Limelight: Yo-Yo Ma and The Art of Living, Youth Music Culture Guangdong
Angus McPherson speaks with Yo-Yo Ma midway through the 2020 Youth Music Culture Guangdong in the Chinese city of Guangzhou, an event presented by the Guangdong Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism and organized jointly by the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra and Xinghai Concert Hall, bringing together young musicians from all around the world. Ma is the event’s Artistic Director and a major drawcard for the participants, who have come to the city on the Pearl River in southern China from across the country as well as from the USA, Japan, Italy and Hungary – and even one musician from Australia.
Limelight Magazine
Angus McPherson
We’re speaking midway through the 2020 Youth Music Culture Guangdong in the Chinese city of Guangzhou, an event presented by the Guangdong Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism and organized jointly by the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra and Xinghai Concert Hall, bringing together young musicians from all around the world. Ma is the event’s Artistic Director and a major drawcard for the participants, who have come to the city on the Pearl River in southern China from across the country as well as from the USA, Japan, Italy and Hungary – and even one musician from Australia.
Read the full article here.
Limelight: INSIDE THE SHANGHAI ORCHESTRA ACADEMY
“I’m enjoying every part of it – but I’m not enjoying the winter, that’s for sure!” laughs horn player Mindy Chang, who has moved north from the warmer climes of Singapore to take part in the Shanghai Orchestra Academy in China, an intensive orchestral training program run by the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra.
Limelight
Angus McPherson
“I’m enjoying every part of it – but I’m not enjoying the winter, that’s for sure!” laughs horn player Mindy Chang, who has moved north from the warmer climes of Singapore to take part in the Shanghai Orchestra Academy in China, an intensive orchestral training program run by the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra.
She has just stepped out of a masterclass with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra’s Principal Horn, Han Chang Chou, who is coaching the horn students – in Chinese, with some English and German thrown in – on the audition excerpts they will have to master in order to one day win a job in an orchestra.
Chang’s first exposure to the Shanghai Orchestra Academy program was through an exchange with her university in Singapore last year, she tells Limelight, and seeking further learning opportunities after finishing her undergraduate degree, she enrolled, particularly keen to learn from the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra’s Principal Horn Peter Solomon. “I feel like he really has a lot to give,” she says. “That was actually the main reason that I came here. Peter really ticked all the right boxes.”
The SOA program, which has just celebrated its fifth anniversary, was established in 2014, evolving out of a 2012 exchange between the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic in the USA. “That was the year when maestro Long Yu [Shanghai Symphony Orchestra’s Music Director] started a discussion,” Doug He, Executive Director of the Shanghai Orchestra Academy, tells Limelight. “We all realised that for Chinese orchestras’ development, we needed a lot of good leadership from the musicians’ side.”
To read more about the Shanghai Orchestra Academy, click here.
Limelight Magazine: Huntington Estate Music Festival, Opening Weekend (Musica Viva)
The star of the concerts was the Russian-American pianist Olga Kern, outstandingly glamorous in dazzling multi-coloured dresses – a different one for each performance. On the first day she played a selection of Rachmaninov Preludes and Scriabin Études with sensational aplomb, accuracy and virtuosity. And her large hands made mincemeat of the notorious difficulties in Balakirev’s Islamey. It is a long time since I have heard – or seen – anything like this.
Limelight Magazine
Richard Gate
The Huntington Estate Music Festival is always an experience. The concerts are held in the Huntington Estate barrel shed, with rows of wine-filled oak barrels behind the players, while meals, which are served in the garden, are all part of the price and the event.
The programme for the opening weekend of this year’s Festival contained at least five undoubted masterpieces – the three Op. 59 quartets of Beethoven (known as the Razumovsky Quartets), the Chaconne for solo violin by Bach, and that outburst of youthful genius, the Octet for Strings by Mendelssohn.
It is no reflection on the quartet players to say that the star of the concerts was the Russian-American pianist Olga Kern, outstandingly glamorous in dazzling multi-coloured dresses – a different one for each performance. On the first day she played a selection of Rachmaninov Preludes and Scriabin Études with sensational aplomb, accuracy and virtuosity. And her large hands made mincemeat of the notorious difficulties in Balakirev’s Islamey. It is a long time since I have heard – or seen – anything like this.
The next day Kern demonstrated her flexibility by adopting an intimate, chamber music style to accompany the Canadian violinist Alexandre Da Costa in Brahms Sonata in D Minor Op 108. Both artists gave a perfect account of this difficult work. It was therefore surprising to me that Da Costa gave a less than perfect account of the Chaconne, which has a claim to be the greatest piece of music ever written. His tempi were too fast, the rhythm was not always steady and the different moods of the successive sections of the work were not conveyed. There was also some inelegant double-stopping.
Altogether though, the weekend provided an extremely enjoyable mixture of music, food, wine and rural living.