Last year's tour was the first one for the Academy for Performing Arts' Symphony Orchestra. It was also a real winner. So successful in fact that the students have been invited back again this year to take part in the prestigious Austria Carinthia Festival 2000, the only students among some stellar company: Vladimir Ashkenazy, Grace Bumbry, Simon Estes, Maurice Andre, Nicolai Gedda.
There'll be time after rehearsals to nip into some top-class concerts. 'And they'll be around the musicians, which will be an excellent learning experience,' said Anthony Camden, the APA's Dean of Music.
He'll be taking 60 students on this year's tour, which also includes various cities in Italy, under the baton of Christoph Campestrini, with whom the orchestra rehearsed so intensely last year.
'We weren't actually considering a tour this year,' said Camden, speaking before leaving for the tour.
'But then the director of the Carinthia Festival contacted us and said they thought our project last year was the best they had, so could we come back?' That project involved taking the APA's top Asian soloists and pairing them with young Viennese soloists for the first time. Audiences in Hong Kong will be able to see how well that works this year - an RTHK radio and television crew will accompany the tour, focusing on it through the eyes of four students.
There's a cross-section of repertoire based around the theme Salieri and his students (Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt and Hummel). Highlights include three operas (Mozart's Impresario, Salieri's Prima La Musica and Rimsky Korsakov's Mozart And Salieri), a chamber music programme, and a piano matinee. The tour - from July 11-July 27 - starts with a rest break to recover from jet lag in Venice. In Cremona - birthplace and home of great violin makers, including Stradivarius, and where every other house seems to contain a violin shop - the string players will perform on Cremonese instruments borrowed from the museum there.