No horses were spared on Friday evening at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre. And neither were the cows! In this larger-than-life rendition of Richard Strauss’ dawn-to-dusk tone poem An Alpine Symphony, presented by the Hong Kong Philharmonic complete with photographic projections of alpine scenery, little was left to the imagination. The spectacular images, snapped by German photographer Tobias Welle, were projected onto a huge screen and loosely followed Strauss’ score. But the jury remains out as to whether the images added or detracted from the musical narrative and/or the listener’s imagination.
As unavoidable and unfortunate as it was, the eyesore of a screen did distract and covered most of the organ and any sign of organist Anne Lam in the opening work, the Festliches Präludium. Fortunately though, her rousing playing could never have gone unnoticed in this work, one that is often criticised as a piece of noisy pomp, penned by Strauss to open Vienna’s Konzerthaus in 1913. The HK Phil’s rendition with Lio Kuokman was voluminous and majestic enough and, as it probably did back then, gave the Concert Hall’s rafters a good rattling.
Even if the pumped-up Alpine Symphony was on the brink of overkill, Kuokman and the HK Phil delivered the musical goods in spades. The brass playing was as precise as ever, notably in their execution of the more rugged manifestations of The Ascent motif. The fanfares, both on-and-off stage, were largely precise, aside from the odd occasion when the trumpets overreached in their chorales and distorted their otherwise fine ensemble. Horns and trombones presented their theme in Entering the Forest with brilliance and the intermittent birdcalls in the woodwind were delightful. Strauss’ glittering textures in both the At the Waterfall and Apparition sections were enhanced by brilliantly executed cascading string figures.