Review | A perfect gift from a man who loved music: Spotify release for album by late composer and Hong Kong classical music show presenter Jonathan Douglas
- Jonathan Douglas presented classical music programmes for Hong Kong public broadcaster RTHK for decades, but he was also a composer and pianist
- Months before his death from cancer, he recorded 13 of his piano compositions, which his family have now released on Spotify as an album, Time and Again
Jonathan Douglas was a man of many talents. Best-known as the voice behind RTHK’s classical music programmes for 30 years, Douglas was also a theatre director and accomplished actor. But his first love was music.
Now these have been released on Spotify by his family as an album, titled Time and Again.
There is a theory that each musical key provokes different emotions. Out of the 13 pieces, nine were written in the keys of D major and E major.
The former is the key of triumph, and often used to symbolise the overcoming of hardship – think of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy – while E major is a joyful, boisterous key (Rossini’s William Tell Overture). The result is that Time and Again is a portrait of a man who loved life and who stood defiantly in the face of death.
