TEXT: Lee Ou-fan
The fall season in Hong Kong is always crowded with concerts and musical events. From mid-September to mid-October my schedule as a music critic has been hectic. Here are some highlights.
Sir James Galway is a superstar of the flute. He is known as “the Man with a golden flute” (presumably referring to hite 20K “Galway” Nagahara Flute especially designed for him. I am not a flute player and has no way of judging the quality of the instrument. But I do enjoy going to his concerts. His two appearances in Hong Kong (Oct. 4 and 7) with the Hong Kong City Chamber Orchestra were a triumph in every way. I purposefully chose the second concert on a Sunday afternoon with “Galway and Friends”; the “friends’ include Lady Jeanne Galway, harpist Claire Jones, young pianist Chloe Pak, and the local flute ensemble “Tutti Flutti” (“all flutes”) consisting of more than 30 youngsters. It was destined to be a winning program for a “family concert”. Sir James knows how to win audiences, since he has been doing just that for the past thirty years. Is it in his Irish blood to be gregarious, I wonder? His fellow countryman the baritone Bryn Terfel has the same winning trait. The afternoon concert ran for two and half hours, topped with four or five encores—and to top it all, the ever-popular and ever-moving “Danny Boy” which Sir James dedicated to the local victims of the recent boat incident. A concert that disarms all possible criticism.
Another super-star, at least in the making, is violist Maxim Rysanov who, I was told, is rapidly becoming the violist par excellence after Yuri Bashmet. I went to his two concerts at City Hall –the solo recital on September 20 and as soloist with the Hong Kong Sifonietta under Yip Wing-sie on September 22. The surprising hit was the seldom heard Bartok viola concerto. I listened to the Menuhin recording before going and was still bowled over by the power of the piece. Rysanov played with utter devotion and total finesse. This young violist was born in Ukraine, now an independent state that used to be dominated by the Russian empire. He seems to have a natural grasp of the strangely mesmerizing rhythms of Bartok, a Hungarian exile who wrote this not fully finished concerto (completed by his disciple Tibor Sirley) before he died in America. I was so moved by Rysanov’s playing that during intermission I went to the lobby and bought most of his CDs—four or five of them, including Bach’s cello suites adapted for the viola but, alas, no recording of this concerto. The effect of this evening also made Rysanov’s solo recital only two days ago, a fairly rich program that included Bach’s Third Cello Suite and Martinu’s sonata and several popular French pieces, recede quickly in my memory. Not a fair evaluation, since on rehearing the solo recital over Radio Four the other day I was quite impressed by the violist ‘s sound.
This is how I define a musical masterpiece: a “master” of a composition, the rendition of which exerts such a strong impact on my mind as to dwarf, at least temporarily, all other pieces in the same vein or program. Sometimes a masterpiece known to everybody –called a popular “canon” or a warhorse—could be difficult to please precisely because it is played too many times and thus offers little surprise. However, my definition of “masterpiece” contains a hidden meaning: the surprise factor has something to do with its being unfairly neglected by performers; hence the re-recognition automatically involves a sense of rediscovery. I have several recordings of the Bartok viola concerto, but I seldom played them. Before the Sinfonieta concert I listened to Menuhin’s recording and was taken by surprise: what a marvelous gem of a piece! Rysanov’s performance, even more intensely felt, only reconfirms my impression.
On the other hand, the viola sonata of Bartok’s contemporary Martinu is not a masterpiece to my ears, as it left no impression after hearing. Both works were composed under similar circumstances by two East European exiles in America who felt homesick. Yet I felt a keen sense of homesickness in the Bartok but not in the Martinu. Perhaps this is due to my personal bias against this Czech composer, whose works never seem to move me the way his countryman Janacek and Dvorak often do. Still, there is one small exception: Has anyone heard Martinu’s “Memorial for Lidice”? A 12-minute orchestral work that commemorates the Nazi massacre of a small Czech village called Lidice in June 1942. That to me is also a neglected masterpiece, which I discovered by chance while listening to a recording of Bela Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra (a deservedly known masterpiece) by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Christoph Eschenbach. Aside from Martinu and Bartok, a third composer included in this CD, whom I never heard of, is Gideon Klein (1919-1945), a Jewish musician from Prague who died in Auschwitz at the early age of 25! His three-movement work “Partita for Strings” is another strong candidate for a neglected masterpiece.
DATA
Performance Reviewed:
Galway & Friends with City Chamber Orchestra of Hong Kong
7 October 2012,3pm
Hong Kong City Hall Concert Hall
Maxim Rysanov Viola Recital
20 September 2012,8pm
Hong Kong City Hall Concert Hall
Maxim Rysanov Plays Bartók
22 September 2012,8pm
Hong Kong City Hall Concert Hall
תגובות