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Photo Credit: Cheung Wai Lok/HK Phil |
At last night’s Gramophone Awards held in the opulent
splendour of London’s Connaught Square Rooms, the Hong Kong Philharmonic
Orchestra was named Orchestra of the Year 2019.
This is a great accolade for an orchestra just 45 years old, based in a
city well away from any of the traditional centres of musical excellence, and
especially when you consider that other contenders for the award included the Akademie
für Alte Musik Berlin, Staatskapelle Berlin, Boston Symphony Orchestra,
Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, London
Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia - Rome,
San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and Les Siècles. The Gramophone Orchestra of the Year Award is
made on the basis of recommendations from Gramophone magazine critics and
editorial staff who base their selection on recordings released over the past year. Once they have drawn up the shortlist, it is
left to the public to vote for the winner after having, we would hope,
carefully listened to the year’s recordings from all 10 shortlisted orchestras.
For many, the award going to the Hong Kong
Philharmonic will come as a huge surprise.
After all, unlike many of the other contenders, they are not a major recording
orchestra; indeed, to date their recording output has been notably unremarkable
and dominated by niche repertory in indifferent recording and performing
quality. Many of the early recordings
they made for the nascent Naxos and Marco Polo labels were not so much
unremarkable as downright poor, and rarely even made it into the review columns
of Gramophone magazine. Even today, a
basic search of recordings by the Hong Kong Philharmonic on any of the
international sites yields a lot of recordings made over the past 40 years few
of which have ever impinged on to the consciousness of serious collectors.
But it was a remarkably brave idea from the
orchestra’s current music director, Jaap van Zweden, which suddenly rocketed
the Hong Kong Philharmonic not just to international fame as a recording
orchestra, but got the music-loving public flocking to Hong Kong in their
droves to hear them live. In 2015 he
embarked, with the orchestra, on a four-year project to perform the whole of
Wagner’s Ring Cycle in concert performances on the stage of the Hong Kong
Cultural Arts Centre, which has been the performing home of the orchestra since
1989, and is now showing its age both visually and aurally. Built at a time when few other cities
anywhere in Asia had a state-of-the-art concert hall, the Cultural Arts Centre
was one of the parting gifts from the British in anticipation of their handover
of their former colony to Chinese rule in 1997.
It has done well, but with its tiles that look increasingly like the
walls of a 1970s British public toilet (with, sometimes, the aroma to go with
it), a weird wedge shape (it was described at the time as a symbolic representation
of China’s claim that they would govern Hong Kong with a “One Country, Two
Systems” policy) and an acoustic which does nothing to enhance the music for
the audience and incorporates a number of pretty significant blind spots to
those attempting to perform on stage, it is now very much the poor man of the
region; especially considering the splendid concert halls which have since sprouted
up in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and all over mainland China. It seems hardly the ideal venue to record
something which is going to take the musical world by storm.
Each opera of the Ring was presented twice in live
concerts, one a season, from Das Rheingold
in 2015 to Götterdämmerung
in 2018, and each performance was recorded by Naxos
who then released each opera as a separate box set. As the cycle progressed, so word spread
around and more and more took an interest in what Hong Kong was doing. On top of that, speaking with my critic’s hat
on (or through it, as some might say) as the cycle progressed, each performance
seemed more polished and secure, until with Götterdämmerung
we had something which was really, really special. So it was that opera, which attracted the
Gramophone team and prompted them to put it up as a nomination for Orchestra of
the Year.
The Hong Kong Philharmonic has been keen to point out
that they are the first orchestra in Asia ever to have been nominated as (and
now awarded) Orchestra of the Year. That,
again, may cause some surprise. What about those excellent orchestras in Japan,
Qatar, Malaysia and Singapore, not to mention those notable ones in China? Many of them have a much higher recording
profile than the HKPO – the NHK Symphony seems to have been a fixture on the
recording circuit for decades, the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra produced a
series of absolutely fabulous CDs for BIS in the early noughties, while the
Singapore Symphony have been churning out well-received CDs (again, mostly on
the BIS label) for years. And the Shanghai
Philharmonic has just been signed up to be an exclusive recording orchestra by
Deutsche Grammophon.
All this goes to show just what a remarkable
achievement van Zweden’s Ring Cycle has been.
While one can argue that a great recording of an opera is far more than
a showcase for an orchestra (something van Zweden was himself anxious to stress
in his acceptance speech for the Gramophone Awards) a comment that has resonated
in almost every review of the HK/Wagner cycle is typified by this quote from Andrew
Clements in The Guardian; “Some
elements have remained at a high standard throughout [the cycle] – namely the
quality of the playing of the Hong Kong Philharmonic”. Looking back over the reviews I’ve written about
the orchestra, I note that in Gramophone magazine as far back as 2013 I was
writing (with reference to a recording of Tan Dun’s music newly released on the
Naxos Label); “This is a vivid demonstration of true orchestral virtuosity”. (I like to be proved right once in a while!)
I first heard the Hong Kong Philharmonic in the late
1980s, and I was left pretty unimpressed.
As one colleague suggested, it comprised largely dispirited players who
would never get a seat in a world-class orchestra and increasingly
disillusioned young players who aspired to one.
I’m not sure that was a fair comment, but it certainly was difficult to
argue with when you heard them on occasions.
At one point, after the departure of David Atherton as its principal
conductor, there were even doubts about its sustainability. But first Edo de Waart and then Jaap van
Zweden revitalised it, brought in some brilliant players, and now, after seven
years at the helm, van Zweden has completed the task most thought impossible; to
make it the finest orchestra in the world (in the view of Gramophone magazine’s
readership – and they comprise some of the world’s most perceptive and
demanding music lovers).
So what comes next?
Will the orchestra start attracting the same level of international attention
for its mainstage week-by-week season concerts as it did for the one-off, but
headline grabbing Ring cycle?
No mention of Hong Kong today can pass without comment
on the fragile political situation which is unravelling there. With street demonstrations happening on a
daily basis and the world holding its breath to see what China will do to stamp
its authority on its recalcitrant Special Administrative Zone, how is the Hong
Kong Philharmonic coping?
Diplomatically, a press release issued from the orchestra to coincide
with the Gramophone Award points out that it allows its players and staff to
express their own views on the current situation peacefully and holds no official
position itself. But it is being
affected with concerts cancelled or re-timed in anticipation of civil
unrest. And the postponement this year
of the orchestra’s biggest annual event – the Swire Symphony Under the Starts
concert held against the spectacular setting of the Hong Kong Harbourfront – shows
just how fragile its future might be. This
is by far and away the highest profile event it stages, and while the financial
loss cannot be insignificant, the loss of prestige may be even more
daunting. So much is riding on how the
current political climate in Hong Kong resolves itself, and that includes the
very future of the orchestra. Unless and
until Hong Kong comes to its senses and starts behaving once again like a
civilised city in the 21st century, visiting music lovers are not going
to risk running the gauntlet of violent protestors and violent police retaliation,
even if the prize is as artistically enticing as the Ring Cycle.
One thing is certain, however. With this Award to its
credit, the Hong Kong Philharmonic suddenly has a lot more friends in lot more
high places than it had before, and if nothing else, it tells the world that
there is more to Hong Kong than tall buildings, tourist kitsch, shopping, tear
gas and face masks; and that, alone, sets it way above the other nine
orchestras in this year’s shortlist.
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