Academy helps Hong Kong musical talent take to wider stage
Ensemble enables graduates to continue performing at a high level and learn there is more to the arts than meets the eye
An ensemble is giving those with surplus musical talent in the city a chance to also show their skills in other directions.
Seventeen members of Philharmonia APA (Papa), formed by alumni of the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, held their inaugural concert on Friday to raise funds for a three-year plan, which will include a tour to Vienna in April.
“Our graduates are excellent but the music industry cannot absorb all of them. So they go teaching and after a few years they can’t play anymore. Their talent is wasted,” Sharon Choa, dean of music at the academy since 2014, said.
“With Papa, there’s hope our graduates will have a guaranteed platform to continue performing at a high level and do things they have fuller control over, because we want them to manage themselves as we trust their artistic integrity,” she added, referring to the group’s self-governing committee.
One of the four committee members, clarinettist Stephanie Ng Lai-man, said her job to “bridge” the musicians with the academy opened her to a deeper side of the performing arts.
“I would not have known all those operational issues if I had just performed,” said the 2011 graduate, who is now a doctoral candidate at the Manhattan School of Music, New York.
The Soldier’s Tale by Igor Stravinsky, the major work at the inaugural concert, was a case in point.