Yan Pascal Tortelier & Jacob Koranyi (托替利亞及古朗尼)

The name Tortelier is special to me. Whilst I was a student, I had a friend called Hikaru Sato  He had a hairstyle very much like that of Simon Rattle/Jimi Hendrix with curls radiating in all directions. He did not speak much. I remember his eyes: small, sensitive, intense, penetrating but always as if trained upon something very very far away, somewhere distant, where his thoughts truly lay. I used to listen to him playing the cello in his dormitory  with force, with feeling. He later went to the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris and got first prize in the cello as well as the first prize in chamber music and is now a cellist in the Orchestre de Paris and a member of the Quatuor à Cordes de Paris and the founding professor of Plan for Professional Musical and Orchestral Education  and for more than 20 years a professor at the Noisy-le-Grand Conservoire . He learned the cello from the famous French cellist and composer Paul Tortelier (1914-1990), the father of Yan Pascal Tortelier (b 1947), violinist and the guest conductor of the HKPO in its concert of the 21st May, 2016. 

Bruckner No. 4 (布魯赫納第四)

Once one starts writing, it's difficult to stop. It seems that the process of writing seems to possess a certain momentum of its own, as if once the the cap for the thought or emotional pool is opened, the internal pressure inside that pool would somehow press itself upon the writer's mind and give him no rest until its dynamics has been given its due. For me, the energy triggered by music must be one of the most potent forces in my universe. So I must continue. I have little choice.

One of the high points in my musical calender of the previous two months must certainly be Anton Bruckner's Symphony No 4 in E flat, which was successively played by two very different orchestras: the first by the Philadelphia Orchestra whose golden brass sound was made famous by one of the favorite conductors in my youth, Eugene Ormandy and now under the baton of Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the other by the HKPO under the baton of Van Zweden. The 4th was written by the composer in 1874 but he was one of those composers who endlessly revised his work in response to criticisms and suggestions. Until 1899, he had revised this piece 6 times! And it proved a huge success.

The Concert by the Philadelphia Orchestra was the second of its two day programme which took place on  25th May featuring  in the first half of the concert Beethoven's String Quartet in F Minor, Op 95 "Serioso" as re-arranged by Mahler, followed by Bruckner No. 4.

Hodge-Podge of Recent Concerts (音樂大雜燴)

It's been a while since I last wrote about the concerts I attended. As I heard the HKPO's last concert for this season last night, it's as good a time as any to do a little recap of the many good and some not so good concerts that I heard in the last two months.

Last night we had a wonderfully Russian, whimsical, lyrical, colorful, sensitive, powerful and at times meditative piece from Serge Prokofiev (1891-1953): his Piano Concerto No. 3 in C, Op 26 in Andante-Allegro, Theme and Variations, Allegro ma non troppo. As soloist, we had a very talented,  musically sensitive and technically superb young pianist from Uzbekistan born in 1990 in Tashkent: Behzod Abdurraimov who had performed with the Boston Symphony, Leipzig Gewandhaus, Munich Philharmonic, Czech Philharmonic, the Marinsky Orchestra under such conductors as Gergiev, our ex- conductor Edo de Waart, Vasily Petrenko, James Gaffigan and Vladimor Jurowsky. Last year he toured Stockholm, Vienna and Dortmund with Gergiev and his Marinsky Orchestra in a Prokofiev piano concerto cycle. As conductor, we had a very personable and quirky pianist cum conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy who was able to coax from the amazingly versatile HK Phil a sound of such subtlety and sensitivity I have never previously noticed. It was a totally satisfying experience. As Bezhod was trying to leave the stage for the second time after the thunderous applauses, Ashkenazy repeatedly pointed him to the pianist stool. We really got to thank this conductor for we got another wonderfully subtle piece played with great musical insight from the young performer.