Review | Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra concert a triumphant celebration of the adaptability of Cantonese opera and music
- The Chinese-instruments orchestra billed its Hong Kong Arts Festival ‘The Stage Door on Mars’ as a means to celebrate Cantonese opera anniversaries
- Featuring arrangements by Ng King-pan, imaginative staging by Carmen Cheng, and Cantonese opera vocalists Man Wah and Leung Fei-tung, this was a worthy tribute
The Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra (HKCO) has come up with some pretty way out concepts over the years, but they have usually had their feet on the ground.
Its production for the closing weekend of the 2023 Hong Kong Arts Festival, entitled “The Stage Door on Mars”, took a somewhat extraterrestrial approach, however.
Conceived by composer and music producer Ng King-pan, the 75-minute multimedia presentation was set in both the past and the future. It recalled the premieres of Cantonese operas from the 1950s to the 1970s, and imagined a time when humans will have built concert halls on both the moon and Mars.
It opened with “Death of a Princess on the Moon”, an elaborately scored arrangement of the famed finale of Princess Changping (1957) by Tong Tik-sang which, accompanied by Carmen Cheng’s futuristic staging, transported the audience to a glass concert hall within the Chinese space station on the moon in 2047. That year will mark the 50th anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty and 90 years since Princess Changping’s premiere in the old Lee Theatre in Causeway Bay.
To finish the concert, the orchestra played “Reunion of the Sword and the Hairpin on Mars”, an arrangement of the reconciliation scene from the Story of the Purple Hairpin (1957), also by Tong. That piece was performed for the imagined centenary celebration of the premiere and to inaugurate a recital hall at a Chinese space station on Mars in 2057.
At risk of causing chronological whiplash, the rest of the programme was rooted in events some in the audience might have remembered, beginning with an excerpt from Romance of the Phoenix Chamber, whose premiere was part of the opening performances of the Hong Kong City Hall in 1962.
