Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra music director Jaap van Zweden bows out in 2 programmes
- Most eminent music director in orchestra’s history, Jaap van Zweden to conduct final programmes before leaving with no successor in place
The time has come for Dutch conductor Jaap van Zweden to sail away from Hong Kong, his home port of sorts for the past 12 years.
He is conducting two farewell programmes to mark the end of his long tenure as music director of the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra: a concert version of Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman (geddit?) with one last performance on June 23, and a final programme on June 25 and 26 made up of excerpts of audience favourites and a new work by principal timpani James Boznos.
Van Zweden’s imminent departure, unusually before a successor is named, is certainly making this an extraordinary end to an extraordinary era at the city’s oldest orchestra.
When we were on tour in Europe and mainland China recently, we were playing better than ever before, and that’s partly because we were not so terrified of Jaap
The Hong Kong Philharmonic is much younger – it celebrated its 50th anniversary as a professional orchestra with a gala dinner on June 18, a red carpet event at the Regent hotel. And so the consensus on van Zweden’s legacy in Hong Kong is more positive than that in New York, which he is also leaving, after standing in the shadow of predecessors such as Leonard Bernstein.