All posts tagged: Concert Hall

Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra

Published by Artomity Magazine

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

Published by Artomity Magazine

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 …

Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra

Published by Artomity Magazine

Concert Hall, Hong Kong Cultural Centre / Hong Kong / Jan 18, 2018 / Ernest Wan / In each of its past three concert seasons, the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, under the leadership of music director Jaap van Zweden, has presented one opera from Richard Wagner’s tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen, aka the Ring Cycle. The plaudits that these concerts and the commercial recordings made of them have received meant there were high expectations for Götterdämmerung (1874), the fourth, longest and toughest work in the cycle. Happily, this final instalment did not disappoint. The orchestra, over a hundred strong, inevitably sometimes overwhelmed the solo singers, with the former just behind the latter on the stage. Daniel Brenna sounded youthful as the hero Siegfried should, but his voice and tone were wanting in power and focus respectively. As Gunther, the ruler of the Gibichung race, Shenyang had a sound that was dark and indistinct in Act One, but thereafter his voice opened up. By contrast, Eric Halfvarson sang with power and authority throughout, in a vivid and often frightening portrayal of the villain Hagen, Gunther’s half-brother. Peter Kálmán’s appearance as …