Monet in Hong Kong (在港的莫奈)

Oscar-Claude Monet (1840 –1926) is one of my favorite painters. As part of the celebrations of Le French May this year, an exhibition of 17 of his paintings was held at the Hong Kong Heritage Museum this year. It will be last day tomorrow. So off I went to Shatin today.

First we had a short documentary on his life. Within 2.5 minutes, we had a brief introduction of his life and times: he came from a Parisian family of grocers but preferred a simple and modest life. He is a tough and uncompromising man, a good father, a considerate husband and faithful friend of the author Octave Mirbeau, the politician George Clémenceau and the artist Auguste Renoir and the founder of the so-called Impressionist style of painting starting in the 1870's. 

This is Étretat, the famous cliff in Normandy where he painted one of his famous paintings. There are three recurrent elements in his paintings: earth, water, sky and through all three the effect of light. He grew up in Normandy and in 1890, bought a house in Giverny where he remained until he died in 1926. "Everyday, I discover even more beautiful things. It is intoxicating to me. I want to paint them all", he wrote to Fréderic Bazille, a fellow painter in 1874 . 

活學活用成語 (Innovative Uses of Traditional Chinese Idioms)

看書雖然好，但若不幸遇到短話長說而又為某些原因不能不看的作者時，唯有硬著頭皮，忍氣吞聲，先看其結論後以飛快的速度選讀其書有關部分以完成任務，然後唞一唞，鬆一口氣，再看看手機或網上有沒有些有趣的東西，以解解壓。哈哈，居然給我找到朋友傳來已久但無暇看的三十個令人拍案叫絕的成語新用，看後頓時悶氣盡消。

獨樂樂不如眾樂樂....

1     最短的季節………….一日三秋
2     最長的腿  ……...……一步登天
3     最吝嗇的人………….一毛不拔
4     最快的流水………….一瀉千里
5     最大的地……………..一望無垠
6     最大的巴掌…………...隻手遮天
7     最貴的話……………...一諾千金
8     最快的話....................一言既出駟馬難追
9     最重的話……………....一言九鼎
10   最重的頭髮………......一髮千鈞
11   最長的棍子….............一柱擎天
12   最高的瀑布………......一落千丈
13   最好當的先生……......一字之師
14   最遠的分離………...... 天壤之別
15   最徹底的美容術...... ... 面目全非
16   最長的一天………..... .度日如年
17   最小的郵筒………...... 難以置信
18   最長的句子……... .......文不加點
19   最大的被子……….....   鋪天蓋地
20   最大的影集………....... 包羅萬象
21   最反常的氣候……........晴天霹靂
22   最大的手術………........脫胎換骨
23   最怪的物…………........ 虎頭蛇尾
24   最難做的飯…………......無米之炊
25   最小的針…………........無孔不入
26   最費時的工程……........ 百年樹人
27   最大的家……………..... 四海為家
28   最寬闊的胸懷……........ 虛懷若谷
29   最厲害的賊……………...偷天換日
30   最艱難的爭辯…….........理屈詞窮

真的，世上沒有甚麼比製造那怕是一丁點兒的歡樂更重要了!

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.