Orchestral manoeuvres
Named Orchestra of the Year in 2019, the Hong Kong Philharmonic, under Jaap van Zweden, was braced to take the world by storm. Then came Covid-19. The musicians and crew finally embarked on their European tour in February, and Post Magazine went along for the ride.
This Valentine’s Day, Vanessa Chan, director of orchestral operations at the Hong Kong Philharmonic, had her final weekly check-up call with the European agent organising their forthcoming tour. In a few days, 120 musicians and management would begin a nine-city, three-week journey that had been gestating for several years: in October 2019, when HK Phil had been named Gramophone magazine’s Orchestra of the Year for its live recordings of Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle as conducted by Jaap van Zweden, it had hoped to promote the love to an international audience. Covid-19 made that impossible, but five years on, van Zweden is leaving the orchestra at the end of June, and there’s been no announcement about his successor.
This European tour, the longest in the orchestra’s history, was now being billed as part of their 50th anniversary celebrations.
The plan was to begin with a warm-up performance in Singapore, from where the orchestra would fly with Lufthansa to Frankfurt, Germany, and then make its way to Dresden for the first European concert. During the Valentine’s Day meeting, agents told Chan it looked as if Lufthansa, which has been having a season of industrial discontent, would not be on strike the following week. That was Wednesday.
On the Friday, Chan discovered she had Covid-19
– the same night the orchestra played the first half of its touring programme at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre for the (full-house) enjoyment of its domestic audience. The concert consisted of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 9, Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, and Brahms’ Symphony No 1. Saturday’s programme was Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 4 and Mahler’s Symphony No 1, preceded by the premiere of a six-minute piece called Asterismal Dance, by Hong Kong composer Daniel Lo Ting-cheung, specially commissioned last year for the 50th anniversary. Every concert on the tour would begin with his work.
Backstage that night, Lo was glowing. “I wanted to compose a piece that embodied something eager and energetic but not overly intense,” he said. As a fan of film director Tim Burton, he had hoped to infuse it with witty animation. “Asterismal” refers to constellations: the heavenly patterns humans see to make sense of scattered stars. “I thought, ‘Oh, let’s do a dance!’” He was influenced by the episodic style of Polish Nobelwinning writer Olga Tokarczuk – the way she knits incidents together seamlessly, especially in her 2007 book Flights. Nearby, huge double-bass cases lined the corridor like storm troopers, on standby for deployment to the airport.
Early that Monday morning, Hong Kong-time, Chan received a text from the European agent to say that Lufthansa’s ground staff had called a strike. By now, she was testing negative for Covid-19 so she flew to Singapore, where the orchestra was performing that Tuesday night.
As seats became available on other airlines, splinters of orchestra flew out of Asia into various European airports: London, Helsinki, Paris, Zurich. Eventually, these fragments coalesced in Berlin, where coaches had been provided. If the strike had affected Lufthansa cargo, which was handling the orchestral instruments, this story probably would not have happened.
It is true some personal luggage went AWOL and
at least one owner wasn’t reunited with his case until Toulouse, the third city (and France being the third country) of the tour. Luckily, the men’s white-tie performance apparel had travelled as cargo along with the instruments. By the Friday night, everyone had completed their global choreography and checked into the Moxy Dresden Neustadt hotel, opposite DresdenNeustadt’s railway station. Then the real work began.
Disabuse yourself of any notion that touring with HK Phil is glamorous. It is a thrilling, enervating, wonderful, infuriating experience but the Moxy’s rooms, for instance, have no kettles, no slippers, no robes, no fridges. Travelling as a musical collective can also be oddly dehumanising. “Bus one – first violins and cellos!” yells Chan at an airport exit; and people often introduce themselves as their instrument (“Yu-po – oboe!”). They are jet-lagged, they are performing for an exacting maestro at a dress rehearsal and then again, a few hours later, for punters in a hall with unfamiliar acoustics. It is like a grown-up version of a school trip, with frequent exams thrown in.
The day of the Dresden concert, February 24, happens to be the second anniversary of the war in Ukraine. Outside the Frauenkirche, the church famously obliterated by Allied bombing in 1945 and then rebuilt in 2005 as a symbol of post-Cold War European unity, a sadly ironic concert – “Stand With Ukraine” – is also being organised. Inside, at noon, a small cohort from Hong Kong gathers to hear the organ service. Nearby, other musicians are visiting the Old Masters Picture Gallery and the Green Vault museum. Across the city, Dennis Wu, HK Phil’s director of marketing, is on a
“JAAP VAN ZWEDEN MAKES YOU LISTEN SO INTENTLY THAT THE MUSIC TAKES UP RESIDENCE WITHIN YOUR HEAD AND WHEN HE HALTS IT, WITH A SLICING GESTURE, THAT SILENT EVICTION IS A PHYSICAL SHOCK.”