Registration 2:15pm
Conversation 2:30pm
Screening 3:00pm
Close 5:30pm

François Girard’s 1998 feature film The Red Violin follows a single mysterious instrument through four centuries and five countries of ill-fated owners. The violin makes its way from its maker in Cremona (Carlo Checci) to a sickly Viennese prodigy (Chrisoph Koncz), an impulsive 19-century English virtuoso (Jason Flemyng) and a Communist Chinese cadre (Sylvia Chang) who saves the instrument from destruction during the Cultural Revolution. When the instrument finally arrives at auction in modern-day Montreal, a canny appraiser (Samuel L. Jackson) discovers its hidden secrets.

John Corigliano, who won the 1999 Academy Award for the film’s original score, has been involved with the violin since childhood. The son of the longtime concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic, Corigliano had been working as a music and video producer when his Sonata for Violin and Piano won the chamber-music competition at Italy’s Spoleto Festival in 1964, launching his career as a composer. Echoes of his Oscar-winning score also resonate in his Chaconne (1997), Suite for Violin and Orchestra (1999) and Violin Concerto (2003). The composer will discuss The Red Violin and its unique approach to film scoring, as well as his own relationship with the violin, with journalist and music critic Ken Smith before the screening.

John Corigliano has created one of the richest, most unusual, and most widely celebrated bodies of work of any composer in the past forty years. His Symphony No. 1, an angry response to the AIDS epidemic, garnered both the 1991 Grammy and Grawemeyer awards. His opera The Ghosts of Versailles, commissioned and premiered at the Metropolitan Opera, won the International Classical Music Award in 1992. Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Music with his Symphony No. 2, Corigliano has also won Grammies for recordings of his String Quartet (1997), Mr. Tamborine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan (2009) and Conjurer, a concerto for percussion and string orchestra written for and performed by Dame Evelyn Glennie. He serves on the composition faculty of The Juilliard School and holds the position of Distinguished Professor of Music at Lehman College, City University of New York, which has established a scholarship in his name.

Critic and journalist Ken Smith has covered music and cultural developments on five continents for wide range of media. He currently divides his time between New York and Hong Kong, where he is the Asian performing arts critic for the Financial Times of London. A winner of the ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award for excellence in music writing, he was for 10 years a US correspondent for The Strad magazine, the bible of the international violin trade. A regular arts commentator on RTHK Radio 4’s “Morning Call,” he is a columnist and consulting editor for OPERA magazine in Shanghai and a critic for Opera magazine in London. Two collections of his writings about music have been translated and published by Beijing Normal University Press.

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On 10 & 11 May 2019 (Fri & Sat, 8pm), the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra and its Music Director Jaap van Zweden will present the Hong Kong premiere of John Corigliano’s Symphony no. 1 at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre Concert Hall in the concert JAAP!: JAAP | Rachel Cheung.
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