Latest news with #HongKongPhilharmonic
South China Morning Post
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Lang Lang, Renée Fleming, Tan Dun, Anne-Sophie Mutter among HKPhil 2025-26 season's stars
A star-studded line-up awaits Hong Kong Philharmonic concertgoers in its 2025-26 season, including pianist Lang Lang, soprano Renée Fleming, composer Tan Dun and violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter. Tarmo Peltokoski , who will become the orchestra's music director in the second half of 26, will conduct three programmes during the season, while the 25-year-old's fellow Finn Esa-Pekka Salonen will be composer-in-residence. This season's artistic partner, Italian Daniele Gatti, returns to conduct the Phil, as do British conductor Daniel Harding, music director of Youth Music Culture The Greater Bay Area, Singaporean Kahchun Wong, principal conductor of Britain's Hallé Ochestra, and German Anja Bihlmaier. Lang Lang will play Grieg's Piano Concerto in A minor with the orchestra on December 11 and 13, when he will share the Hong Kong Cultural Centre Concert Hall stage with Peltokoski for the first time. Soprano Renée Fleming, who will perform music from her award-winning album Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene with the Hong Kong Philharmonic in October 2025. Photo: Andrew Eccles, courtesy of Decca American soprano Renée Fleming will perform music by Handel, Fauré, Listz and contemporary composers from her award-winning album Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene on October 24-25. Her performances will be accompanied by a film commissioned from the National Geographic Society for the album.
South China Morning Post
17-02-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Schmaltz and sorrow in HK Phil's Rachmaninov and Raymond Yiu premiere
Premiering a new composition alongside a warhorse of the orchestral repertoire is an approach often taken to strike a balance between challenging and pacifying concertgoers. Yet the myth that contemporary music is difficult was soon put to rest by the Hong Kong Philharmonic and soloist Esther Yoo in their performance of Raymond Yiu's Violin Concerto. A four-movement tribute to Chinese violinist and composer Ma Sicong (1912-87), the work received its Asian premiere at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre on February 14. While anguish and nostalgia pervade both the concerto and Rachmaninov's Symphony No. 2 , which the Phil played in the second half of a programme conducted by its former music director Jaap van Zweden, Yiu's self-described 'meditation on the sorrows of exile' was much more than just doom and gloom. Esther Yoo plays the solo part in a performance of Raymond Yiu's Violin Concerto with the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra under conductor Jaap van Zweden on February 14, 2025. Photo: Keith Hiro/HK Phil The composer, who was born in Hong Kong and moved to the UK as a teenager, marries folk elements and the sounds of traditional Chinese instruments with a familiar Western musical form, just as did Ma in his own compositions such as the Inner Mongolia Suite (1937).
