Year of the Tiger in Concert 2022

Limelight Review

A joyous program of classic Chinese repertoire, capped off with Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto.

Reviewed on 5 February, 2022

by Jessie Tu on 7 February, 2022

Under red lights in the concert hall of the Chatswood Concourse, the Willoughby Symphony Orchestra celebrated the Lunar New Year with a blooming program of classic Chinese repertoire, capped off with Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto.

The orchestra, led by Chinese-born Australian conductor, Shilong Ye, launched the concert with the Australian premiere of HuanZhi Li’s Spring Festival Suite — a four-movement orchestral work composed in the 1950s evoking the sprightly energy of the week-long celebrations in mainland China.

The overture’s flamboyance thrummed across the concert hall, with the string section harnessing a tight, clean sound and a gorgeous solo from principal oboist Josh Ning carrying on the composition’s lightness and playful urgency through to the second movement.

By the third and fourth movements, audiences may very well have felt themselves transported to the hills of rural China – the lush phrasing executed by each section of the orchestra proves Ye a competent, dynamic leader.

The concert, presented by Ausfeng Event Productions, a Sydney-based events company promoting traditional and contemporary Chinese arts in Australia, invited celebrated erhu player Tuqiang Zhang from China to play Rirong Lu’s Tune of Meihu, a famous traditional piece that demonstrates the instrument’s vitality and flair.

A two-stringed bowed fiddle, the erhu is played like a cello, except the player places the body of the soundbox on their lap, and the instrument is much smaller than a cello.

Zhang had the chance to display his impressive dexterity over the instrument, carving soft passages with a sweet sensitivity as well as rapturously exploding into lively moments of verve.

He continued this musical athleticism in the next piece, when he was joined onstage by Ashley Sui, fellow erhu player, and Zina Fan on the pipa and Angela Feng on the yangqin.

The composition, Haihuai Huang’s New Horse Racing, was a crazed, exuberant showpiece, directing a cascading voltage of energy through each player as they whipped and slapped and strummed their instruments.

Fan’s rigorous technique on the pipa (a Chinese lute) complemented Feng’s easy-going panache on the yangqin, a Chinese hammered string instrument, much like the Hungarian cimbalom.

No Lunar New Year concert is complete without a few vocal pieces, and here, soprano Lei Du dazzled audiences with her almost painfully nostalgic performance of Pamir, My Beautiful Homeland, composed by Qiufeng Zheng.

She returned onstage in the second half of the concert to perform a Chinese rendition of Mendelssohn’s On Wings of Song, originally set to the poem Auf Flügeln des Gesanges by the German Romantic poet Heinrich Heine. Du’s charisma and whimsical poise gave the piece an uplifting, modern edge to the widely-performed romantic song.

The concert, thus far rooted in Eastern sounds, finished with one of western classical music’s giants, Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No 1, with soloist Tony Dongyi Lee taking centre stage.

Lee, having previously played with international orchestras including Brussels Philharmonic and BBC Symphony Orchestra, captured the power and majesty of the piece without the frothy panache typical of so many young performers today.

After multiple rounds of applause, Ye returned on stage to round off the concert with the quintessential New Year’s Concert piece, Johann Strauss’ Radetzky March.

As the audience clapped along to the waltzing gallop of the elating tune, a group of young children sitting in the box seats began jumping up and down, moving side by side to the rhythm, rapturous and laughing.

The best way to end a concert of this kind – to reign in what we all hope to be a better year than the last.

This article is written by Jessie Tu from Limelight on 7 February.

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