Hong Kong City Hall Concert Hall. Front Stalls (Seat H13, HK$50).
Repertoire
Stravinsky Concerto in D for String Orchestra: I Vivace
and on of the following works, determined by a draw:
Beethoven Leonore Overture No. 3, Op. 72b
Mozart Symphony No. 39 in E-flat, K543: I Adagio -Allegro
Candidates (per the brochure)
Rodolfo Barraez, 29 (Venezuela)
Vicente Chavarria, 34 (USA/UK)
Linhan Cui, 28 (China)
Taichi Fukumura, 30 (USA/Japan)
Mark Hui, 31 (Hong Kong)*
Edmon Levon, 34 (Spain)
Omer Shteinhart, 27 (Israel)*
Yi Wei, 26 (China)
Yao-Yu Wu, 33 (Taiwan)*
Nathaniel Efthimiou, 30 (USA/Finland)
Roc Fargas, 26 (Spain)
Kyrian Friedenberg, 24 (USA/Canada)
Brian Liao, 30 (Taiwan)
Mikhail Mering, 31 (Israel)
Abner Padrino, 30 (Venezuela)*
Satoshi Yoneda, 26 (Japan)
* ones we saw in the round
We saw advertisements about this event posted around MTR stations, and thought it would be interesting to attend one to see how these competitions work. That it only costs HK$50 (discounted price for seniors) for four hours of music makes it a no-brainer if there are not other pressing matters to attend to.
The event is either sponsored by, or closely affiliated with, the Hong Kong Sinfonietta. The CEO of the orchestra Dorothy Yang introduced the event. She spoke for about 15 minutes without notes, and I didn't take any notes ...
The first competition was held in 2018, so I assume it wasn't going to be an annual event. While they were fretting if people would apply, they ended up getting close to 200 applications, from which they selected 16 candidates for the multi-day event this week. The candidates would be meeting the orchestra for the first time (one would think the one from Hong Kong may know the orchestra or some of the musicians in it), and were told which random piece (Beethoven or Mozart) they would be asked to conduct.
We sat through the first four candidates (asterisked above), each one taking 15 minutes.
Everyone played through the Stravinsky piece. The second piece was treated more as a rehearsal as the candidate would stop and explain to the orchestra what he wanted. 15 minutes seem an awfully short amount of time to have one's future in conducting determined. (I am assuming a win will give one a career boost.) If forced to pick among the ones I heard, I will choose Mark Hui. However, if he doesn't get to the next round, I can also accept that.
The orchestra is the instrument, but an instrument that can learn, and one with human emotions and problems. One conductor might ask a timpanist to play in a particular way, the other may ask for a specific way of phrasing, if these are good suggestions, should the specific players retain those suggestions unless prompted by the "new" candidate to change? Won't the last candidate be building on the work of his/her predecessors? To cite as an example, the way the orchestra started the Mozart symphony was pretty bad - to put it bluntly - and the candidates actually all tried to improve it. So would the judges take that into account when the last candidate pulled an A+ performance (probably no chance of that happening)? By the end of the day the orchestra will have played for 4 hours; and if they take the job seriously, quite exhausted from both the physical playing and the mental concentration needed. I won't be surprised if they sound tired at the end of the day.
I guess the judges would take all that into account. Also for this round the task is to narrow the field to eight people. Even I can probably tell the extremes (good and bad), it's the middle ones that would present problems, but there are eight jurors, so some level of safety in numbers.
After listening to the first tranche of four candidates, we decided to head off to an early lunch. And this is more like an event than a concert.
[They announced the semi-finalists earlier today (March 22 HK) on their website. Of the four candidates we saw, only Wu made it to that round. My "favorite" Hui didn't make it. My career as a judge quashed on my first try.]
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