A new piece of music, based on Mao's thoughts on mountains, has been commissioned from local composer Law Wing-fai, to mark both the Academy Music Festival and the handover.
'The academy had planned for Elgar's two concertos and Beethoven's Ninth and it needed a Chinese piece, so I had a good chance,' Law said.
He based his piece, titled When Mountains Roar, on a pre-revolutionary poem by Mao Zedong, written in the mid-1930s in a spirit of idealism and hope for the future.
There are three sections to the poem, each echoed by Law's composition. The first is about how the mountain is like a fast horse running: when you turn and look at it, it is just a tiny speck.
The second is about the mountain's power and the third is about the mountain's quiet strength, how its peaks seem to support a falling sky.
'When I was writing the piece, I found that I needed a strong theme for the chorus and I was exploring ideas about mountains,' Law said.
'For me that represents Hong Kong. It has its own character and its own way of life. Even though Hong Kong is returning to China, it is its own thing; it never moves. The poem seems to express this kind of idea.' For Law there was another advantage. 'It is not a revolutionary poem, like many he wrote later. This poem was written in 1934 or 1935.' He wrote his piece with a strong sense of the balance in the musical programme it would be creating.
