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Siu Pak Yung was featured on the second night. He played a total of three works by Liu Tian Hua – two as part of the planned program and one for the encore – all requiring a certain intensity from the performer. Siu gave himself more latitude for expression by choosing pieces that were more pensive and emotionally tense. There were some idiosyncracies in his technique, but these don’t matter much to me. Compared to the pieces Min played last night, I can more easily relate to those Siu had chosen.
The orchestral works Gu Huai Xun Gen and Execution in Fall were most fascinating. Having already heard both of them the night before, I became more acquainted with them on second hearing.
A troubling chord played by the strings starts off Gu Huai Xun Gen, composed by Zhao Jiping. He is known more for the soundtracks he had composed for films, most notably Raise the Red Lantern, To Live, and Farewell My Concubine. The introduction was reminisence of the opening of Sibelius’ Swans of Tuolena – full of uncertainty and mystique. The first movement, played entirely by the string section, had the quality of an adagio movement in a string quartet. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was part of a movie soundtrack. The exuberant second movement depicted the return to one’s homeland. Most of the fanfare centered around a second theme (which I’d also jotted in my notebook), and was carried through till the end of the movement by the wind section. The surreal never-ending cycles of celebration had to end somewhere. The inevitability of which was unfortunately confirmed when the same chord heard at the start of this piece rose like a pall of darkness over the now distant fanfare melody. And then it’s back to the brooding heard in the first movement. The fanfare theme, played once by the flutes, gave a quiet reminder of the bygone days before the music draws to an end.
The other orchestral work Execution in Fall, also played on both nights, was composed by Lin Yue Pei who was in the audience. The conductor paid personal tribute to the maestro, who recently celebrated his 80th birthday. The work is based on a drama set in dynastic Chinese periods. The drama tells the story of a lady wrongly sentenced to death for allegedly poisoning her father-in-law. Traditional Chinese operatic devices and idioms were used alongside harsh dissonant chords and irregular rhythms such as 7-time and 9-time. The court calls and the maiden’s cries, verbalized by the suona and leiqin, tickled the audience. The orchestra sound was pared down, often in the more introspective sections, to just that of a few different instruments played by the section principals. I remembered these as the most haunting, alarming and distressing moments.
I wonder if it would be easy to find recordings of the two works. I’d really like to have them on my playlist. Oh… this is totally random, but I can’t explain why I’m reminded of Messiaen’s Turangulila Symphonie after listening to Execution in Fall.
It was a good weekend :)
Just got back from a CO concert. Tonight’s performance is the first in a series of two featuring two well-established erhu performers. I have been to Min Hui Fen’s concert many years back when she performed Xin Hun Bie. It is typical of her to grace every performance with epic works. For tonight, it was the Great Wall Capriccio, a piece that has become synonymous with her name.
The concert hall was fully occupied. “Regular” concerts by the SCO don’t normally see such fantastic attendance. She delivered small-scaled ensemble works before the intermission and played the Capriccio for the final piece.
One shouldn’t attend Min’s concert expecting surprises. Her performance was very polished and down to earth, but after the first half of the night I felt she was getting jaded after all these years on the concert track. She exuded a sort of Zen-like aura throughout. If I was seated further away, I probably won’t noticed her blink. Perhaps the dainty good ol’ ensemble works don’t go well with bucketsful of passionate play. They require only that much, and not more.
But I felt the same when she played the Great Wall Capriccio. I see an interesting contrast in the level of energy between the orchestra performers and her in this work. She seemed like an oasis of calm in the company of visibly enthusiatic string players (some, if not most, of whom are qualified to play the concerto). My main beef was with the first movement. She sounded almost too pedagogical. If she was facing the string section, it would look like a lesson in erhu kindergarten. It’s child’s play to her anyway. Oh, and her glissandos usually ends a quarter tone to a semitone from the end-note. The applause in between movements was distracting too.
The evening gown she wore was the same one in her publicity photo. The encore was the same as that I heard at her previous concert and so was the rapturous applause.
No, it’s not a bad performance. My palms were sore from the applauding and I thoroughly enjoyed her performance. I wondered how much of the appreciation shown by the audience was due to her reputation? And how much was out of courtesy? I felt I had watched a performance staged exactly the same way twenty times over, elsewhere in the world.
Well, not that it’s a bad thing. I think I’m developing the habit of judging (and attending) music performances for their novelty that I get unappreciative of the well-established. Hmm… that’s something to mull over.
Now that the end of year exams are underway, I’ll be getting more free time on weekends. For once in 6 weeks, I have Saturday morning to myself, and I’m not about to blow it off in slumberland, though blogging at 3 am in the morning is a sure step in that direction. I used to cycle to the beach on weekend mornings, but not since I started tutoring on Saturdays. I should do that this morning!
My TODO list is so filled. The long term ones include learning a foreign language and submitting variable star magnitude estimates more regularly. I need to do a bit of research on contact lenses if I’m keen to try them. Then I need to decide the Linux distro I’d use on the desktop. A home brewed manual guiding device for my camera might be interesting too.
There are so many things to do… but time is always short.
I did my first night duty on Wednesday night. It wasn’t as bad for me as the guys who did it the night before. The full 9 hour shift was shared amongst the 5 of us — mine was scheduled to start just before midnight and end at 0140h. I’d gone through half of Murakami’s “Dance Dance Dance” when I ended my duty. No better time than night duty to read a novel! So there’s something good to be said about night duty! I didn’t get a chance to talk to the rest since most of them were asleep when I was awake, so it was quite uneventful. My ex-boss happened to enter the building at about 10pm, and we caught up on each other’s lifes (well, mostly mine). I’ve known him as a night worker from the days I worked for him, so it didn’t surprise me to see him around at that time.
Although I didn’t sleep for very long after my duty ended, I slept well, unlike my peers who complained of the cold air from the A/C. Thanks to the days spent in the frigid wasteland and the reluctant heater in my room over there, I’ve put my skill of minimising heat loss to good use in situations like this.
I was well aware of the lunar eclipse last night, but I have seen too many lunar eclipses to be motivated to stay up for the event. The umbral magnitude of a little less than 20% didn’t convince me to leave my bed, and so… no obs report here. Some local folks took pretty decent photos. The next lunar eclipse observable from my location will happen on the UT night of March 3rd next year (the umbral phase begins at about 5:30 am local time on March 4th). I wonder if I’ll stay up for that.
