This is the inauguration concert of the Ponte London Orchestra, a new orchestra in the UK with professional musicians, music school students and good amateur musicians who are from Hong Kong or with close ties to the east Asian city. Stemming from the roots of the Ponte Orchestra in Hong Kong, the Ponte London Orchestra aims to promote the arts and culture of Hong Kong, and to provide a performance platform for talents who see the Asian city as an inherent part of their lives.
In this concert, the Ponte London Orchestra is going to present three pieces of music featuring Hong Kong composers and performers. The first piece will be a commissioned work by the young composer Lance Mok for orchestra and a solo countertenor. Mok is a pianist-composer currently based in London whose works are often inspired by social issues and literature, with a particular strong affinity to the poetry of William Shakespeare and John Keats. This particular piece will be performed by our countertenor Keith Pun, who recently made his festival debut at Longborough Festival Opera. This season he will return to O Festival Rotterdam and have company debuts with English Touring Opera, Britten Pears Arts and Opera Ballet Vlaanderen.
The second piece will be Strauss’s Oboe Concerto, featuring the young Hong Kong oboist, Bobby Cheng. Born and raised in Hong Kong, Cheng is a regular performer throughout Europe, the USA and in Asia. He is currently the Principal Oboe of l’Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse, and appears regularly as guest principal oboe with BBC Symphony Orchestra, l’Orchestre National de France, l’Orchestre de Paris as well as London Symphony Orchestra.
For the second half of the concert, the Ponte London Orchestra will perform the famous Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 “From the New World”. This piece has a special place among the composer's works as it was inspired when he set foot on the foreign soil across the Atlantic Ocean to work in the US, and have stricken a chord in countless hearts over the generations, particularly among migrants and those who are far away from their homeland. As families after families are immigrating to the UK from Hong Kong, we hope to send our best wishes to all of them with this monumental masterpiece.
