Any musician would tell you it is not an easy career path. Being talented is not enough. It takes a good support network to market your music and to get it heard. That is where the Leisure & Cultural Services Department steps in to help. To nurture and support local artists it has been hosting the Our Music Talents series since 2009, to provide musicians and groups with performing opportunities, enabling them to develop and showcase their achievements.
The concerts are held at City Hall and cater to a wide range of musical tastes. A home-grown string quartet and six soloists playing the oboe, piano and Chinese string and woodwind instruments are featured in this year's programme.
Erhu player Chan Pik-sum will stage a concert on October 16. She has a special treat for her audience and plans to take them on a musical time-travelling journey of huqin instruments. Her repertoire will include nanyin - one of the oldest and best preserved musical art forms in the world, dating back to the Han dynasty. She will also collaborate with a young a cappella group for the first time, to perform some new songs.
Music promoter
Ms Chan says huqin music has not caught on yet in Hong Kong, so she wants to introduce audiences to it through crossover productions. She appeared in The Legendary Fai Wong Musical last year, in which she was literally a one-man band: she was the actor, singer, dancer and instrumentalist.
“The audience loved the songs in the musical and some told me that they started to listen to Chinese music after that. I would like to use this kind of production to promote huqin music and show audiences how diverse it can be. That is my dream.”
She has been playing the erhu - which is often described as a Chinese fiddle - since she was six. She sees the two-stringed instrument, which is part of the huqin family, as a musical time machine.
“I love the sound of the erhu. It touches my heart. When I touch the strings, I feel like it is touching my heart and the audience’s hearts.”
Ms Chan added that she is grateful the department organised and promoted her concert, which not only helped raise her profile, but allowed her to focus on the music instead of the logistics side of planning a concert.
Made in Hong Kong
The Romer String Quartet was invited to stage a concert in July as part of the Our Music Talents series. The group consists of violinists Kitty Cheung and Kiann Chow, Ringo Chan on viola, and Eric Yip on cello. The four young musicians have known each other since childhood and all of them currently play with the Hong Kong Sinfonietta.
They performed an eclectic repertoire of Haydn, Beethoven, Ravel and a Polish Suite by contemporary composer Maciej Malecki.
Violinist Kitty Cheung described the Our Music Talents concert as one of their most memorable, as they chose to challenge themselves by playing four pieces, instead of the usual three.
They chose Mr Malecki’s Polish Suite after hearing his CD. As luck would have it, an alumni at Ms Cheung’s university helped find the composer’s contact details and she took a chance and emailed the composer asking him for the score.
“We were connected through our mutual university, so I plucked up the courage and asked if we could play his music in Hong Kong and he was thrilled. He said the music was not available anywhere because he wrote it for his daughter who has a string quartet.”
After the concert, members of the audience told the group that Mr Malecki’s piece was their favourite part of the performance.
“That was quite special,” Ms Cheung said.
Support mechanism
The heart of a concert is the music. Fellow violinist Kiann Chow said the quartet was grateful that they could focus on just that, while the Leisure & Cultural Services Department dealt with the promotional side and helped them reach a new audience.
“With the department’s help we could connect to people who have not experienced chamber music before, plus we can boost our profile through magazines, radio, newspapers and different kinds of interviews, which really helped us a lot.”
The quartet got together three years ago to form Hong Kong’s first ever string quartet made up of locally born musicians and decided on an apt name.
“We are named after the Romer’s tree frog, a very tiny endemic Hong Kong tree frog which you can’t find anywhere else in the world. And we just thought it suits us as four Hong Kongers, born and raised in Hong Kong. And the colour of the frog happens to be brown, which also fits our instruments, and it is delicate but very strong and it leaps quite far, and we thought we want to leap forward as a string quartet as we grow,” Ms Cheung explained.
The quartet, which will be performing at New York’s prestigious Carnegie Hall next year, hopes to bring all genres of music to Hong Kong audiences, while helping to boost the city’s international image as a cultural and musical hub.
