff in October 2010.

The concert last night was wonderful. They played an all Russian programme consisting of  Glinka 's Overture to Ruslan and Lyudmila, Arutiunian's Trumpet Concerto and  Rachmaninoff's Symphony No, 2 in E Minor Op. 27 .

Yuja Wang Triptych 3-Brahms (王羽佳三連幅之三--布拉姆斯)

Time flies. Before you know it, it's Yuja Wang's last concert in her triptych last night. On this occasion, she played another concerto, Brahm's (1833-1897) Piano Concerto No. 2 in Bb, Op .83, a massive concerto lasting some 50 minutes, more like a symphony than a concerto which he took three years to write (1878-1881) after a break of some 22 years from his first. It's revolutionized the genre. Instead of having the usual three movements as in the classical tradition, it got 4 movements: Allegro non troppo (B-flat major),  Allegro appassionato (D minor),  Andante (B-flat major), Allegretto grazioso (B-flat major). All the movements in Bb except the second ends with a forceful bang. It's a piano concerto full of passion, power and huge dynamic contrasts, explosive and quiet contemplative passages where the orchestra constantly dialogues with the solo piano with now one taking control and now the other and in the climax both together.  It requires perfect co-ordination between the solo piano and the orchestra. One seems to hear in that great second movement shadows of a future Tchaikovsky or a future Rachmaninoff. Yuja Wang was superb. I came with great expectations. I came away more than satisfied. Yuja Wang delivers not only the power and the passion, but also the subtler nuances in the quieter passages. No wonder all the great orchestras of the world are going after her.

No encore this time. I think I know why. It's an extremely taxing concerto. She only got a bit of relief in the 3rd movement when the movement with the cellos and strings come in to deliver a tranquil, quiet and incredibly beautiful melody of joy and contentment. Michael Bamping too played the cello with a great deal of feeling and extremely well. In the brief lilting and delightful fourth movement,  she is called upon alternate between strong and light passages and to pack it in all her physical strength again in the finale. 

The second half of the second are both French impressionist symphonic poems :  Debussy's La Mer  with 3 tableaux viz. De l'aube a midi sur la mer (from dawn to midday over the sea), Jeux de vagues (play of waves) and Dialogue du vent et de la mer (conversation of wind and sea originally called "Le vent fait danser la mer" meaning the wind makes the sea dance ) and Ravel's Boléro. Both of them involve extremely subtle changes in tonalities and volume to create the relevant movements and moods of the wind, the waves, the storm in the former or a simple motif endlessly repeated to simulate the undulating rhythms of the sand dunes in the latter.  I enjoyed  the first part of the concert much more than the second. Somehow, the sound of the individual sections in Ravel's piece when it was their turn to take centre stage was a bit too loud and the sense of gradual building up to the finale could have been done much better. Maybe I'm wrong in my impressions but that's how it felt to me. 

A night brimming with light and delight: Yuja Wang (一個洋溢著光華與歡愉的晚上:王羽佳)

Amongst the current crop of Chinese pianists on the international concert circuit, there is only one which fascinates me. It's a pianist who has got music in her soul, perhaps in her blood.  She immerses herself into whatever music she plays. She breathes music. She lives music. And she enjoys playing music although it may sometimes frighten her to go on stage. But once on stage, something magical happens. It's as if she has finally found herself again.  Somehow, all her fingers would instantly find the proper place to place themselves, with the right kind of force, the right kind of rhythm, the right kind of tonal quality, the right kind of texture, the right kind of inter-relations, the right kind of touch, the right kind of mood all by themselves. And perhaps for those very reasons, the music which surges from her fingers is imbued with her life and also the spirit of the composer into whose music she plunges herself, the result of long hours of pondering over it, digesting it, absorbing it, feeling it, imaginatively merging into it as if she were entering into the musical soul of the composer and thus infusing it with a new life, a new kind of vitality, a life in which it is no longer possible to tell which part of it belongs to the composer and which to her. She plays not merely intellectually, but emotionally, instinctually, almost viscerally.  She gives the score something its doesn't have, life. She is my favourite Yuja Wang.

Last night, I had the chance to listen to her again, not as a soloist in a concerto, but a soloist simpliciter. She plays what comes most naturally to her, her kind of music: romantic music. She plays music by two of my favorite composers: Frederic Chopin (1810-1849)  and Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915), two musicians who write music fit only for heaven, each in their own way, the latter hugely influenced by the former. Indeed, Scriabin imagined himself a kind of messenger of God or even a species of god himself.  Wang plays with enthusiasm, with passion, with power, with poesy and with with soul. Perhaps she finds an affinity with the fire, the passion, the yearnings, and the longings and the characteristic abandon of the Slavs, Chopin himself being a Pole whom some regard as part of the Slavic races,  as is Scriabin, who is pure Russian. And she ends her official programme as she she begins it, with another Slav composer: the music of Balakiev.

Two innovators in the same concert: Mozart & Beethoven (一音樂會內二革新者:莫扎特與貝多芬)

The HKPO concert at the Cultural Centre last night is unique: in one concert, we had two courageous innovators who made musical history, both in E flat. The first is Mozart with his Piano Concerto No. 9 in E flat K 272 ("Jeunehomme" or "Young Man") in Allegro, Andantino, Rondo: presto and the other is Beethoven's Symphony No.3 in E Flat, ("Eroica" or "Heroic") in Allegro con brio, Marcia funebre: Adagio assai, Scherzo: Allegro vivace and Finale in Allegro molto.  But that's not where their similarity ends. I found, though I'm not sure if that's merely coincidental, even a particular compositional device which is used by both composer: the sudden but brief burst of piano notes in the middle of the orchestral introduction in Mozart's piano concerto and the introduction of two apparently "dissonant" notes forcefully played right at the start of the symphonic  movement, as if they were totally unconnected with the main theme which started off the Eroica, something totally unprecedented in musical history. Mozart pulled the stunt when he was 21 and Beethoven when he was 32.

Wim Mertens: Struggle for Pleasure (維姆·梅爾滕斯 : 為歡樂的掙扎 )

Music is a very strange medium. It is something entirely abstract. It is abstract in that it doesn't tell you anything concrete which we normally associate with either a visual image or series of images or its representation in the form of words linked together by certain arbitrary and habitual or conventional rules of combination which produces something we think of as narrative "meaning".

Music is not visual images or metaphors or symbols of what we normally think of as "reality" . Though there's something called "programme music" or a "symphonic poem", which tries to create a supposed correspondence between sound and images, any such "correspondence" is always vague, ambiguous and merely suggestive, connotative, never specific or denotative. Neither can music tell any narrative story the way words can. If music "represents" anything at all, it "re-presents" itself, its own sound, its own sonic structures, its own rhythms, its own rules of combination, its own "form" of motion in time. 

From Classical to Late Romanticism: Mozart & R Strauss (從古典到後浪漫: 莫扎持與李察.史特勞斯)

Music is good. It's rendered better by a concert. In the space of two hours, you can travel the distance of more than a century, en vivo. That happened last Saturday. At the Cultural Centre in Tsim Sha Tsui. We had only two pieces, the first a symphony, the second a number of what's been called "symphonic poems" but to me, it may be even more appropriately called a "symphonic epic". The symphony is a Mozart (1756-1791) favorite, his Symphony No. 40 in G Minor, K500, written in 1788,  3 years before he died, his second written in a minor key, the other being his 25th. The symphonic poems or epic is Richard Strauss' (1864-1949)' s autobiographic Ein Heldenblen, literally "a heroic life". The styles of the two pieces could not have been more different: the former is written in the so-called late "classical style" (although certain romantic elements can already be found in it) and the latter is written in the Romantic style initiated by Beethoven and  developed to extremes by such composers as Mahler and Wagner: no images are suggested in the former whilst certain extra-musical images are explicitly stated in the texts of the titles of various sections of the score of the latter.

Ray Lynch's Quandra

I haven't listened to Ray Lynch for quite a while now. I don't know why, I suddenly got the urge to listen to him this morning. I first listened to him years ago. When I listen again to his Quandra, part of his Sky of Mind album, it still seems as though I'm listening for the first time. His music has a kind of repetitive yet pleasing simplicity, a kind of reverence for certain forces greater than us,  a kind of spirituality that takes one into a different world, a world moving beneath the surface of our mind, full of beauty, full of a certain tranquility, a certain peace which is so soothing that it makes one long to stay there forever.

Re-imported Music á la France: Broadway Français (法式出口回流的音樂--百老音樂劇)

Many people in Hongkong now listen to some kind of jazz music, including some Broadway, but I'm quite sure that not very many of them may know that American jazz might have part of its roots in the traditions of the funeral marches of southern France, with strolling players of  funeral marches reverting to much brighter and livelier music on their trumpets and drums on the return journey from the graves to lighten up the mood which in time was cleverly woven with the work song and blues of the African slaves in the cotton, corn or tobacco plantations of the American south or that the place where all the European and African musical elements making up early jazz  came together was New Orleans, a town in Missouri full of French influence. So it might be said that in a sense, no jazz, no Broadway. And with Randall Fleisher, jazz made a round trip back to France at Broadway Français. And what a hodge podge we had.

What did we have? The list is long: before the break, Frank Loesser's Overture to Guys and Dolls, Cole Porter's : "Another Opening" from his Kiss Me, Kate;  Irving Berlin's" No Business like Show Business"   from his Annie, get your Gun; Lerner & Loewe's "I Could have Danced All Night" from their My Fair Lady; Harold Arlen's "Over the Rainbow" from his Wizard of Oz; "Everything's Coming Up Roses" from Stephen Sondheim & Jule Styne's Gypsy;  Oscar Hammerstein & Jerome Kern's Show Boat Medley ; Meredith Willson's "76 Trombones" from his The Music Man;  John Kander & Fred Ebb's "All that Jazz" from their Chicago; Cole Porter's "You're the Top" from his Anything Goes;  George Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm" from his Girl Crazy. After the break, we had Howard Ashman & Alan Menken's "Be Our Guest" from their Beauty and the Beast; Frank Lehár's "Vilja" from his The Merry Widow; Lynn Ahrens & Stephen Flaherty's "Speaking French" from their Lucky Stiff; Lerner & Loewe's Gigi from their musical of the same name; George Gerswin's An American in Paris,  Leonard Bernstein's "Glitter and be Gay" from his Candide; Andrew Lloyd Weber's "Bring Him Home", "I dreamed a Dream" and "One Day More" from his Les Miserables, "The Phantom of the Opera" and "Music of the Night" from his The Phantom of the Opera.

Haydn's Creation (海頓的<創世記>)

To many, there are few oratorios on a religious subject as magnificent as Handel's Messiah. It was no doubt so to Franz Joseph Haydn 1732-1809, often regarded as the father of modern orchestral music, who produced his own Creation (Die Schöpfung), written in 1797-1798 after he returned to Vienna in 1795 at the end of his second series of visits to England, a composition which he fully expected could stand beside that impressive work of his predecessor without any undue risk of humiliation. It's a massive work consisting of 34 excerpts sung by a soprano, a tenor and a bass (singing respectively as the archangels Gabriel, Uriel and Raphael) and towards the end, by an alto, sometimes alone, sometimes as duets, with or without the participation of a huge chorus to the accompaniment of a chamber orchestra, punctuated with recitatives from time to time to help maintain a sense of thematic unity.

Mozart & Shastakovich at the Cultural Centre (莫札特與蕭士塔高維奇在文化中心)

What has Mozart (1756-1791) got to do with Shostakovich (1906-1975)? One is a happy go lucky violinist and pianist and musical genius who exudes talent writing classical music with flair in 18th century Austria and the other a state sponsored but iconoclastic pianist and composer with twisted relationship with his employer writing music full of strife, ambiguity and passion and occasionally quasi-programme music to the "apparent" dictates of the state in 20th century Russia after Stravinsky in a post-Romantic style but still paying lip service to the need to glorify the achievement of the "proletarian working class" in accordance with official Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist ideology. The connection is last night's musical programme of the HKPO under the direction of an up and coming young American conductor striking out in different musical directions called Case Scaglione.

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.

The two latest concerts: Zhang Xian's Roman Festivals & Johannes Wildner's Flying Frenchmen (最近两場音樂會:張弦的羅馬節日及懷德納的飄泊法國人)

Very busy lately. Hence a big regret and an even bigger sense of guilt because I had two excellent concerts recently, the first including even a world premiere! The first was Zhang Xian's Roman Festivals. Zhang is an up and coming Chinese conductor from Shanghai. He conducted for us several pieces by Ottorino Resphighi (1879-1936) rarely played together: the third part of the composer's so-called "Roman Trilogy" comprising Circuses, Jubilee, October Festival and the Ephiphany. Resphigi is known among hi-fi aficianados in Hong Kong chiefly for his very colorful Pines of Rome. So my concert going hi fi friends were all pleasantly surprised that Respighi had other interesting pieces too. I think I have a fairly good idea why. Respighi is a most audacious innovator in imitating "real life" sound and in the Roman Festivals( the spiritual god-father of George Gershwin?)  he gave himself full rein in these pieces. eg, he used 3 buccines (ancient Roman curved trumpets resting on the player's shoulders" to replicate the feeling the Roman populace experienced upon hearing the clarion call for the entry of gladiators in the Roman circus) and tavolettes ( hollow boards struck by hammers). He must be considered a precursor of the composer of modern movie music though he might be rivalled by Berlioz in that regard. His music seems calculated to evoke in the audience, perhaps kinaesthetically, various very visual images and in the case of the Roman Festivals, the various images associated with the title of the four episodes and if so, then he must be considered a huge success, at least as far as my friends are concerned. There is such a rich combination of various moods: quiet, contemplative, solemn, religious, ominous, agitated, light-hearted, jolly, confusing, boisterous and exuberant, switching moods quickly from one piece to another and even within the same piece, from one part to another and conveyed to us by the huge dynamic range, in all kinds of rhythms provided by the extremely rich mix of orchestral sounds from all conceivable kinds of instruments and percussions so that the HKPO had to be out in full force and had even to hire some outside trumpet help. The result is a very obvious: one really gets the feeling that one is watching a moving panorama of Roman life with in all kinds of situations with "typical" Italian inconsistencies complete with some very Mediterranean excesses.

The Hilliard Ensemble & Arvo Pärt in Hong Kong (希利亞之聲音劇場與亞福. 帕特在香港)

Arvo Pärt is an enigmatic and reclusive composer struggling to express himself in music in a way which is unique to what he regarded as important and vital in this most ancient media for self-expression: the sound and magic of individual tones: their resonance and their harmonics, whether in isolation or in simultaneity, whether in dissonance or in harmony with other tones or whether or not they stand out from silence. Early in his career he experimented with serial music and in a sense, he has never really completely abandoned that. But growing up in Estonia, a country steeped in the musical traditions of Russian Orthodox Church and its chants, he feels irresistibly drawn towards his roots, something which touches him most deeply: mystical transcendence: the way that tones inevitably fade into the silence from which they first arise, as if in the beginning, human life emerges from a certain vague and formless eternity and must in the end return to it. Whatever the truth may be about his musical development, we got a chance to listen to some of it last night at the City Hall. The occasion was "Arvo Pärt--80 by 8: Pärt at 80 celebration concert." I don't suppose I'd be far wrong if I were to think of the numeral "8" in the latter part of the main title may be a reference to the time at which the concert began.  The explanation on the programme note elaborates: "An 80th birthday celebration recital, presenting vocal works of Pärt's career, for vocal octet a capella".

We had 7 of his vocal compositions:

1. Morning Star (2007)
2. Most Holy Mother (2003)
3. The Deer's Cry (2007)
4. Solfeggio (1963)
5. Seven Magnificat Antiphons (1988): O Wisheit (O Wisdom), O Adonai, O Sproß aus
     Isais Wurzel (O Root of the Tree of Jesse), O Shlüßel David (O Key of David), O
      Morgenstern (O Morning Star) O König aller Völker (O King of All Nations), O Immanuel
6. Missa Syllabica (1977) Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Benedictus, Agnus Dei, Ite Missa
     est
7. Kanon Pokkajanen (selections) (1997): Kontakion & Ikos, Ode IX: Heirmos, Theotokion, Prayer

The number of works may look huge but they are all short pieces, seldom lasting more than two or three minutes each. So it was not a very long concert by the performers, the famous Theatre of Voices founded by Paul Hillier in 1990, popularly known as the Hilliard Ensemble, which has recorded numerous CDs, through which I first learn of their existence years ago.

Arvo Pärt's Morning Star

This is a piece commissioned by Durham U to celebrate its 175th anniversary. Pärt chose a text found inside Durham Cathedral: "Christ is the morning star, who when the night of this world is past brings to his saints the promise of the light of life and opens everlasting day." He repeats the same sentence "Christ is the morning star" beginning in different notes by the male and female singing separately and then continues with the rest of the words of the text by the singers singing together.

Cassandra Wilson: Coming Forth By Day: A celebration of Billie Holiday

Jazz is never as popular in Hong Kong as in Taiwan or in Japan but there are still some who love it. For me, it is difficult not to love the kind of constant innovation which some jazz musicians are introducing into the genre, a genre which is open to all kinds of musical influences: geographical, native, cultural, personal or from other genres like classical, folk, pop, rock, punk, Latin or other indigenous music, probably because the creativity of jazz musician depends heavily on spontaneous improvisation just so long as they stay certain rhythmic and chordal constraints peculiar to the jazz genre in what they call a "jam" session. At the Cultural Centre last night, a jazz legend made a tribute to another jazz legend: Cassandra Wilson paid tribute to Billie Holiday in a programme called  "Coming Forth By Day: A Celebration of Billie Holiday" because 2015 is the 100 anniversary of the birth of Billie Holiday.

Bolshoi Opera's The Tsar's Bride (莫斯科大劇院歌劇團之沙皇的新娘)

Western operas are seldom popular in Hong Kong. We simply do not have the kind of tradition of going to see an opera which one finds in the most big European cities. So opera lovers in Hong Kong have to content themselves with seeing them on DVD's or Blue Tooth. The closest we get to the opera would be having some singers come to Hong Kong to perform various numbers taken from the vast repertoires of European operas as part of the orchestral music by our local or visiting orchestras. But from time to time,  world famous opera companies do come to Hong Kong, normally, during our annual Arts Festival. We had one this year. It comes from Russia, a country with a very long tradition of opera production. Last night, at the Grand Theatre of the Cultural Centre, we had the Bolshoi Opera, a world renowned opera company. Bolshoi is justly famous not just for its ballet production. They mounted a popular opera by one of the best opera composers of all times, Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov whose Scheherazade most music lovers must have heard a hundred times.

Dudamel's Mahler Sixth in Hong Kong (杜達美的馬勒六在香港)

Mahler's Symphony No. 6 in A minor has often been described as "tragic".  His wife Alma said it was a symphony which came directly from his heart. But others claim that its sombre intensity reflects the tensions and conflicts in pre-WWI Europe and forbodes its arrival. Whatever the truth may be, we had another chance to hear it again last night at the Cultural Centre, the HKPO under the baton of our former chief conductor De Waart having done so some 3 years ago. (see http://elzorro927.blogspot.hk/2011/02/mahler-no-6-in-hong-kong.html ). This time however, we had Gustavo Dudamel conducting the LA Philharmonic which came out in full force.

The four movements of this extremely long symphony ( one hour twenty minutes without intermission) are:

1. Allegro energico, ma non troppo Heftig, aber markig
2. Andante moderato
3. Scherzo: Wuchtig
4. Finale: Sostenuto--Allegro moderato--Allegro energico

It was not, however, a symphony which was enthusiastically received when it premiered in 1904, the critics at the time complaining that it had too much brass. I can understand why. But the brass is there not simply because Mahler wished to be bombastic. It's there because he really felt something intense inside his heart which could not find expression otherwise, something brewing inside and crying out for an adequate musical form. There is in this music two forces: the forces of tender love, domestic bliss and rustic peace and serenity on the one hand and then the forces of death and destruction raging outside. The two are constantly vying for  dominance. Even in the happiest moment as in the second movement, the forces of destruction, in the form of the irresistible and implacable marching rhythms are never far off. And yet, even when the forces of destruction are playing out themselves (the timpanis, the trumpets etc), it could somehow never quite forget the moments of tenderness ( the woodwind, the horns, the flute, the lyre, the cowbells suggesting lullabies and the innocent play of children) which linger on at the very heart of all the violence to remind one of those happier times. Hence the tension one feels as one listens to the music.

Mikhail Rudy's Kafka's Metamorphosis and Chagall's The Sound of Colors (米凱.路迪與卡夫卡的"變形" 和夏卡爾的"音樂的色彩")

The City Hall was packed last night. The reason? Mikhail Rudy would be playing various compositions by Leos Janácek as accompaniment to an animation film of Kafka's short story "Metamorphosis" by Stephen and Timothy Quay commissioned by Rudy and in addition various works by Gluck, Mozart, Wagner, Debussy and Ravel as accompaniment to the images of various frescos called "The Sound of Colors" painted by Marc Chagall on the ceiling of the Paris Opera Garnier in 1964.
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Kafka's Metamorphosis is a short story about the fate of Gregor Samsa,(an ordinary but otherwise hardworking travelling salesman who is one of the breadwinners in the family and who is always punctual at work) finds in morning that he has transformed into an insect ( conventionally thought of as a cockroach/bug), unable to get up from his bed. First, his mother tells him that he is late for work, then his favourite sister Grete begs him to. He wants to but can't. Then they find through looking at the keyhole of his bedroom that he has been turned into the insect. A little later, his supervisor comes to warn him of the consequences of missing work. But when he discovers Gregor's new shape, he flees. His mother gives Gregor the bread and and milk he likes but in his new condition, he doesn't like them any more, so she gives him instead various rotting food scraps which he happily consumes. Gradually, both they and he himself got used to his new condition. To make room for Gregor to crawl around, they remove some furniture in his room. Because he cannot work, his family  takes in 3 lodgers for whom his father asks Grete to play the violin, something they don't enjoy but Gregor loves. When one of the lodgers discovers Gregor listening to her playing at their side, they all got alarmed and refuse to pay to rent on account of his unseemly presence. One day, Gregor got out of the room in response to her sister's call and goes into the kitchen to see her but when his father returns from work, he drives him out by throwing an apple at him. The apple got lodged on Gregor's back and soon begins to rot. Often, Gregor overhears through the door the family discussing their financial condition. After a while, Grete has grown tired of taking care of Gregor and suggests removing him. The family agrees. Gregor is deeply hurt and dies in his room, all alone. His body is removed by the cleaning lady as garbage. Greatly relieved, the family drive out the 3 lodgers and move out from their house and takes a smaller apartment and to celebrate, takes a trolley ride. Mikhail Rudy loved this story so much that he commissioned