Violinist Fan Xing vividly recalls her first performance with the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra: a concert early last month at the Cultural Centre Concert Hall featuring Mahler's Symphony No9. She was thrilled to share the stage with her 'idol', the Philharmonic's artistic director and chief conductor Edo de Waart.
'I felt a huge sense of accomplishment playing with a professional orchestra because no student orchestra has the time and resources to play such a long, complex piece,' says the Sichuan Music Conservatory graduate.
Fan, 22, is among five young mainland musicians who are spending a year honing their skills with the Hong Kong Philharmonic through fellowships from the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation. The others are violinists Wang Yue and Long Xi and cellist Li Cheng from the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing and violinist Xu Heng from the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. All string players, the five are being mentored by concertmaster John Harding and other string principals.
Launched in the 2006/07 season, the training programme also gives the Philharmonic a good way to recruit talent from outside Hong Kong, which has been notoriously difficult in recent years partly because its salaries are relatively unattractive compared with those in orchestras in the west.
Timothy Calnin, chief executive of the Hong Kong Philharmonic, says young Chinese string players have shown tremendous technical skills at auditions for vacant positions. What they lack, he says, is real orchestral training.
'They could play Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto amazingly and brilliantly, but never would make it through the round of playing orchestral repertoire during the audition,' says Calnin.