Review: Beach Boys with the Hong Kong Philharmonic - Love is all around

It can’t be easy singing When I Grow Up To Be A Man with a straight face three days after your 75th birthday, but Mike Love - who co-wrote the song in 1964 with his cousin Brian Wilson - managed it with aplomb.

Last time he and fellow long-serving Beach Boy Bruce Johnston played Hong Kong was in 2012, with a line-up featuring all the surviving members from the band’s 1960s heyday, assembled in celebration of their 50th anniversary. This time we got the stripped-down regular touring configuration in which Brian Wilson, who wrote almost all of the band’s most memorable music, does not feature.

I suspect, though, that it generally does better justice to his songs, particularly when they play with symphony orchestra support, as they did for two nights here with the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra.

Apart from Johnston and Love, the band comprised guitarist and musical director Scott Totten, bassist Brian Eichenberger, keyboard player Timothy Bonhomme, drummer John Cowsill and guitarist Jeff Foskett. All except Bonhomme contributed lead as well as backing vocals, and all except Eichenberger participated at various points in the 2012 reunion tour.

For many years Foskett has been the Brian Wilson touring band’s musical director. They all know the songs backwards, and although the Hong Kong Phil, conducted by Gerard Salonga, can’t have had much rehearsal with them, they sounded as though they did too.

The orchestra performed two pieces without the band, an overture medley of Beach Boys hits, and an arrangement of In My Room, which opened the second half of the concert and earned them a standing ovation. They also appeared on every other song, except for the band’s first single, Surfin’.

It was no surprise that the combination of band and orchestra worked well on the ballads, but more surprisingly the more sophisticated arrangements of the basic surf-and- hot-rod rock songs from the Beach Boys’ early repertoire were also effective.