words yvonne teh

The folks behind the HK Arts Festival are doing something lovely for next year – they’re having it open on Valentine’s Day with one of the most romantic ballets in the repertoire, Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Cue visions of Hong Kong’s lovers scrambling for their phones to book tickets! And, as the festival’s full programme is available, why shouldn’t those same lovers (and other culture mavens) jot down more events from the slightly over month-long arts festival they might wish to share with their sweet Valentines?

It may seem early days to be talking about the 2008 HK Arts Festival but with the programme available and advance bookings now open, you can’t be slow to get tickets – for this year’s festival, sales reached 97.5% an all-time high. Eighty-two ticketed performances will be on enticing offer next year, from the Stuttgart Ballet’s opener to the London Philharmonic’s closing concert of Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique Symphony and Prokofiev’s Symphony No 5 in B-flat major. bc has had a look through the programme and, as much as we’d love to cover everything in it, that would leave nothing for you to discover. So, to whet you and your lovers appetite…

February 15-16 and 18
Question: What do classical music greats Gustav Mahler, Arturo Toscanini, Leonard Bernstein and Zubin Mehta have in common? Well, along with current incumbent Lorin Maazel, they’ve all been principal conductors of the USA’s oldest orchestra, the grand ol’ New York Philharmonic, which will play three concerts in Hong Kong as part of the HK Arts Festival. Each concert is symphonic: on Saturday, February 16, the orchestra enters the New World with Dvorak’s most famous symphony, the Seventh. The following day it will be Mendelssohn’s turn, the highlight of the programme being his Fourth Symphony, The Italian, and on Tuesday, February 19, the orchestra bows out with the work music critic Eduard Hanslick described as “a dark well; the longer we look into it, the more brightly the stars shine back”: Brahms’ Fourth. All performances will commence at 8pm at the HK Cultural Centre’s Concert Hall. Tickets are from $780 to $200.

February 21-23
Pulsating and edgy are choice words to describe the American Repertory Theatre’s Orpheus X, a rock musical revisiting of the Greek myth of Orpheus. In this contemporary reinvention, master musician Orpheus is recast as a vain and vacuous rock star/songwriter who has locked himself in his recording studio and dreams of rescuing Eurydice, a lost poet, from the underworld. And if that doesn’t sound sufficiently innovative, do note that this production will have its Asian premiere at the HKAPA’s Lyric Theatre on February 21 and run until February 23. Showtime is scheduled for 8pm. Tickets are priced from $480 to $120.

Sunday, February 24
Before you think the HK Arts Festival has gone all American for 2008, on Sunday, February 24, Japanese jazz prodigy Hiromi Uehara takes centre-stage with Hiromi’s Sonicbloom – Time Control, a musical presentation that promises to be quite extraordinary. Uehara will be on piano and keyboards, with hits from her same-titled album released earlier this year, and backed by band members David Fiucynski (on fretted and fretless guitar), Tony Grey (bass) and Martin Valihora (drums). Hiromi’s sonics are set to bloom from 8pm at the HK City Hall’s Concert Hall. Tickets cost $240 to $80.

Wednesday, February 27
The HK Chinese Orchestra’s Music About China concert was one of this year’s HK Arts Festival’s sold-out events. Any bets against their follow-up Music About China 2 doing the same? One funny thing though, despite its Sino-focused title, the 2008 concert will include the premiere of a newly commissioned work by composer-conductor Bongani Ndodana, one of the leading musical figures to have emerged recently from South Africa. He draws on African dance music with Chinese musical instruments for inspiration! This concert, which will also revisit two highly acclaimed works from their traditional Chinese repertoire and premiere ethnic Chinese composer Zhang Haofu’s Chang’An Symphony, will start at 8pm at the HK City Hall’s Concert Hall. Tickets for it are priced at $300, $200 and $100.

February 29-March 3
At the festival media preview, the question that pretty much every member of the press wanted to ask after a viewing a video clip of the Pina Bausch Tanztheater Wuppertal’s watery Vollmond (Full Moon) was: how are they going to stage this sodden production at the HK Cultural Centre’s normally pretty dry Grand Theatre? The German dance theatre production requires its dancers to splash, twirl and swirl through torrents of water in a landscape of shadows cast by a full moon! So... can they do it? About all we can know is that we’ll have to wait for the evening performances at 7:30pm on February 29 to March 1 and March 3 and for an afternoon matinee at 3pm on Sunday, March 2 to find out. Tickets are on sale at $650 to $100.

March 7-9
Chinese and Norwegian cultures couldn’t seem to get much further apart, yet the Mainland’s most accomplished and prominent theatre director, Lin Zhaohua, is set to helm Ibsen’s intense psychological and autobiographical drama, The Master Builder, at the festival. From March 7 to 9, the affecting story of an aging architect who must take time out to reflect on his life achievements, diminishing creative powers and all-consuming desire for success will be staged in Mandarin (with English and Chinese surtitles) and star thespians Pu Cunxin and Tao Hong over here in Hong Kong. Showtime is at 8pm at the HKAPA’s Lyric Theatre. Tickets are $260 to $100.

March 7-11
Named by many knowledgeable folks as the masterpiece of Guiseppe Verdi’s middle-to-late career, Rigoletto is a canonical Italian opera with a libretto based on Victor Hugo’s Le Roi s’amuse, a controversial play banned for 50 years in France on the grounds that it defamed that country’s reigning monarch! On the evenings of March 7 to 11, the Fragrant Harbour will play host to the Asian premiere of a grand production of the work by the Teatro Regio di Parma, the opera company that’s the epicentre of all things Verdi and whose home is near where the great composer spent many of his years. The curtain goes up each evening at 7:30pm at the HK Cultural Centre’s Grand Theatre. Tickets are priced from $1280 to $250.

March 14 and 15
Multi-award-winning dance choreographer Marie Chouinard has been variously called ‘the queen of avant-garde’ and ‘the new artist of the body’. On March 14 and 15, the Canadian’s Compagnie Marie Chouinard will stop by in Hong Kong as part of the world premiere tour of its new Ode to Joy L.I.V.E. (provisional title) production. Inspired by the fugato movement and its Ode to Joy of Beethoven’s Symphony No 9, this celebratory dance production promises, if nothing else, some truly exhilarating exuberance. Both evenings’ performances are set to commence at 8pm at the HKAPA’s Lyric Theatre. Tickets are $380, $280, $180 and $120.

The 36th HK Arts Festival will run from February 14 to March 16, 2008, at various locations around the HKSAR. For a full schedule and detailed information, go to www.hk.artsfestival.org or refer to the Programme & Booking Guides available now, from URBTIX outlets.