Author: Ilari Kaila

As my home instution HKUST celebrates its 35th anniversary, the university has the great honor of hosting the Hong Kong Sinfonietta, conducted by Yip Wing-sie, on April 14. The concert will feature works by my composition faculty colleagues Bright Sheng, Timothy Page, and Steven Snowden, as well as the coolest collection of orchestrated student drinking songs of all time by Brahms.

For me, this concert also marks both the premiere and 20th anniversary (!) of the symphony orchestra version of The Bells Bow Down, with the dazzling pianist Emil Holmström as soloist. Emil will revisit the piece with the Lohja City Orchestra and conductor Jukka Untamala soon after, on April 23, in a slightly reduced orchestration.

As a prelude of sorts to the world and European premieres, a chamber orchestra version, commissioned by Olli Mustonen received its first perfomance in September by the Lapland Chamber Orchestra and Anna Laakso, with Mustonen conducting. It has been hugely gratifying to see the concerto version of this work come to life after spending two decades in the drawer, and I’m eagerly looking forward to the April concerts.

Cameo, a trio for the unusual combination of flute, viola, and piano from 2015, has caught second wind in the past year and some. Thanks, no doubt, to the fantastic recording by Izzy Lepanto Gleicher, Ayane Kozasa, and Adrienne Kim (below) who reprised it last spring in their Malmgren Concert at Syracuse. Other performers have included pianist Kyoko Fukushi’s group in Tokyo, Ensemble Ipse in New York City, and this week, I’m looking forward to hearing Ensemble Dal Niente from Chicago play it at our 2024 Cosmopolis Festival here in Hong Kong. Coming up in September, Dal Niente’s wonderful flutist Molly Barth will perform it again at Vanderbilt with her colleagues Eric Wong and Megan Gale.

A small miracle, and something we’re all grateful for in this concert-starved time: our inaugural Cosmopolis Festival at HKUST is going forward! For the next five weeks, we’ll present around 15 events on the campus of the Hong Kong University of Science Technology, with concerts paired with talks, masterclasses, and workshops, ranging from South Indian Carnatic music with the breathtaking sister duo Ranjani and Gayatri, to a performance of Donizetti’s one-act opera Rita, to electroacoustic music from Finland with defunensemble. I’m looking forward to all of it, but in particular the Asian premiere of Taonta by the brilliant rising star, Rachel Cheung, on April 9.