Concert 13/11/2005
It’s my fault that I had had three glasses of wine during the dinner before concert. The perfume-like alcohol eventually made me very sleepy and my soul was wandering during the first half of the concert. Berlioz’s Overture Le Corsaire is indeed not an attractive piece, and even the top-of-the-world orchestra couldn’t bring out any interesting feature from the work. Ravel’s Ma mere l’oye is a masterwork, but when the orchestra played it I had already lost my very last consciousness. Anyway, I was then told that the Ravel’s was presented so chaotically that my sleep wasn’t a pitiful one.
What I did perceive was mainly from the second half of the concert. Marvelous! The Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony was rendered with glamorous texture --- higher strings were a sort of “tactile”, while the lower ones were “glassy transparent”. Woodwinds were bright and elegant (though I’d prefer a darker sound), and brass were well-controlled. My seat --- balcony Q105--- gave me a distant but well-blended acoustic feeling, and I enjoyed much upon the crystal-clear juxtaposition and contraposition of different layers of this great orchestra. Simon Rattle, the Chief Conductor, should be praised for his choice of such balanced tempo, and more importantly his imagination on the musical details. The Symphony was not in a strictly-forward nor free-and-dreaming style; what I felt was a construction of various clear layers, a paragraph with nice phrases and natural breaths, and a novel with a comfortable touch of affection. I’d not be surprised if audiences were criticizing the performance with the “ideal interpretation” in their mind. Indeed, Rattles’ performance here was not much characterized, and we could easily find a more interesting recording for each movement of the Symphony, especially the solemn second movement could have been far more moving. However, in term of overall structure, fluentness, and musical tension, we should say BRAVO without hesitation.
The concert ended with the encore piece Scene of Crane by Sibelius --- really moving!
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Concert 14/11/2005
Though not having Beethoven nor Mahler, the repertoire of the second concert was a real gem. I had a great expectation on the Haydn’s Symphony No. 86, because the beauty of Classical pieces is so hardly shaped that only a real first-class orchestra can really make it. My seat --- E 3 behind the bassist --- let me hear the sound of first violins more clearly than any other string groups. The result was however disappointing. There were so many places of the Haydn that the first violins were not “clean”! In some faster passages, the players were having their notes on their own, and they were eventually creating chaos. This really distracted me and I could no longer think of the beauty of Haydn. After the concert, I kept thinking about it and having such conclusion: with music as simple as Haydn’s, it’s even more difficult for the players to play it messily than to make it perfect, and the poor result was very possibly due to the condemn-to-death concert hall. My guess was that the back of the section actually couldn’t hear the front players, so they could hardly play the running notes together. (Really, on the stage of such poor concert hall, even the Canon in D would be a challenge.) Still, watching the gesture and facial expression of the maestro Simon Rattle, one might imagine how delicate should the music be if the condition were ideal.
It was my first time to listen to Thomas Ades’ masterpiece Asyla. The four-movement work was full of colours, contrasts and extremes. The percussion section was itself spectacular, with so many “instruments” to produce musical notes --- including 6 tins which you can find at supermarket. There were 3 pianos - one grand; it’s said that one (or 2?) of that was 1/4 note flat. The celesta also joined the great keyboard section. The winds were also special, with so many rare members like contrabass clarinet, bass oboe, bass flute. The music was complex, but the musical themes were not such difficult to approach as one would expect. I would regard the piece as a very sensational and colouristic symphonic work with proper uses of modern materials. My only reservation was that the last movement ended a bit too suddenly.
R. Strauss’ Ein Heldenleben was another highly expected piece, although I’m not really familiar with it. The Japanese solo violin (concertmaster, which was different from the western guy at 13/11 concert) sounded neatly, but a bit tensed. The whole orchestra was again very well balanced, but the music flows seemed not free enough, and musical ideas were not much “spirited”. What made me surprised was that the very last note of the solo violin was not in tune. Apparently Mr. Toru Yasunaga knew what happened, and he applied vibrato so thickly on that particular note to dress thing up.
The encore piece, one of the Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances, was played so lively to give the orchestra’s Hong Kong visit a perfect ending.
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