ReviewHong Kong Ballet and Philharmonic’s ‘Carmina Burana’ double bill suffers from stark mismatch
- Ricky Hu’s hauntingly beautiful piece ‘The Last Song’ was in sharp contrast to ballet director Septime Webre’s ill-judged take on Carl Orff’s ‘Carmina Burana’
- The philharmonic deserves full credit for doing justice to two such different composers, while the ballet’s dancers were superb
Titled simply “Carmina Burana”, the new joint production by the Hong Kong Ballet and the Hong Kong Philharmonic featured a version of the title piece by Carl Orff created by the ballet’s artistic director, Septime Webre, originally written in 2016 for the Washington Ballet.
The production also featured The Last Song, a new work set to Bach by choreographer-in-residence Ricky Hu Songwei.
This was a mismatched double bill. While conductor Lio Kuokman and the philharmonic deserve full credit for doing justice to two such different composers, Hu’s elegant, hauntingly beautiful dance piece was in sharp contrast to Webre’s ill-judged, overblown take on Orff.
The Last Song is inspired by Oscar Wilde’s “The Nightingale and the Rose”, one of the most unbearably poignant stories from Wilde’s The Happy Prince and Other Tales.
In the story, the nightingale kills herself in an act of selfless love for what turns out to be a worthless cause – a theme prophetic for Wilde himself, whose passion for poet Alfred Douglas would lead to his destruction.