VMO 9th Annual Chamber Orchestra Concert

BY LLOYD DYKK, the Vancouver Sun

It’s always a very pleasant part of autumn when the local conductor Ken Hsieh temporarily leaves his full-time job leading orchestras in Japan and comes home to Vancouver long enough to conduct his local Metropolitan Chamber Orchestra, as he did Sunday afternoon, Sept. 11, when he opened the season at the Michael J. Fox auditorium in Burnaby.He has brought wonderful results to this mostly young collection of trainee musicians and he knows how to put a program together. We hear plenty of Mozart in Vancouver but for some mysterious reason, not nearly enough Haydn. Hsieh’s attention to this gross unfairness is a big reason why he is to be cherished.

The Symphony No. 103 is known as “The Drumroll” for the simple reason that it starts with one (it must have amazed the London audience that first heard this astonishing work). That London crowd was also notoriously noisy “possibly a good reason to use the hard sticks” but holding attention wasn’t a problem for the crowd, a large one in view of the radiant weather.

The program was a pure delight, every number remarkable from a moody Mendelssohn Fingal’s Cave to a new piece by composer-in-residence, Alain Mayrand called Isle of the Blessed Dead commemorating, to the day, 9/11 and managing to do this while avoiding cliche, the subtlety of a tremolando conveying much. The guest conductor for this piece was the promising Christopher Lee.

The orchestra played wonderfully and you couldn’t have expected much finer work from the two local soloists. Coloratura soprano Shannon Chan-Kent sang some dazzling Mozart, including the notorious Queen of the Night aria from The Magic Flute and only tripping up a little on the difficult intervals in O Zittre Nicht.

Violinist Esther Hwang was sensational in some material that demanded high performance and included Saint-Saens’s Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso. She’s all of 16. Remember her name.