It’s not unusual for a festival to span many art forms: theatre, dance and circus rubbing shoulders with opera and concerts in various musical genres. But next year’s Hong Kong Arts Festival, which opens on 20th February and runs for about a month, seems to make a point of going further, including several events which mix up different art forms within the same performance.
Take, for example, the performances of Brahms’ German Requiem, in the august confines of HK University’s Loke Yew Hall. It’s a performance of a work that’s very much in the middle of the standard choral repertoire, by a highly respected choir (the Rundfunkchor Berlin). But look at the programme closely: there’s no orchestra, you’ll spot the presence of the Sasha Waltz & Guests dance company and you’ll see a promise to “banish separate spaces for performers and audiences”. Clearly, this is going to be anything but a run-of-the-mill Requiem concert.
Chamber music fans will head for one of several concerts by the Debussy Quartet, Baroque fans for Concerto Copenhagen or harpsichordist Lars Ulrik Mortensen, while there’s more Shostakovich on offer from Russian piano star Alexander Melnikov.
On 3 March, you do have the option of a relatively straight requiem concert, by going to the HK Cultural Centre to see Verdi's Messa da Requiem played by the Orchestra and Chorus of the Teatro Regio di Torino and their Music Director Gianandrea Noseda (I use the word “relatively” because the Verdi work is far more operatic than liturgical in style). Noseda has been on top of his game recently, so the chance to hear him conduct Verdi with his own authentically Italian opera house orchestra is not to be missed. Noseda also conducts the orchestra in a concert of Shostakovich and Prokofiev, and the Teatro Regio are doing more Verdi in the shape of three performances of Simon Boccanegra, as well as playing a mixed Verdi/Wagner opera gala on 27 February, all under the baton of another top Italian conductor, Roberto Abbado.