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Given their proportions and lack of upright agility on their hind paws, the very notion of giant pandas dancing a waltz sounds, dare I say, absurd.<\/p>\n
So going by its title alone, any chance of a cheeky lilt in 3\/4 time or a nostalgic nod to the Strauss clan in Yao Chen\u2019s panda-themed Waltz of the Rolling Giants<\/em>, the opening piece in the Hong Kong Philharmonic\u2019s \u201cChengdu Pre-Tour Concert: Eric Lu Plays Chopin\u201d, seemed slim.<\/p>\n As it turned out, it was the spiralling and moments of playful whimsy that ultimately saved Chen\u2019s waltz from such a fate, offsetting any tendency to layer the orchestral texture too densely along the way.<\/p>\n With resident conductor Lio Kuokman at the HK Phil\u2019s helm, Chen\u2019s fragments, which stem partly from a Sichuan mountain song and a Cantonese melody, were lent a buoyant character, soon morphing into a quasi \u201cpanda motif\u201d \u2013 an idea Chen took from Wagner, drawing inspiration both from the \u201cgiants\u201d of his operas and from the composer\u2019s use of distinct leitmotifs.<\/p>\n For all its spinning and sliding, not to mention the addition of two extended rainsticks for extra effects, Chen\u2019s \u201cWaltz 2.0\u201d packed a great deal of musical material into a piece lasting less than 10 minutes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Given their proportions and lack of upright agility on their hind paws, the very notion of giant pandas dancing a waltz sounds, dare I say,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":84467,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[20458,29929,179,7035,15824,6327,7889,215,28],"class_list":["post-84466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bored-interesting","tag-brilliantly","tag-chopins","tag-concert","tag-eric","tag-genius","tag-phil","tag-pianist","tag-reflects","tag-review","wpcat-33-id"],"brizy_media":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=84466"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84466\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/84467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=84466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=84466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=84466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Thankfully, though, Chen\u2019s waltz \u2013 an HK Phil world premiere written especially for the orchestra\u2019s coming China tour, which begins, coincidentally, in Chengdu, the home of pandas<\/span> \u2013 neither spiralled into a clumsy \u201cpolonaise for polar bears\u201d, as musicologist Donald Tovey famously dubbed the finale of Sibelius\u2019 Violin Concerto<\/em>, nor ended up as an awkward romp among the bamboo shoots.<\/div>\n
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