Quintet Blowing up a Real Harmonica Storm

REVIEW

The King's Harmonica Quintet

Lim Por Yen Theatre, Arts Centre

Saturday, 21 April 1990

By Harry Rolnick

South China Morning Post

As one-time professional practitioner of the blues mouth-organ myself, I anticipated having an insight into the King's Harmonica Quintet, which played to a full house on Saturday. Not surprisingly, however, a rather formidable gulf exists between Dmitri Shostakovich's Quartet Number 3 and Got Dem Possum-Belly Fatback Blues.

The King's Harmonica Quintet was one of the more astonishing concerts Hongkong has presented recently. In fact, it was the most fascinating exercise in musical rearranging since Kazuhito Yamashito played a solo of Dvorak's New World Symphony.

For these five young artists took a giant leap forward from the usual facile music for harmonicas. They plunged headlong into the most serious music from the Classical, Romantic and Contemporary periods, and made a very good show of it.

All of them alumni from the King's College Old Boys' Association Harmonica Chamber Orchestra, they entered in requisite tie and tails, tuned up their instruments (a superfluous measure, to say the least, as adjustments were impossible) and launched into a sharp version of Mozart's Quartet K 465.

One could hardly blame the group from using five instruments where Mozart specified four. The two treble chromatic harmonicas replaced the violins while tenor harmonicas did the honours for viola and cello. The rather unwieldy bass harmonicist played in unison with "cello" but frequently offered a pedal point to give substance to the others.

After the original aural shock, one took a certain pleasure in just how proficient these five could be. If I should point out "first harmonicist" Ho Pak-cheong for his faultless scale passages, this isn't favouritism. But strings possess a variety of colour impossible in the harmonica. With the most transparent counterpoint in the world, five harmonicas do possess an inevitable "much of a muchness".

The ending of Dvorak's American Quartet had a lively reading, though the length of the work made it a bit wearing. But one had nothing but praise for their remarkable reading of Shostakovich's Third Quartet.

Whereas one missed the strings in the Mozart, harmonicas were virtually an improvement on the Russian's work.

This quintet deserves its own recording (it would be a unique collector's item).

As for myself, hearing Mozart, Dvorak and Shostakovich, I'm bidding Possum-Belly Blues a fond "inhale and farewell".