Hong Kong

Yang Xuefei plays Rodrigo’s “Concierto de Aranjuez” with the Hong Kong Philharmonic, 18 October 2016

An article in the most recent Economist was subtitled “China’s newest export hit is classical music” with a lede about the China Philharmonic Orchestra on tour in New York.

 

Once, classical music generally travelled from the West to the rest. Now China is reversing the exchange, not merely performing Western classical music in China, but exporting it.

 

But China has been “exporting” individual performers of demonstrable world-class stature for quite some time: pianists Wang Yujia and Li Yundi and opera singers soprano He Hui and tenor Shi Yijie are just a few Chinese artists in demand worldwide. Hong Kong had the privilege to hear one of the others this weekend, classical guitarist Yang Xuefei, playing Joaquín Rodrigo’s “Concierto de Aranjuez” with the Hong Kong Philharmonic.

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“Lee Fook Chee’s Hong Kong: Photographs from the 1950s” by Patricia Chiu and Edward Stokes

Lee Fook Chee’s Hong Kong: Photographs from the 1950s is a remarkable book with many levels of meaning. It tells the story of a lone immigrant photographer and presents his collection of photographs portraying 1950s Hong Kong. A photo book, and of the highest standards at that, it also brings sharp and fresh research into the social history of the place that invites scrutiny on how it compares itself sixty years later. The entire book, its sum greater than its parts, will delight therefore not only photography aficionados but anyone with a serious interest in Hong Kong.

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Verdi’s “Otello”: Shakespeare Sings in Hong Kong

No opera composer turned to William Shakespeare more often than Giuseppe Verdi, who composed three works, Macbeth, Otello and Falstaff, based on the Bard’s plays. But if it hadn’t been for the persistence of his publisher Ricordi and would-be librettist Arrigo Boito, Verdi might well have stopped at one. He had to be coaxed out of a post-Aida retirement to write Otello, which finally premiered in 1887, sixteen years later.

But Otello was worth waiting for. A masterpiece, a thorough integration of music, words and drama that, astoundingly, manages to illuminate the original work—itself an unequalled masterpiece—on which it is based.

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“Something Sets Us Looking for a Place”: A Conversation with Sarah Howe

When Fleurs de lettres approached me about interviewing Sarah Howe, winner of the 2015 TS Eliot-prize, I didn’t need to think twice about accepting the invitation. Before Howe won the prestigious award, I had already admired her work in the anthology Eight Hong Kong Poets (Chameleon Press, 2015) and a special issue of Law Text Culture (18:1, 2014). When her debut collection Loop of Jade came out I bought a copy right away and I appreciated all the more the care and thought she put into her work.

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“Madame Butterfly” in Hong Kong

The concept for this new production Madama Butterfly was been influenced the work’s literary background: the western perception of Japan present throughout the autobiographical novel of Pierre Loti (Madame Chrysanthème, 1887) and the diary treatment of the subject by Félix Régamey (The Pink Notebook of Madame Chrysanthème, 1894). These two sources present the protagonist Madame Chrysanthème is in two completely different characterizations: in Loti, she is a dissolute and licentious woman, while in Regamey she is a needy, extremely sensitive creature. David Belasco, meanwhile, (who wrote the play (1904)—derived via an 1898 short story by American John Luther Long—that was the main reference for Giacomo Puccini’s librettists Illica and Giacosa, describes her as a victim of a fatal and irresistible love.

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