Fou Ts'ong, Taipei, April 28

Eliza : May 9, 2012 12:01 am : In person

by Nick Frisch

credit : http://www.lifeofguangzhou.com/

China’s Legendary Cold-War Era Pianist gave a show to a packed house in Taipei last weekend, cementing his status as an elder statesman of China’s classical music universe, and of the piano, full stop. He is one of the few surviving links to China’s pre-1949 musical past: raised in a Shanghainese Europhile family, he studied with Mario Paci, the Italian maestro credited with establishing a classical music framework for foreigners and Chinese alike in pre-war Shanghai.

Fou is best-known for his association with Chopin; a win at the 1953 Chopin Competition first put him on the map, and he lived in Warsaw before moving to the UK and forsaking his PRC citizenship. But for last weekend’s concert in Taipei’s National Concert Hall, he eschewed the usual crowd-pleasing mazurkas for other works he has championed. In his long career.
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Astor Piazzolla

Eliza : May 8, 2012 12:01 am : In person

by Ian Pong

Astor Piazzolla

Tristeza de un doble A

Escualo

Adios Nonino

Contraataque

Mumuki

Miguel angelo

Chin Chin

credit : http://www.findagrave.com/

Aix-en-Provence 7th January 2012

I first encountered Piazzolla’s music when I was a student in London. I had not been much attracted by tango, except perhaps the classical tango scene in the movie, Scent of a Woman. But this all changed when a cellist friend introduced me to Piazzolla’s music.

Born to Italian parents in Argentina in 1921, Piazzolla took tango and bandonéon music from (but not away from) the streets to the concert hall, an achievement not unlike Segovia’s with the guitar. He gave the genre and the entire family of instruments a new identity and introduced them to a much wider audience. I recall that, about a decade ago at the University of London Foundation Day, an accordion student from the Royal Academy of Music was chosen to perform at the music interlude in front of the Princess Royal, in favour of the traditional string quartet. This would be quite unimaginable 50 years earlier. But how, of all instruments, did Piazzolla choose the bandonéon? And what exactly is a bandonéon?
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All in the Family!

Eliza : April 28, 2012 12:26 am : In person

by Georg Predota

Le French May Arts Festival Hong Kong & Hong Kong Sinfonietta
Daishin Kashimoto Plays Brahms
14/4/2012, Hong Kong City Hall Concert hall

Click here to read the concert preview “Getting Ready for the Performance”.

credit : http://frenchmay.com/

Going to see the Hong Kong Sinfonietta is like going to a family picnic. Plenty of young and excitable children are using the foyer of City Hall as a Parkour training ground, efficiently and gracefully speeding around nicely dressed obstacles. Others focus intently on mastering the newest video games, making sure that the sound effects can be heard across the harbour. In the event, once the lights go out in the concert hall, they are fast asleep in less than a second. Teenagers, smartly dressed and accessorized in the latest imitation luxury brands engage in animated discussions regarding Korean soap operas, always making sure to prominently showcase their best features to the members of the opposite sex. Under the guise of darkness, teenage lovers — ever so grateful of having escaped parental supervision — shyly hold hands and take flight into a private world of exaggerated emotions and raging hormones. Extended family groups, including grandma and grandpa alongside an entourage of obedient servants regally make their way into the concert hall, personally greeting half the audience in the process. Since the program features three local choirs, the hall is filled to capacity and buzzing with excitement. So far, the marketing strategy with its focus on education, introducing local talents and bringing students and young people into the concert hall, is working to perfection. Yip Wing-sie, rightfully assuming that nobody reads the program booklet because everybody is too busy socializing, personally introduced the upcoming musical selections and advertised for future events. Having been the music director since 2002, Wing-sie has developed a warm and highly personal relationship with her audience, earning vigorous applause for her verbal announcements; even the musicians looked genuinely happy and pleased to be on stage. What then could possibly be wrong with such a warm and happy family gathering? Absolutely nothing, until the orchestra starts to play!
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Messian’s L’Ascension and Puccini’s Suor Angelica ; "Taiwan Philharmonic, the National Symphony Orchestra"

Eliza : April 9, 2012 12:01 am : In person

by Nick Frisch



When Lü Shao-chia (呂紹嘉) returned from the Staatsoper Hannover for the directorship of the NSO, he inherited an ensemble already steeped in Austro-German music and musicianship, on account of both the education of many orchestra members and the directorship of Günther Herbig. It’s a moment – and momentum – Lü seized and pushed forward giving critically-acclaimed renderings of Mahler and Strauss, with heavy doses of Russian music on the side.

While not absent, the French and Italians figured less prominently in the NSO’s lineup, making this past weekend’s Messiaen-Puccini doubleheader a concert to to watch, and listen for.
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Getting ready for the Performance

Eliza : April 6, 2012 9:10 pm : In person

by Georg Predota

Le French May Arts Festival Hong Kong & Hong Kong Sinfonietta
Daishin Kashimoto Plays Brahms
14/4/2012, Hong Kong City Hall Concert hall

Johannes Brahms: Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 77 (1878)

Brahms
credit : http://geoffmyers.net/brahms/

Among the great composer-musicians of the nineteenth century, Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) stands as somewhat of an anomaly. In an age that worshiped flamboyant personalities and in which composers strove to break from tradition in radical new ways, Brahms was a private man who forged his own musical identity while upholding the traditions of the past. The Violin Concerto — written for his lifelong friend, the famous violinist Joseph Joachim — embodies his high regard for classical forms and reflect his disdain for bravura and empty technical display. Although it poses some of the most difficult challenges in the concerto literature, Brahms’s Violin Concerto is not a showpiece: rather it reveals his desire to blend solo and orchestral lines into a unified, symphonic texture. This essentially symphonic conception is confirmed by the fact that Brahms originally planned the composition in four movements. In the event, he reported to Joachim “the two middle movements have fallen through. Naturally they were the best ones. However, I have substituted a feeble adagio”. Merely three years later, as is well known, Brahms would fashion an ingenious four-movement hybrid between the symphonic and concerto genres with his second piano concerto. Scholars have suggested that the discarded Scherzo from the violin concerto migrate seamlessly into the piano concerto of 1881. Since Brahms was not a violinist, he sent sketches of the solo part to Joachim for advice. He writes: “I wanted you to correct, and I didn’t want you to have any excuse of any kind; either that the music is too good or that the whole score isn’t worth the trouble. But I shall be satisfied if you just write me a word or two, and perhaps write a word here and there in the music, like ‘difficult,’ ‘awkward,’ ‘impossible,’ etc.” Joachim worked painstakingly through the entire manuscript, and communicated his suggestions to Brahms, who characteristically ignored most of it. Nevertheless, Brahms entrusted Joachim to write the Cadenza for the first movement, which quickly became an integral part of the composition. Huber Foss wrote, “of all of Brahms’s major work, the violin concerto is the one that shows in the highest degree of perfection the reconciling of the two opposites of the creative mind—the lyrical and the constructive; Brahms the song writer and Brahms the symphonist.” The work premiered on New Year’s Day 1879 at Leipzig, with Brahms conducting and Joachim featuring as the soloist.
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