Rob Garratt
Der Ring des
For Hong Kong Arts Festival (HKAF) program director Grace Lang, life has always been punctuated by the music of Beethoven. As a child she learnt his short dances and bagatelles. Later she scaled the emotional heights of the third piano concerto in C minor in front of an audience, and in the late 1980s even recorded the monumental Waldstein Sonata, No. 21, for Hong Kong’s RTHK — what she calls her “last” performance peak before taking a job at HKAF.
Naturally, then, Lang is marking the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birth with an all-out, celebratory “festival-withina-festival”, an unprecedented arc of events strafing from straight orchestral and chamber recitals — using both modern and period instruments — to family concerts, films, and even a puppet opera.
“Beethoven really is an inspiration,” she says. “We all learnt his music... it’s so approachable, so much easy listening, because it’s so descriptive, so much about our pulse, our heartbeat, the different emotions.”
In total, nearly a fifth of HKAF’s 47 main program theater and dance performances to be staged as part of the 2020 edition will pay tribute to Beethoven — a fitting homage from Hong Kong, a city where Lang believes Beethoven is especially beloved, and where piano lessons are a natural rite of passage for a certain segment of society.
She hopes to inspire appreciation of Beethoven’s holistic beliefs about life, humanity, and music in an approach that starts from the grassroots up, she explains. “Because almost everybody has heard of Bui Do Fan in Hong Kong — his music is sewn into the life of people here. All the piano players have learned at least one or two of his dances; his keyboard works are really very well acquainted in Hong Kong.”
HKAF will kick off on Feb 12 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which is returning to the city for the first time in 25 years, and under the baton of music director Andris Nelsons. The next day, Nelsons will direct the accompaniment to pianist Yefim Bronfman’s reading of Beethoven’s fourth piano concerto. The festival will close a month later with feted soloist Midori performing Beethoven’s only Violin Concerto alongside the Festival Strings Lucerne, and two performances by the project orchestra Anima Eterna Brugge from Bruges, Belgium. On March 13, the orchestra will employ their period instruments — natural horns, trumpets without valves, violins with thick gut strings — to offer authentic readings of Beethoven’s third and seventh symphonies that capture “the tone colors of Beethoven’s Vienna”. The following day they will play the sixth symphony and the ever-popular fifth at two family concerts accompanied by narrator Pieter Berge, who will explain, among other things, how the natural world inspired the “Pastoral” sixth, and why the unmistakable “duh-duh-duh-duuuh” which introduces the fifth is commonly called “fate knocking on the door”.
“Some people might think we’re really challenging the kids to sit for an hour listening to an entire symphony,” admits Lang. “It’s not just good for the kids, but for parents too. It’s good for music teachers and music lovers to rethink his symphonies and refresh their understanding.”
Five of Beethoven’s form-defining string quartets will be performed by the Shanghai Quartet over two nights on Feb 18-19, while Beethoven’s first three piano concertos — dating from the last decade of the 17th century, and the dying days of the baroque movement — will be played on a period fortepiano by Kristian Bezuidenhout alongside Germany’s Freiburg Baroque Orchestra on March 6.
“There’re not so many fortepianos in Hong Kong — just one or two, and we had to find the right one,” says Lang, adding, “this is a really wonderful opportunity to hear how the concertos were played back then using a fortepiano, how it originally sounded.”
However, the festival’s most arresting engagement may be the staging of Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio, in a performance by puppets, courtesy of the UNESCO-listed Salzburg Marionette Theatre, performed in Asia for the first time.
“This we hope will really spark imaginations and can really tie the families together,” says Lang. “Sometimes, people might think puppetry is just entertainment, but this is very educational because Beethoven’s whole thinking is in the piece. It’s about love, humanity, hope, and brotherhood. This really brings out the whole thinking of our mini Beethoven festivalwithin-a-festival.”
Hong Kong’s other homegrown ensembles have also been busy paying their dues to the father of romantic music. Last June, the City Chamber Orchestra of Hong Kong set the ball rolling with an all-Beethoven program, conducted by and featuring as soloist Philippe Entremont, timed to coincide with the French musician’s 85th birthday.
In keeping with its decidedly un-snobbish, ambassadorial approach, Hong Kong Sinfonietta meanwhile will host an educational two-day “Beethoven the Immortal” program, which will see two symphonies and two piano concertos — performed by soloist Colleen Lee, introduced by conductor and presenter Jason Lai.
Fittingly, the weekend will close with outgoing music director Yip Wing-sie’s favorite Beethoven Symphony, the seventh. “No conductor can perform this symphony without feeling exhausted, both mentally and physically,” she says. “The intense energy that goes from one movement to the other and then all the way to the last chord — it never fails to move and excite the audience. Only great music like this can bridge the gap between the stage and listeners.”