Typhoon Usagi effectively denied me the anticipated musical
highlight of my week when the Hong Kong Observatory announced that the typhoon
was due to hit at around the same time that Alina Ibraginova and Cédric
Tiberghien were due to hit the stage of the City Hall. However, in a way I’m glad it didn’t happen, because
I suspect it would only have been an anticlimax after what came out of the blue
as the most riveting musical experience for quite some time.
That riveting musical experience did not come, however, from
the early evening organ recital at the Cultural Centre. Polish organist Gedymin Grubba was a new name
to me – perhaps surprisingly since, according to his biography, he has
performed an average of 100 concerts a year for the last decade or so – and he
certainly has some pretty agile fingers and toes. But he has no idea how to build a programme
which is going to keep 900 or so young Hong Kongers absorbed and while, on
their own terms, Buxtehude and Bruhns can make scintillating listening (especially
that wonderfully eccentric Fugue subject in the Bruhns E minor Praeludium) putting them both together
with one of Bach’s more obtuse chorale preludes (An Wasserflüssen Babylon – I have to confess I much prefer Boney M’s
take on Psalm 137) does rather weigh things down. This superfluity of North
German Baroque might have been balanced by a set of chorale variations by Grubba’s
compatriot Jan Janca, but despite a succession of nice chords, this turned out
to be a very watered down imitation of Flor Peeters’ Op.20 Variations (which
is, itself, a very watered down version of Dupré’s Op.20 Variations) which was
so stop-start in its progress it never had a chance to bed down in the
consciousness. Even the Guilmant at the
end of the recital failed to raise the spirits.
It was the first movement of the Fifth Sonata, and why anyone would end
a recital with a first movement defies all logic; is it that the player thinks the
composer is so bad he begins a major work with something which should really
end it? Personally, much as I admire and
love Guilmant’s music, I’m not sure he should even have begun his Fifth Sonata;
this was not a piece which showed him off in a good light, its saving grace, so
far as Grubba was concerned, was that it included – like just about everything
else in the recital – a fugue.
More fugues came in John Estacio’s Brio which the Hong Kong Philharmonic played later in the evening
at the same venue. True, the work outlived
its usefulness by a good five minutes (it stretched to around 13), but it had
lots of pulsating rhythmic drive which the HKPhil violins articulated with
impeccable crispness. Canadian conductor
Jean-Marie Zeitouni kept it all tightly under control, and it proved to be a
good test of the newly adjusted Cultural Centre acoustics (achieved, it would
seem, mostly by placing Perspex screens around the stage canopy – which I have
to confess I find immensely distracting because they offer a high-level
reflection of part of the orchestra. When
I first saw it at the Asian Youth Orchestra concert last month, I wasted time when
I should have been listening to the music staring at the screens trying to work
out which section of the orchestra I could see playing upside down in them). Nevertheless, the acoustic changes have
brought the sound right into the middle of the stage, coagulating it into a
homogenous whole which takes off some of the edge, but balances things much
better. The real test will come, of
course, when a solo violinist takes to the stage – has the acoustic change got
rid of that awful blind spot where the
soloist stands? – but in the meantime it’s a definite improvement.
The acoustics took quite hammering later in the concert with
a tremendously exciting account of the original (1911) version of Petrushka.
Ever since I saw Stravinsky himself conduct it in London, I’ve been
convinced that the 19i11 is the best way to hear Petrushka and that the subsequent orchestral suite is a sadly desiccated
version . The Hong Kong performance – bringing an orchestra of around 100 on to
(and off) the stage – was no neat, tidy or polished affair by any means, but it
had raw energy and was greatly enhanced by some tremendous off-stage drumming
between acts. (What a shame nobody thought to open the door on the other side
of the stage – as it was we heard the drums funnelled out of one door, sent
across the stage to hit a solid wall and then bounce back to create something not
dissimilar to a tap dance training session held in an echo chamber). There was some gorgeous flute playing and
wonderful sounds coming out of the brass, and while Zeitouni had his work cut
out to keep everybody more or less going at the same speed, it worked
splendidly. But even this arresting and
absorbing performance was not the highlight of my musical week. That came with some Chopin.
Regular followers of this blog will know that Chopin and I
do not see eye to eye, and that the First Piano Concerto is a work the point of
which I have consistently failed to grasp.
I won’t say I had a Damascene moment, but Louis Lortie had me so
enamoured that when the Concerto ended I turned to the lady beside me, who had
spent the entire Concerto coughing, and declared “Wasn’t that lovely!” (She
misunderstood me to mean her coughing, and carried on all the way through the Stravinsky.)
It was an enchanting performance; graceful, poised and, above all, utterly,
utterly lovely. What made it work for me
was the attitude of both Lortie and Zeitouni who clearly were not investing it
with any great emotional or spiritual depth but merely relishing the sounds it
made. Lortie metaphorically ground his
teeth while the orchestra drifted through their long and pointless preamble, but
then burst on to the scene with a relish, and before long was taking all the
credit, floating up and down the keys, adding some lovely touches of dynamic
light and shade (how rarely we get those in Chopin where most pianists seem to
feel rubato is the prime means of expressiveness) and throwing in the odd
gesture – like a left hand waving while the right does some arpeggios or a
right hand ending an upward sweep with a kind of karate chop off the end of the
keyboard. It was a delight to watch and
delight to hear, and if Lortie followed it up with a shameless outburst of virtuosity
in an encore (which might have been by Chopin but I suspect was by Liszt) of
such vacuity that afterwards I wondered whether I had actually heard it, who
cared? Chopin won the day for me this weekend
in Hong Kong.
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