Thursday December 22nd, 1808 was a bitterly cold day in Vienna. Beethoven took the stage in what was to be his last public performance as soloist with orchestra. The crammed programme lasted some four hours. Due to lack of rehearsal time, the evening didn’t go smoothly, with the final Choral Fantasy having to be stopped and started again. The fourth piano concerto was not very well received, and was to be neglected for almost three decades before Mendelssohn revived interest in it.
Fast forward to more than two centuries later, five and a half thousand miles away, the air in the Hong Kong City Hall lobby on Saturday was muggy. In the concert hall, conductor Yip Wing-sie held court with the Hong Kong Sinfonietta and the SingFest 2013 Festival Chorus in works by Brahms and Beethoven. Perhaps by design, the programme included the same piano concerto and was to close with the Choral Fantasy, just like the evening in the Theater-an-der-Wien in 1808.
One would not normally associate expediency with Brahms, yet I can’t help feeling that he composed the Tragic Overture to fulfil a need other than art itself. Its provenance is not clear, although it seems certain that it was a companion piece to balance the cheerful Academic Festival Overture. Brahms himself claimed he didn’t have a specific tragedy in mind; thus the work does not plumb the depths of emotion – at least that’s the impression the Hong Kong Sinfonietta left with me. Not that Brahms set out to expound the intricate meaning of classical Greek tragedy, but the well-honed material probably deserved more serious consideration than the bland treatment I heard.
Among Beethoven’s piano concertos, the No. 4 in G major, Op. 58 is an oddball. In addition to having an inventive structure, it requires genuine dialogue between soloist and orchestra that needs to be patiently nurtured and honed. In the image of Orpheus taming the wild beasts – a concept of the concerto popularised by Liszt – the soloist prevails over the orchestra through inner strength and unruffled lyricism, rather than technical brilliance or force of will.
Ben Kim’s opening chords were gentle enough, but against the warmth and lyricism of the lengthy orchestral response, they got off to an unequal footing, sounding dry and cold. He glided fluidly to dominance with increasingly assertive statements, marred by a tinge of muddiness in his fingering. Beethoven provided plenty of scope for the soloist with a penchant for forceful hammering, and Ben Kim took the bait. Refusing to cower in the face of burly orchestral strings in the slow movement, he gradually gained the upper hand to settle into copious space for dreamy contemplation, like a soldier collapsing into bed after a hard day’s fighting. Orchestra and soloist came together in a stronger bond than ever in the finale, weaving together their respective parts with panache and ebullience. The gentle tug-of-war ended with the triumph of both.