Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2002 19:17:21 +0800 From: "Lau Chun Bong" Subject: King's Harmonica Quintet 15th Anniversary Concert on 13 Jan 2003
Dear list members,
Glad to see the list is back. A good news to add to that...
If you plan to come to Hong Kong in mid January, you are cordially invited to join us in celebrating the 15th anniversary of our harmonica ensemble King's Harmonica Quintet << http://home.netvigator.com/~cblau/khq >> on 13 January 2003, Monday. In the concert that evening in the City Hall Concert Hall, we will present our achievements in the past 15 years, not just by the five of us, but pulling together some of our best friends who are representative of our musical journey in the past decades.
Since our 10th anniversary, the most significant musical achievement is definitely the emergence of new compositions for harmonica quintet. Starting from the 2000 Hong Kong Arts Festival, we have garnered 14 works from famous local composers, totaling over 2 hours of original music. In the International Society for Contemporary Music World Music Days held in October in Hong Kong, we are proud to present an "all Hong Kong compositions" concert for the composers from all over the World. We will continue the momentum by having 3 new works in this concert, written by 3 different composers: Hui Cheung-wai and Mui Kwong-chiu who are no strangers to harmonica quintet, and Clarence Mak who will write for us for the first time, offering some fresh ideas on the harmonica quintet. Hui, who is by far the most proliferating composer, has written a piece for 2 harmonicas and Stephen Chau on guitar. Mui has based on the well-known Chinese tune Colour Clouds Chasing the Moon and developed a rhapsody for the Quintet, sheng (Loo Sze-wang whom we first worked with in the 2000 Hong Kong Arts Festival), and piano (Nerissa Yeung, our resident pianist).
We have not forgotten the musical genre that we started off with - classical string quartets. We have selected two well-known pieces: Mozart's Oboe Quartet in F Major, and Dvorak's String Quintet Op.97. The latter work has its special meaning - we first played this together with our dear friend (and fan of harmonica as well) Herman Ho 10 years ago. The sweet memory urges us to play this again with him 10 years later.
The final part of the concert features the large harmonica ensemble, consisting of 17 of our best friends whom we started to know each other at different times. Some of them were our teachers while some of them were our students, but they all become members of the cozy harmonica family that we feel very much at home. We will play two contrasting works - the lyrical Vocalise of Rachmaninov and the energizing Light Cavalry Overture of Suppe.
We are eager for the day to come, and hope you will share our feeling. Please come to our website to see the leaflet about the concert with detailed instructions on how to obtain tickets.
