SSO'S FORGOTTEN RECORDINGS: HUNG HU VIOLIN CONCERTO on Hong Kong Records

 

This was the not the original cover design
of the LP, but the first CD release.
Notice how much it resembles
Naxos CD sleeves to come later.

HUNG HU VIOLIN CONCERTO

Singapore Symphony Orchestra 

Takako Nishizaki (Violin)

Choo Hoey (Conductor)

Hong Kong Records 8.880020

Marco Polo 8.223902

Marco Polo 8.225811

This retrospective of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra’s earliest and forgotten recordings begins with its very first album. Recorded in January 1981, this was born of a quite successful relationship between the two-year-old orchestra and the fledgling Hong Kong-based record label Hong Kong Records, founded by German entrepreneur Klaus Heymann, which would later become the specialist Marco Polo label, which in turn spawned the to-be giant budget label Naxos.

The main work of the LP was A Kejian’s Hung Hu Violin Concerto, a fantasy based on the Chinese folksong The Waves of Hung Hu. At just 15 minutes, this is shorter than the wildly popular Butterfly Lovers Violin Concerto, but conceived and scored in the same idiom – that of a Romantic violin concerto. The music is similarly enjoyable and demands made on the soloist par for the course, well suited for Japanese violin virtuoso Takako Nishizaki (Mrs Heymann), who went on to record Butterfly Lovers no less than six times.

The formidable Mrs Heymann

The second work is one half of Butterfly Lovers composing duo Chen Gang’s Fantasy on a Sinkiang Folksong, which is now better-known as Sunshine Over Tashkurgan, recently recorded by Chloe Chua and SSO (on Pentatone, recorded in 2023) as a fillup to her Butterfly Lovers. How the decades have passed. Unashamedly virtuosic, this is Central Asia’s rhapsodic answer to Ravel’s Tzigane.

Autographed by both Choo Hoey
& Takako Nishizaki

The balance of the album contains shorter works, Ge Yan’s The Horse Cart (performed at the official opening of Victoria Concert Hall in October 1980), Gin Yong Cheng’s The Happy Grassland, Ma Ke’s Shanbei Suite (which also features an uncredited gaohu soloist) and Fu Geng Cheng’s Celebration Dance. All very engaging music based on Chinese folk music, and some with a Socialist Realist agenda that Chinese composers during the 1950s and 60s were no inferior to their Soviet comrades and counterparts. 

Choo Hoey was SSO's founding maestro

The SSO under founding music director Choo Hoey give more than creditable performances in more than adequate sound, and it should be noted that today’s SSO no longer performs this repertoire other than the ubiquitous Butterfly Lovers. In short, a worthy blast from the past.

Another iteration of the same album,
now part of the Chinese Music Series.

The final edition, now under the umbrella
of Popular Chinese Orchestral Music.
Obviously, somebody must be
listening to these recordings.