All the world’s top artists come to Hong Kong

The Hong Kong Arts Festival celebrated last month its 35th year of providing Hong Kong and the Asia-Pacific region with a premier arts event. Featured were the world’s top talents in a month-long program of music, song, dance, and theater that saw an embarrassment of riches. Where do you go first? What show should you see?

With the assistance of the Hong Kong Tourism Board, the Philippine STAR was privileged to experience firsthand this annual arts event.

ASGP: ‘asian super guitar project’

It just had to happen. Three of Asia’s jazz guitar virtuosos came together for an evening of jazz music. Hong Kong’s Eugene Pao, Japan’s Kazumi Watanabe, and Korea’s Jack Lee, together with Malaysian percussionist Lewis Pragasam, teamed up for an entire program that highlighted killer guitar playing.

The combination could not have been more perfect. The trio with their different sounds clicked while jamming in Korea during the summer of 2006 — thus, the Asian Super Guitar Project was born. Its sound has been described as a "mélange of earthy groove, combined with spontaneous interaction and a deep dedication to musical flow." One thing audiences at the Hong Kong Arts Festival agreed on was that it was a hell of a night.

Pao and Watanabe first met in 1986 when the Hong Kong guitarist played with Watanabe’s band in Tokyo and Hong Kong. When Pao was in New York in 1990s, he and Lee were introduced and what followed were performances in Seoul. Then Lee met Watanabe, and that got the ball rolling. To give the ASGP its unique sound, the three enlisted Pragasam to be the fourth man on the team.

Each provided original music the band played that night: Eugene Pao’s catchy Offside and the Latin-influenced Spanish Fried Rice; Watanabe’s Asian Triangle, which takes its inspiration from the Japanese koto and shamisen, and Azimuth, an almost classical piece; and Lee’s romantic song-like Waiting in Rain and Somewhere in Time. Rounding out the evening were Made in France by Biréli Lagrène, Toninho Horta’s melodic For the Children, which had the whole theater humming to the music, and a highly charged performance of Astor Piazzola’s classic Libertango.

Three guitars playing as one could not have been more varied. Watanabe’s acoustic guitar reminds us of his foray into the classical guitar repertoire, Pao his jazz background, and Lee his rock roots. As each improvised and performed solos, it was like hearing the same song three times — although in different attitudes. The extended solos in Libertango, with each guitarist alternately improvising twice that night, brought the house down. Never has this beloved of tango standards been given such engaging treatment.

The Hong Kong show was just a stop in a series of tours around Asia. The Asian Super Guitar Project has already played in Nagoya, Osaka, Tokyo, Seoul, Jakarta, and Bangkok.

Those who would like to get an idea of the brilliance of ASGP should get a copy of the CD that started the whole project. It contains the same program though in shorter arrangements. That’s more than enough to cheer you up on a slow night in the city.

Amadinda percussion group: ‘around the world in 80 minutes’

How much noise can four men make with a full battery of drums? Let me rephrase that. How much music can four men make with a full battery of drums?

Quite a lot — of music, and noise, too. That’s what the Amadinda Percussion Group demonstrated in their unique concert, "Around the World in 80 Minutes," at the Hong Kong City Hall Concert Hall on March 11. Incidentally, the concert coincided with the 23rd anniversary of the Hungarian percussion group. It was only the group’s third time in Asia. Previous engagements were in Japan and Taipei. This was their first appearance in Hong Kong.

Founded in 1984 by members Zoltán Rácz, Zoltán Váczi, Aurél Holló, and Károly Bojtos, the Amadinda Percussion Group wanted to introduce the world of percussion music to Hungarian audiences, as well as perform contemporary Hungarian music worldwide. Aside from inspiring composers to write new music for percussion, the group also researched traditional percussion music worldwide, incorporating African, Polynesian, Basque, and Balinese music making into their programs.

For the recent Hong Kong Arts Festival, the group devised a program of traditional and contemporary music and transcriptions that showed audiences the possibilities of both tuned and untuned percussion.

The group took its name from the amadinda, a Ugandan log xylophone. And naturally, they opened the program with a traditional Ugandan piece for the amadinda.

The pieces were grouped in pairs, a traditional or ethnic music matched with a modern or contemporary composition that mirrored the playing technique of its partner. That was why Steve Reich’s Drumming (Part 1) was paired with a number of traditional Ugandan music that showed Reich’s patented phasing technique as a natural offshoot of African drum playing. Rácz, who provided commentary during the show, explained that the Reich piece provided the noisiest music that afternoon — as well as the most colorful patterns of music in any composition written during the ’70s.

Much of world percussion music comes from Africa and Asia, and that’s what concertgoers heard a lot of: traditional music from Zimbabwe and Polynesia. There was also a rare piece from the Basque region of Spain, the only known piece of drumming from Europe.

The afternoon’s highlight was John Cage’s Third Construction, one of three constructions for percussion the American composer wrote. It was a sight to behold, as well as an experience to listen to, as objects and instruments rarely seen or heard on stage made their appearance for the performance. Some of Cage’s exotic instruments include tuned tin cans (yes, they ranged from paint cans to milk cans), a conch, a wooden box, a pair of lion’s roar, cow bells and the like. As you tried to come to grips with Cage’s music, you were also entertained by the efforts of four men running around the stage, reaching out for instruments in time.

Contrasting with the racket caused by all the drums that afternoon were a number of transcriptions for marimbas and xylophone, including three pieces from Debussy’s Children’s Corner (Snowflakes Are Dancing, The Doll’s Serenade, Golliwog’s Cakewalk), rags by Scott Joplin, George Hamilton Green, and Red Norvo, a Chinese song, and for encores, a Hungarian song and three pieces from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (Tuilieries, Chicks, and Limoges).

It was a truly noisy afternoon of music — and quite an experience, too. Highly recommended.

Julia migenes: ‘alter ego’

Savor that rarefied moment when a diva becomes a star. Julia Migenes came, sang, and conquered Hong Kong’s hearts with her two-night sold-out concert "Alter Ego" at the Hong Kong Cultural Center Grand Theater. The opera diva has been pushing the limits of her craft, branching out from opera to jazz, pop, and world music. This concert, a theatrical version of her jazz album "Alter Ego," features songs by Antonio Carlos Jobim, Damien Rice, Annie Lennox, Bill Withers, Alanis Morissette, and Sting among others. The soprano wasn’t fazed by her material — including Miles Davis’ All Blue, scatting the trumpet solo in her own unique way — reinterpreting mostly Top 40 songs in an acoustic setting that highlighted her unique range as an artist.

In the notes to the record, Migenes talks about her two distinct musical sides: one rooted in opera, and the other one kidnapped by her Muse to a different world where "Alter Ego" is based on, far from the confines of opera. In fact, the songs she sings in this record, the words and the music, she says provoke a profound emotional effect on her.

The album enlists a battery of instruments to create a soundworld that fuses a variety of world music styles. For the concert version, the instrumentation is stripped of this world-music attitude to the barest instrumentation: piano, cello, and drums/percussion, with minimal contributions by a melodica and flute. This didn’t change the character of the songs Migenes sang; rather, it pushed her to be more innovative in her singing, often calling on her operatic capacities to bring her truth to the songs.

The concert opened with a tango version of Jobim’s Insensatez (How Insensitive) followed by the jovial Brazilian song Repente. She moved on to a variety of song genres, from spirituals (Motherless Child), cabaret (Jacques Brel’s Les paumés du petit matin and Moustaki’s Milord, a Piaf signature song), jazz (Miles Davis’ All Blues), blues (Bill Wither’s Use Me) to Top 40 (Alanis Morissette’s Uninvited, Annie Lennox’s Cold, Sting’s When We Dance, and Damien Rice’s The Blower’s Daughter). On paper, the program made one wonder whether she could pull it off. But on stage, she proved that she could, and indeed she could keep you in your seat for the intermission-less 90-plus minute duration of the show.

The show was conceived by French director Philippe Calvario, who stripped the stage to the barest of colors. There were no props other than a microphone on a stand, and later a single light bulb that dropped magically from the ceiling to illuminate Migenes’ singing. Nothing else. What audiences got most was a screen awash in solid colors to add emotional weight to a song: deep blue for a touch of sadness and tragedy, red for anger, yellow for sunshine-y happiness.

Migenes’ band included music director Edouard Ferlet on piano/melodica/flute/percussion, Alain Grange on cello/electric cello, and Xavier Desandre-Navarre on drums/percussion. This trio served as more than just background to Migenes; they provided her with an orchestra of sound that replicates the music on the CD — drumming that resembled the frenetic energy of the Indian tabla, the whistling of birds, the sizzling sound of a wooden flute, the brazen tapping of a tambourine, and the like.

In some songs, the diva danced to the music, giving the audience an idea of her training as a dancer. She could sing and move at the same time just like any pop star on stage. In some songs, hip-hop dancer Thierno Thioune collaborated with her, assuming the role of a much desired lover. The dancing added an extra dimension to the program of songs.

Migenes is taking her "Alter Ego" show worldwide this year, and those who missed her slot at this year’s Hong Kong Arts Festival can enjoy the show with the CD version of the show. The CD lacks the Davis solo, as well as some of the French songs, but it provides fans of this sultry diva an opportunity to rehear the show in the comforts of their homes or earphone.

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This early, next year’s 36th Hong Kong Arts Festival from Feb. 14 to March 18, 2008 promises to be another event worth watching out for. Performances scheduled next year include legendary pianist András Schiff; the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Vladimir Jurowski, its principal conductor designate; Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal in Full Moon; Ibsen’s The Master Builder in a production by Chinese director Lin Zhaohua; Peter Brook directing Samuel Beckett’s Fragments; and salsa and Latin jazz legend Eddie Palmieri.

Advance bookings will start by October.

For details on the 36th Hong Kong Arts Festival, log on www.hk.artsfestival.org.