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Performing arts in Hong Kong
LifestyleArts

Toilet paper shortages and other Hong Kong pandemic stories given musical spin

  • Composer Daniel Lo has created a multimedia concert based on poems about the pandemic from writer Ho Fuk-yan
  • The one-hour concert will premiere on November 19 at the HKICC Lee Shau Kee School of Creativity

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Customers queue to buy toilet paper in a supermarket in Hong Kong on February 14, 2020, a pandemic phenomena that led to widespread shortages in the city. Photo: AP
Enid Tsui

Composing for voices didn’t use to be Daniel Lo Ting-cheung’s speciality. His doctorate from the UK’s University of York was on orchestral music after all.

But since 2016, when he was commissioned by the Hong Kong Arts Festival to create a piece of music based on local literary history for a programme called “Hong Kong Odyssey”, he has been hooked on writing to words.

Having written the music for two chamber operas based on Xi Xi’s story A Woman Such as Myself, and a semi-staged cantata version of Yesi’s The Banquet at elBulli, Lo has turned to contemporary Hong Kong literature once again for “Songs of Virotopia”, a one-hour concert that premieres on November 19 at the HKICC Lee Shau Kee School of Creativity.

The concert features a “song cycle” of nine pieces based on poems about the pandemic by Hong Kong writer Ho Fuk-yan. These will be sung in Cantonese (with English surtitles) by bass Caleb Woo accompanied by a six-person ensemble. Artist Yu Wing-yan’s black-and-white images of Hong Kong will be projected in between songs.

Composer Daniel Lo. Photo: Songs of Virotopia
Composer Daniel Lo. Photo: Songs of Virotopia

The nine poems are selected from Ho’s 2021 Love in the Time of Coronavirus, a collection of 50 poems (in Chinese with English translation) on subjects that local readers in particular can easily identify with.

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