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Ken Smith
Forces of four symphony orchestras perform beneath giant screen at Hong Kong Coliseum to open this year’s Greater Bay Area arts festival.
Jia Ding’s ‘authentic’ Chinese production of Puccini work sets the stage for some fine singing and acting, notably by soprano Bing Bing Wang.
Orchestra’s incoming music director produced a concert of two halves: the discipline and control he showed in Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No 2 unravelled in the animated sections of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5.
It was Wagner that changed the Hong Kong Philharmonic’s profile, so it was fitting that one of Jaap van Zweden’s last programmes as its music director was a concert version of opera The Flying Dutchman.
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With the action moved to Ming dynasty China, Law Ka-ying adapts, directs and stars with Sun Kim-long in the story about a sensitive hero with a big nose caught in a love triangle.
Hong Kong Arts Festival show with a rock concert vibe features pieces orchestral in scope composed by Nordic metalheads and performed by multinational Baltic Sea Philharmonic.
The Chinese opera highlight of the Hong Kong Arts Festival, Peony Pavilion (Complete Version), by Shanghai Kunqu Opera Troupe, was well done, but lacked the depth the title promised.
Garden of Repose at the West Kowloon Cultural District, a multimedia choral concert produced by the Hong Kong Arts Festival, includes works by Brahms, Arvo Pärt, Poulenc and Antonia Lotti.
Performed at the Hong Kong Arts Festival, Van Gogh in Me is a multimedia display of music and visual art by the Netherlands Chamber Choir using works by Debussy, Gustav Mahler, Saint-Saëns and more.
A performance of nervous intensity from the Hong Kong Sinfonietta of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 is accompanied by artist’s film inspired by the work and by Soviet composer’s career.
Conductor’s reading of Bruckner’s Symphony No 4 focused on the summits at the expense of the valleys, his pacing offering Hong Kong Philharmonic sections a showcase but also an inconsistent pulse.
Forget the futuristic title “The Stage Door on Mars” given this production – it was very much a tribute to the present-day vibrancy of Cantonese opera and music.
Silent Opera strips operas to their bare bones. In the case of Vixen, this brings narrative clarity to Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen. But the singers still need to deliver some theatre.
Hong Kong group’s performances of Donizetti’s opera about the rivalry between England’s Queen Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots were like night and day.
From art deco to brutalist, Philip Jablon’s poignant photo book Thailand’s Movie Theatres recalls the glory days of cinema-going before shopping centre multiplexes cornered the market.
