Verbier Festival Chamber/Cheung/Capuçon: Beethoven, Saint-Saëns etc.

Date: March 23, 2018
Location: Hong Kong City Hall, Hong Kong.

Mozart – Symphony No. 35, K.385
Beethoven – Piano Concerto No. 4, Op. 58
Saint-Saëns – Cello Concerto No. 1, Op. 33
Schubert – Symphony No. 5, D.485

Encores:

J. Strauss II – Hungarian Polka Op. 332
Rossini – Overture to Guillaume Tell (with a twist)

Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra
Gabor Takács-Nagy, conductor
Rachel Cheung (piano)
Gautier Capuçon (cello)

The fervent energy of the Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra capped off an exciting month of programming at the Hong Kong Arts Festival. Culled from the best musicians from professional orchestras around the world, Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra is currently touring in Asia and the Middle East, as part of its celebration of the Festival’s 25^th anniversary. This evening, Gabor Takács-Nagy led the procession, with joyous and jubilant reading of the Mozart and the Schubert. With the beginning of Schubert, Takács-Nagy’s phrasing and dynamic control led us into a world of agony, the sort of wandering misery that Schubert is fond of projecting. But Schubert never intends his fifth symphony as a treatise on romanticism. Instead, he aims to allude to the classical era where formalities in harmony are at the forefront, and the piece would develop as such. The seamless transition in the interim is what made this evening most interesting: the orchestral sound ebbed and flowed, but what seemed to be an emerging didactic imagery slowly but surely gave way to pure sonorous beauty. Takács-Nagy’s handling of the call and response between the upper strings and lower strings in the final movement was one that conjured up less of visual symbolism than a professorial pursuit of harmonic balance. Never mind that Takács-Nagy tended to tap his shoes along with the music, thus revealing his perhaps even more illustrious past as a chamber musician: as an orchestral conductor, he was thoughtful, vivacious, and complete.

Cheung is a gifted pianist who gave a thoughtful display of perhaps Beethoven’s most lyrical piano concerto. Her intonation, especially in the slower second movement, was ethereal and controlled. In the faster passages, Cheung’s performance was handicapped by a Steinway piano muddling away, especially in the middle registers, and seemingly unwilling to project more clarity that perhaps Cheung, and most certainly Beethoven, surely would have sought. Capuçon’s cello lines had long, overarching phrasings that wove nicely with the orchestral lines. Melodic subjects were repeated with slight tweaks to intonation to yield a richly woven fabric of sound. If Cheung was seeking perfection in individual notes, Capuçon was clearly more committed to channeling meaning through shapely and refined paragraphs. Two encore pieces followed: a cheerful Hungarian Polka, by Strauss II, and a vocal-only rendition of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell overture (yes, orchestra members sang the overture) that confirmed just how much fun members of this festival orchestra are having on their tour.