Music

To open its landmark 10th season, the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble presents five striking works from Asia and the USA that reimagine traditional musical materials and forms, exploring new sonic frontiers.
At the concert’s centrepiece is South Korean composer Unsuk Chin’s 15-player ensemble work, Gougalon (Scenes from a Street Theater). The composer writes that the work is about an “imaginary folk music” with Hong Kong being a point of inspiration:
“In 2008 and 2009 I visited Hong Kong and Guangzhou, among other places. The atmosphere of the old and poor residential neighbourhoods with their narrow, winding alleys, ambulatory food vendors, and market places…brought to mind long forgotten childhood experiences. It reminded me very much of Seoul of the 1960s, of the period after the Korean War and before the radical modernization….I was particularly reminded of a troupe of entertainers I saw a number of times as a child in a suburb of Seoul.”
Two works in this programme combine Chinese, Japanese and Western instruments. In Toshio Hosokawa’s Landscape V, the Japanese composer experiments with finely thin calligraphic textures verging on the edge of silence for Japanese shō and string quartet. As a tasteful pairing, local composer Charles Kwong’s quintet Sonata/ dissipated in silence evocatively explores the transitions between sound and music, and ambience and silence.
Two commissions are also presented in this concert. American composer Eric Wubbels’ sextet life-still, co-commissioned by the HKNME and MATA Festival (USA), is a “distantly starlit lullaby” (New York Music Daily) where each player’s heartbeat at times determines for the flow of the music. Chinese composer Yao Chen’s The Supplicant for solo oboe and 10 players explores musical expression at the frontier between the old and the new, the East and the West, and between irrational mysticism and rational logic.