Irish Hong Kong Proms

IF you happen to be passing through Dublin Airport this morning, you may notice a group of vivacious - if slightly bedraggled - people lugging, in addition to the usual suitcases, hand luggage and duty free bags, a variety of oddly shaped boxes and the occasional dress suit. This will almost certainly be the National Symphony Orchestra, which has spent the past 10 days as orchestra in residence at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre's Midsummer Classics Festival.

Bringing a symphony orchestra to Hong Kong is an undertaking of alarming proportions. A hundred passports which can be mislaid, 100 tickets which can be left behind, luggage to go astray, money to be lost, connections to be missed - not to mention the complex logistics involved in trying to arrive at the ideal seating arrangement for 100 individuals of extremely varied requirements on a 13 hour long haul flight. If, for example, you have a bass player who is - like Daniel Whibley - seven feet tall, then you need to make sure he sits where he has some decent leg room. Somebody else has inquired whether British Airways can provide edible meals for somebody who's allergic to nuts.

"Allergic to nuts, is the incredulous response from Paddy McElwee, the orchestra's manager. Well, they chose a right bunch of nuts to travel with today, didn't they?

In the end the mammoth journey is completed without mishap, and the orchestra's members have a day or two to accustom themselves to the hot, damp frenzy that is August in Hong Kong. The first crisis comes with the first rehearsal. Sunday morning at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre, and most of the double basses which have been hired from local orchestral groups prove to be unplayable. The bass players do their best but, as one musician puts it, the instruments have a light, tinny sound and a tendency to sharpen when played at anything louder than mezzo forte, one of them was stuck together with masking tape, and two of, the bridges fell off during tuning.

BACKSTAGE there are white faces and grim expressions. The dead basses lie on the floor like beached whales while their would be players prowl around disconsolately and the search for replacement instruments begins.

"It was always a risk to hire instruments here rather than ship our own over," admits Paddy McElwee. "But there's a risk in shipping them as well. It's very expensive, for a start - and not only are they vulnerable to damage during transit, they can also be badly affected by the humidity when they get here".

As are we all, for the humidity in Hong Kong in August has to be experienced to be believed. Stepping into the street is like being enfolded by a damp cloth. Glasses, if you happen to wear them, steam up instantly and totally, leaving you stranded amid the chattering crowds. Every time you go out you need to arm yourself with: a) a brolly in case of torrential rain; b) sun glasses in ease of searing sunny intervals; c) a jacket for when you enter the chilly air conditioned shopping plazas and d) a map for reorienting yourself when you get, as you inevitably will, horribly lost. Coming to terms with Hong Kong isn't easy take it from one who spent most of the first three days just gawping, slack jawed, at skyscrapers - and if it wasn't one of the most exciting cities on the planet, it could easily be a pain in the ass.

MIRACULOUSLY, over the next few days, better basses begin to materialise and the begin to material orchestra settles down to a regular pattern of morning rehearsal, evening concert. And for two members of the band, in any case, that famous skyline is only too familiar. The cellist Simon Webb worked with the Hong Kong Philharmonic in 1994.

"The city is very exciting at first," he says, "but after a while it can get to you - the pollution, the money, the double standards." He coped by living on an offshore island in a village where there no cars and no shops. For the NSO's only Chinese member, violinist Ting Zhong Deng, meanwhile, a visit to Hong Kong is almost like coming home to his native town of Shanghai - except for the language problem.

"I speak Mandarin, when as here they speak Cantonese, he says. "And," he adds with a grin, "I can understand people here a lot better than they can understand me...

Meanwhile RTE's concerts manager, Claire Meehan, has been having some communication difficulties of her own. Seeking to contact a colleague one morning, she phones his hotel and asks to speak to Mr Taylor. "Certainly, madam," is the polite reply. "Which tailor would you like? We have three tailors working for our hotel: Mr Cheung, Mr Chan and Mr Zhen."

BY THE time the audience is taking its seats for the first Midsummer Classics concert on Monday evening things look remarkably normal in the cool, air conditioned auditorium of the Cultural Centre. Another piece of stunning Hong Kong architecture, the building is unusual in that it spreads outwards rather than upwards and is flanked by an elegant promenade which offers both breathtaking views of the busy harbour and a relatively peaceful place to take an evening stroll - not, quite as glamorous as the Sydney Opera House, maybe, but that sort of thing.

"The cultural centre was built in 1989 and the auditorium seats 2,058 people," explains Rebecca Yu, manager of the cultural presentations office at Hong Kong Urban Council, which has footed a goodly chunk of the total bill for the NSO's visit. The Midsummer Classics festival, she says, is an audience building event. "We would like to draw an audience of people who are not normally concertgoers, so the programme is much lighter than usual."

THE brainchild of a Hong Kong resident by the name of Klausymann, better known in the West as the millionaire owner of Naxos Records, the festival began in 1990 and has featured orchestras like the Ukraine State Symphony, the Bratislava Radio Orchestra, the Moscow Symphony and, of course, the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland - all of whom have recording contracts with Naxos.

"We have an arts festival here in January and February and a lot of visiting orchestras and soloists throughout the year - La Scala are coming with Muti in a few weeks' time - but tickets for those concerts are very expensive, so the audience is mostly ex pats and upper class Chinese," says Klaus Heyman. "The audience for regular Hong Kong Philharmonic concerts is more mixed, but for Midsummer Classics it's the youngest we've ever seen. Also, the atmosphere is very casual - people come in and have a good time."

Thus this year's opening two nights of Chinese art music are aimed squarely at that audience, with well known pieces such as The Dance of the Yoo Tribe, Song of Fishermen in the East Sea and Dance of Youth, an Ugyur folk song arranged by Ding Shande, grandfather of the conductor for the NSO's first three concerts, Long Yu. But the highlight, predicts Klaus Heyman, will undoubtedly be the Butterfly Lovers violin concerto, a Romeo and Juliet type story written in 1956 and as popular in this part of the world, he says, as "the Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn and Brahms concert all rolled into one". The concerto's major exponent, the Japanese violinist Takako Nishizaki, who has recorded it five times, is treated as something of a pop star in China, playing regularly to stadiums of 20,000 people and the recipient of the Golden Violin from the Chinese government for her services to Chinese music.

She is also, as it happens, Mrs Klaus Heyman. And when she appears onstage, a tiny figure in a spectacular white dress embroidered with gold butterflies, the already enthusiastic audience goes bananas. During the concerto the packed auditorium is pin drop quiet; at the end, wild and prolonged applause can only be stilled by a repeat performance of the work's main theme. The orchestra looks bemused; this is all very well, but how will the week's remaining concerts be received?

WITH increasing delight, is the answer. The word on the Hong Kong grape vine, apparently, is that there say great evening's crack to be had at the Cultural Centre. Night after night there's a 90 per cent turnout; night after night there's prolonged applause, culminating in a 15 minute ovation after Saturday's selection of operatic favourites. Teething troubles forgotten, the orchestra is on top form and enjoying itself hugely.

"It has been a very revealing tour," says principal horn player Lesley Bishop. "We've seen parts of our colleagues anatomy we've never seen before - and never want to see again. Hairy legs and hairy chests.

"But seriously, it has been very, very good for our morale. We haven't toured since we went to Germany in 1992 - and when you play in the same place all the time, you don't have anything to compare yourself with, if you like. So when we got standing ovations in Germany we were saying, `Who, us?'"

The violinist Anne Marie Twomey agrees. "Apart from being completely intoxicated by the place, by the exotic feel of it, it's fantastic for the orchestra to play to a different audience and be so well received. It's great to see a whole hall full of Chinese people really enjoying themselves because of our playing."

AS FOR the chairman of the RTE Authority, Farrel Corcoran, who arrived just in time for the midweek From The Silver Screen programme of film music, he found himself particularly moved by the band's stirring performance of the Ride of the Wallyries, aka the theme from Apocalypse Now. "It's one of the central films of the 20th century, and some of it is set in Da Nang, which we flew over en route to Hong Kong - to be just a few miles from there, and then to hear the music played so passionately by Irish musicians, is just incredible.

"I think it's crucial for the orchestra to take advantage of touring opportunities - and to see such a huge turnout of young Chinese people in this hall raises all sorts of questions, about how we manage music in Ireland, and about the old traditions of elitism and snobbery which are so hard to break down."

The only bum note, it seems, is being sounded back in Ireland, by those who have been grumbling that the whole enterprise is a waste of licencepayers' money. Which doesn't amuse RTE's head of orchestras and performing groups, Simon Taylor, in the slightest.

"Questions are asked when the orchestra doesn't tour," he points out. "And if you're going to build a top class orchestra, then touring is part of that building process - as is recording. The more the orchestra tours, the bigger its reputation grows, and the bigger the fees it can command, so that in three or four years' time, we would hope to be able to tour without it costing a penny - or even to make money, as some of the British orchestras do."

Meanwhile, in the Friar Tuck pub down the road from the cultural centre, more urgent matters of orchestral fiscal policy are under consideration, such as which is the most reasonably priced brand of Hong Kong beer and how many pints of it can reasonably be downed before prices shoot up at midnight. Somebody is doing accurate and hilarious impersonations of the RTE top brass; somebody else is doing a deal on a rented house in Donnybrook. The Chinese may be due to take Hong Kong over in 1997, but last week it belonged to the Irish.