All posts filed under: Classical Music Reviews

Hong Kong Sinfonietta 香港小交響樂團

Concert Hall, Hong Kong City Hall /Hong Kong / May 17, 2025 /Ernest Wan / Among the offerings of this year’s French May Arts Festival was a concert from the Hong Kong Sinfonietta, Trio Wanderer Plays Beethoven Triple Concerto. It was memorable, however, neither for the acclaimed chamber ensemble from France nor for the great German composer’s work but for the Czech guest conductor Tomáš Netopil’s rendition of the other, equally buoyant works on the programme, both written by his countrymen. Like the Beethoven work it preceded, Bohuslav Martinů’s seven-minute Overture H 345 (1953) is in bright C major and is sometimes redolent of a baroque concerto grosso. Under Netopil’s assured baton, the orchestra filled the auditorium with a warm glow of sound from the first bars, and the music, with its insistent succession of 16th notes and chains of syncopated string figures, chugged its way at a healthy clip to a firm conclusion. The Sinfonietta was joined in the Beethoven concerto (1804) by Trio Wanderer, whose members, says the official bio, are known for …

Eliso Virsaladze 艾莉索·薇莎拉茲

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Concert Hall, Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts /Hong Kong /Mar 2, 2025 /Ernest Wan / The great Georgian pianist Eliso Virsaladze made her Hong Kong debut in 2017 at the age of 74, playing both solo and chamber music, and returned two years later for a concerto performance. Now 82, she was back at this year’s Hong Kong Arts Festival for a solo recital, one in which her powers proved largely undiminished. The recital began with Schubert’s Moments musicaux, the middle four of which were played in a straightforward fashion. In the C-major opening piece, Virsaladze’s left and right hands at times went slightly out of sync so as to clarify the interaction of two imitative voices, a rare practice among today’s pianists. In the outer sections of the sixth and last piece, in A-flat major, such was the extreme flexibility of her tempo – it changed almost every bar and the music slowed down massively upon settling into F-flat major (notated as E major) – that the triple metre was often difficult to …

NOĒMA樂季

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Auditorium, Tsuen Wan Town Hall /Hong Kong /Jan 11, 2025 /Ernest Wan / Founded by Sanders Lau as recently as 2022, NOĒMA has already taken to calling itself “Hong Kong’s leading chamber choir” – and indeed, with its programmes in this 2024/25 season of numerous serious and challenging works, it puts other local choral groups in the shade. It had a slightly different line-up of singers for each of its past concerts, and for its recent performance at Tsuen Wan Town Hall, it comprised four sopranos and three each of altos, tenors and basses. Among them were four members of the renowned British choir Tenebrae — one of each voice type — who in the days before the concert had shared with the other performers their expertise in the British 20th-century a cappella music that constituted that evening’s programme. The evening opened with John Tavener’s The Lamb (1982), a simple setting of William Blake’s famous Songs of Innocence. This served as a gentle warm-up for the choir, producing a sense of rapt wonderment. In the …

Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra 香港管弦樂團

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Concert Hall, Hong Kong Cultural Centre /Hong Kong /Jul 5, 2024 /Ernest Wan / On 4 July, the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra announced that the 24-year-old conductor Tarmo Peltokoski, of Finnish and Filipino descent, will become its music director in the 2026/27 season. Peltokoski had previously conducted the HK Phil in only one programme, in June 2023; following the announcement, his second ever engagement with the orchestra, which took place the very next day, was eagerly anticipated as an event offering nothing less than a glimpse into the orchestra’s future. This concert of new-found significance was ushered in by the muted first notes of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No 2 (1913, revamped 1923), with Seong-Jin Cho as soloist. The 30-year-old South Korean pianist loaded that unassuming opening theme with portent in the first movement’s huge, dense cadenza – which he performed with exceptional clarity – and thus lent its fearsome subsequent tutti restatement a sense of inevitability. In the intermezzo, which plods away like futurist machinery, Peltokoski savoured its many weird sounds, such as the loud …

Bayerische Staatsoper 巴伐利亞國立歌劇院

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Ariadne auf Naxos /Grand Theatre, Hong Kong Cultural Centre /Hong Kong /Feb 22, 2024 /Ernest Wan / This year’s Hong Kong Arts Festival officially opened with the Bayerische Staatsoper’s Ariadne auf Naxos, Richard Strauss’s opera, in its 1916 version. There was concern that Hongkongers might not warm to the spareness of Robert Carsen’s 2008 production. However, judging from the enthusiastic audience response, such concern seems to have been unnecessary, so engaging was the bustle in the first part of the work and so riveting the steadily sustained momentum in the second. In the opera-within-an-opera of this second part, the desert island of Naxos on which the princess Ariadne has been deserted was an empty stage in utter darkness. As the young god Bacchus emerged and at the end ascended with her to the heavens, light emanated through an ever-widening upstage slit and eventually engulfed the entire stage. Few objects other than dance mirrors were used for the set of even the first part, which shows onstage the frantic backstage preparations for the drama of the …

Minsoo Sohn 孫旻秀

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Concert Hall, Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts /Hong Kong /Mar 15, 2024 /Ernest Wan / In 2022, South Korean pianist Yunchan Lim shot to stardom when he became the youngest-ever winner of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition at the age of 18. His success has understandably called increased attention to his teacher Minsoo Sohn, and the Hong Kong Arts Festival invited the latter to make his local debut in both concerto and solo performances. His programmes included Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto and Liszt’s Études d’exécution transcendante, which Lim performed in the Cliburn final and semi-final respectively. Sohn’s Liszt recital was doubly interesting in that the Études figured prominently in the career of his own teacher, Russell Sherman, who died in September 2023. The 47-year-old Sohn began his recital with Liszt’s Consolations, or Six pensées poétiques, intimate pieces that are mostly slow and soft. His playing of the initial chords of the first piece, more deliberate and meditative than usual, right away characterised his rendition of the entire set – these are serious, even pious …

Bamberg Symphony

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Concert Hall, Hong Kong Cultural Centre / Hong Kong / March 18, 2023 / Ernest Wan Formed mainly by German orchestral musicians in Prague who were forced after the Second World War to leave Czechoslovakia and settle in the Bavarian town of Bamberg, the Bamberg Symphony, with its Czech chief conductor Jakub Hrůša, recently appeared at the Hong Kong Arts Festival. It performed a repertoire at which, with its history, audiences expect it to excel: symphonies by Antonín Dvořák and Johannes Brahms, as well as music by the Hungarian György Ligeti, whose 100th anniversary is celebrated this year. The first of the orchestra’s two concerts began with Dvořák’s New World Symphony in E minor (1893), his ninth and last work in the genre. The lower strings’ doleful playing of the soft opening melody and the fierce, incisive fortissimoattacks soon after in the slow introduction were illustrative of the far-reaching emotional landscape to be traversed. While the Largo was scenic and deeply felt as expected, with characterful woodwind solos and delicate sustained string harmonies, even accompanying …

Kit Armstrong

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Grand Hall, Lee Shau Kee Lecture Centre / University of Hong Kong / Hong Kong / Dec 11, 2022 / Ernest Wan / For his debut recital in Hong Kong, 30-year-old pianist and composer Kit Armstrong presented a programme that, at first glance, seemed a mere attempt at maximum eclecticism, consisting as it does of music ranging from that of the Renaissance all the way to that of our own time, indeed of Armstrong’s own invention. As his softly spoken introduction revealed, however, the first half of the programme comprises works by composers of an “Apollonian” disposition, the earliest of them being William Byrd, whereas the second half spotlights more personal, subjective utterances, the earliest from John Bull. Byrd and Bull were both “Jacobethan” composers whose pieces for virginals, according to Armstrong, created the world of solo keyboard music as we know it. His longstanding conviction that this four-century-old music works on the modern piano is amply borne out by his playing. While the listener could easily imagine a performance on the harpsichord of Byrd’s …

Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra

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Concert Hall, Hong Kong Cultural Centre / Hong Kong / Jun 11, 2022 / Ernest Wan / In the programme of the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra’s César Franck at 200 concert, it is baffling to see, amid a pair of works by the French composer born two centuries ago in what is today Belgium, the utterly irrelevant Viola Concerto by the Hungarian Béla Bartók. This is especially odd considering that just the previous month the orchestra presented an all-Felix Mendelssohn programme, even though it never mentioned the 175th anniversary of the composer’s death; and that just last year it was engaged by another organisation to play not one but two programmes devoted exclusively to music by Camille Saint-Saëns, marking his death a century before. That said, anyone who manages for a moment to refrain from pondering the context ought to feel grateful that the Bartók concerto gets performed at all. The composer left only sketches when he died in 1945, from which his former student Tibor Serly put together what would for decades remain the …

Chiyan Wong 王致仁

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Concert Hall, Hong Kong City Hall / Hong Kong / April 26, 2021 / Ernest Wan / The 32-year-old, Berlin-based pianist Chiyan Wong came back to his hometown of Hong Kong amid the pandemic to play a solo recital of a J S Bach-inspired programme, one that grew better and better as it progressed. It opened with Felix Mendelssohn’s Prelude and Fugue in E minor, Op 35 No 1 (1837), which pays homage to Bach not only with its genre but also with its surprising inclusion of a chorale near the end. In Wong’s hands, the torrential prelude sounded suitably tumultuous and agitated, but the moody fugue, whose pages of accelerandi call for the highest level of control to achieve their cumulative and eventually cathartic effect, was let down by often lurching forward suddenly and impetuously. The pianist was perhaps so carried away by his passion that he skipped several bars of music in the middle. The centrepiece of the programme was Bach’s Goldberg Variations edited by Ferruccio Busoni (1914), who omits as many as …