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SCMP Reporter

AUDITIONS for this year's Asian Youth Orchestra tour were long over. Executive director Richard Pontzious and his colleagues had just finished ploughing through the paperwork to decide which of the 2,000 applicants from 10 countries would be selected to fill the 96 seats in the orchestra.

  Then a handwritten fax arrived from Singapore - from a young viola player who had been on the tour the year before.

  Dear Mr Pontzious, it began.

  I miss you very much! I have a favour to ask of you, it's rather a big favour actually.

  Do you remember Yuwen, the oboist from Taiwan?   Her mother passed away last week because of liver cancer. She tried to spend every second she had with her beloved mother and thus she did not go to the audition.

  She thought that if she really did get in, she would have to leave her mother for six weeks; she was afraid that she might pass away during her absence.

  She is very depressed now and her health is not in a very good condition.

  I will really be very grateful if you could give her a chance to go to AYO this summer.

  If I am lucky enough to get in this year I will gladly give up my place for her. Please grant me this wish and I will be forever grateful. Lim Chun. Both Lim Chun and Huang Yuwen are taking part in the 1995 orchestra tour which starts in Hong Kong this week and goes on to Taiwan, Japan and the United States   Pontzious said: 'We were lucky. We had three oboists already, but there was room for four, so we were able to invite her to audition straight away.'   An earnest Lim, at 16 one of the youngest players in the orchestra, said: 'It was natural, anyone would do that for a friend.'   He referred to the young Taiwanese oboist as his 'god-sister', saying they had written and called 'almost every day' since they met during the Asian Youth Orchestra's 'Great Hall of the People' tour last year. 'Of course, I didn't tell her that I was writing - I didn't want her to be disappointed. But when I had heard from Mr Pontzious then I told her and she was very touched,' said Lim.

  'We were all very touched by the letter and by his willingness not just to help his friend, but to give up his own place,' Pontzious said. 'This is not a romance, but he was speaking from his heart.'   He said the young oboist was still feeling sad. On Wednesday morning she had suggested she resign from the tour. 'She said her spirits were low and she was worried that she would pull everyone else down.

  'But my assistant Christopher Chen, who is also from Taiwan, took her to lunch and we are trying to persuade her to stay.'   The story perhaps sums up what the Asian Youth Orchestra (AYO) is all about. After the musicians have put down their bows and closed their sheet music books, there is a tremendous sense of solidarity.

  Even on the first night - when the entire orchestra had a banquet at the Jumbo restaurant in Aberdeen - it was possible to see the strength of old friendships and the warmth of the old-timers as they tried to make the newest arrivals feel at home, even where there were language and cultural differences.

  A Hong Kong trumpeter helped a young Japanese horn player to relax and laugh by trying out his pidgin Japanese.

  A Taiwanese boy nodded in the direction of a girl from China whose eyes had closed in exhaustion by the end of the night: 'Sleeping Beauty,' he said, with affection. 'There is no question about it. More important than the music is the co-operation - letting someone play first, admitting that it might be you who's playing out of tune and not the other guy,' Pontzious said.

  One of the many success stories of the orchestra is Francis Kan Pak-kin, a 24-year-old viola player from Hong Kong, now studying at the Guildhall College of Music in London and on his sixth tour with the orchestra. Earlier this month, Kan won The Orient Foundation Competition for Young Conductors in Lisbon.

  His first experience of conducting came at an AYO rehearsal in 1991. 'That was one of the most exciting days of my life,' Kan recalled.

 'Francis was a wild tiger that first year,' Pontzious said, adding that the young player had been involved in at least two fights during his first tour in 1990.

  'I wasn't going to have him back, even when his mother came to see me.'   But Kan, 'to his credit' called the following morning, admitted he had not behaved well and promised to shape up.

  'We both agreed that we didn't want his mother to be crying in front of anyone on his behalf again. So he came back. And he's been growing ever since.'   In his six years of organising the AYO there have been many tears, Pontzious said. Most are shed at the final concert, where Nimrod, from Elgar's Enigma Variations (a moving, beautiful piece described by its composer as 'noble and eloquent') has become the traditional final work.

  Sentimentality (and further mutual congratulations) can, and will, come in August, when the tour ends at the Hollywood Bowl, after travelling through Hiroshima, New York, and many other cities.

  But for now, at rehearsal camp in Hong Kong, everyone has to concentrate hard and rehearse at three - or even four - sessions a day.

  In charge of the camp arrangements is Naomi Chung, in term-time a masters degree student in California, but for the past four years she has opted to spend every summer with the AYO.

  Sometimes she has to be tough. Last Sunday - day one of this year's camp - she gave the annual 'sweaty feet talk' to the musicians, whose ages range from 16 to 24.

  'Many of them have never lived with other people, or have never even left their home countries before.

  'So every year we have a meeting to lay down the rules.'   These include no smoking or drinking (at least in front of the staff), keeping the hotel rooms tidy and taking daily showers.

  'There is always a complaint from at least one person each year that their roommate hasn't been taking a shower, or has smelly feet,' Chung said.

  It is her least favourite job when she has to step in and have a quiet word with the culprit.

  Another problem is that the students frequently leave things behind - clothes, bags, even musical instruments are strewn behind the orchestra wherever it goes. 'We have to do a lot of chasing,' she said.

  Over the years she has also rushed sick flute players to casualty during typhoons; sorted out hotel room breakages; and comforted a team of weeping mainland Chinese musicians facing their government's refusal to give them visas to join the rest of the orchestra in Taiwan.

  China eventually relented, and they were able to go, Chung said.

  'The whole orchestra celebrated that day: we felt so much like a family that it was almost unbearable to think that we would be split up for political reasons.' Asian Youth Orchestra at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre Concert Hall. July 25 (conductor Mark Churchill) and July 29 (conductor Sergiu Commissiona). 8 pm. Tickets $75, $150, $250 and $320 from Urbtix. 2734-9009.



In harmony over Asia