Theater personality Sylvia Chang and pianist Yen Chun-chieh come together to stage Spirits, an evening of romantic music and poetry. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

Theater personality Sylvia Chang Ai-chia, pianist Yen Chun-chieh from Taiwan, musicologist Chiao Yuan-pu and Mathias Woo — who is the co-artistic director of Hong Kong theater company Zuni Icosahedron — are coming together to present Spirits, a crossover production featuring piano solo, poetry recital, theater and art. A combination of live and live streamed performances, the show opens tonight at Hong Kong Cultural Centre.

Essentially, Spirits is a piano recital presented in the form of an audio-visual fiesta with a theatrical vibe. Each music piece played on the piano by Yen is preceded by a poem inspired by the composition to be read out by Chang. Music and narration happen simultaneously during the final piece — Liszt’s Lenore — as was intended by its Hungarian composer. Written by Louis Bertrand, Petrarch among others, all poems have been translated from French and English into Chinese by Chiao. While multimedia orchestral concerts are not unheard of — think Hong Kong Sinfonietta’s McDull concerts, or Joe Hisaishi’s show in Budokan, Japan, for Studio Ghibli’s 25th anniversary — combining classical piano with poetry is indeed rare.

“We think classical music can pull off splendid lighting and projections too, like pop music,” says Yen. “In fact, classical music nowadays deserves to be executed in more exciting and extraordinary ways.” He believes presenting literature in conjunction with music can help bring out the obscure and subtle emotions that inform the movement of the piano keys. “Rather than being ‘additives’ that reduce the meaning in music, or restrains the mind, the surrounding elements are more like guides, triggers or supports to the imagination,” Yen explains. 

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Chiao shares a similar sentiment, saying that art is about interconnectivity. To consider music and literature as separate entities would be to “miss the point,” he says.

Yen has selected some of the most demanding and impressive pieces written for piano from the canon of western classical compositions. Romantic masterpieces including Mendelssohn and Rachmaninoff’s Scherzo from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit, Saint-Saens’s Danse Macabre, Liszt’s From Annees de Pelerinage: 2eme Annee: Italie and Lenore will be performed, with Chang playing 13 characters in the course of her narration. Unrequited love, desire, and spirits figure heavily among the themes of the concert — hence the title Spirits.

Yen’s piano playing will be livestreamed from Taiwan. Fortunately, Yen had plenty of practice coordinating live and online performances, having offered piano lessons and seminars online in the last few months. “There is often a delay in livestreams, but that’s okay, I’ve got used to them, so I just need to make sure I anticipate my playing a second or two earlier,” Yen said with a smile.

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Yen sounds optimistic about the future of the cultural scene in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the rest of Asia. “In the beginning of COVID-19, I was quite depressed. It felt like I’d hit a dead end since I invested a lot of time and effort in organizing international events,” Yen says. “Luckily, it’s also thanks to the pandemic that I feel that we’ve all matured and become more refined, whether in technology, our lives, or interpreting our work.”

With the pandemic dragging on, perhaps it is more important than ever to rekindle the audience’s appetite for going to live concerts. Spirits might be offering an opportunity to get started in that direction.

If you go

Spirits — Piano Solo Storytelling

By Sylvia Chang, Chun-chieh Yen, Mathias Woo, and Yuan-pu Chiao

Presented by Zuni Icosahedron

Dates: 23-24 Oct

Venue: Grand Theatre, 

Hong Kong Cultural Centre, 

10 Salisbury Road, Tsim Sha Tsui

www.zuni.org.hk