Presenter：Stacey Rodda 盧廸思
MAY 2025 FOCUS: FRANCE
VIDEO PROMOTIONS ...
…connecting music to visual arts, literature, film and theatre while discovering the delights of these arts in different parts of the world
NEW
FOCUS: FRANCE
The Culture Show with Mr. Benjamin Cabouat, Consul for Culture, Education and Science in HK and Macao
The Culture Show with Mr. Benjamin Cabouat, Consul for Culture, Education and Science in HK and Macao
The Culture Show with Mr. Benjamin Cabouat, Consul for Culture, Education and Science in HK and Macao
PREVIOUS
The Culture Show with Mr. Timo Kantola, Consul General of Finland in Hong Kong
The Culture Show with Mr. Timo Kantola, Consul General of Finland in Hong Kong
The Culture Show with Ms. Alice Fratarcangeli, Director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Hong Kong and Macau
The Culture Show wirh Ms.Klára Jurčová, Consul General of the Czech Republic in Hong Kong
MAGRITTE AND THE TUBA
Clouds, pipes, bowler hats, green apples and tubas: these remain some of the most immediately recognisable icons of René Magritte, the Belgian painter and well-known Surrealist. This week we focus on the tuba in Magritte’s work – in particular, The Central Story (1927), Threatening Weather (1928) and The Discovery of Fire (1935). We’ll hear music written for the instrument by Sophia Gubaidulina, her ‘Lamento’, Widening Circles by Joshua William Mills and Asha Srinivasan’s Dyadic Affinities.
Magritte, Monet and Storms
In this episode we look at rain and storms in the paintings of a major figure in Belgian Surrealism, Rene Magritte, and a major figure in French Impressionism, Claude Monet.
The connections…
Danish composer Rued Langgaard composed his Symphony No. 15 the same year as Magritte’s ‘The Song of the Storm’, and its concluding section features his setting of The Night Storm to a poem by Thøger Larsen.
Liszt accomplished conjuring up a thunderstorm in his first book of Years of Pilgrimage, but more of a psychological storm than a meteorological one. And that is the connection to Magritte’s ‘Golconda’ where it’s raining men – 171 of them.
Claude Monet also portrayed rain and storms. We look at his atmospheric ‘Cliffs at Pourville, Rain’ accompanied by the impressionist music of Debussy’s ‘What the West Wind Saw’ – demanding and violent, a more tranquil depiction of precipitation comes by way of Chopin’s Prelude in D-flat, Op. 28, No. 15 which also accompanies this Monet well.
Presenter：Stacey Rodda 盧廸思
ROSSETTI, LEIGHTON AND THE HARP
The visual arts have been influenced by music and musical instruments for as long as we can imagine. In this programme, we look at the unique aesthetic beauty of the harp featured in ever so many paintings.
La Ghirlandata (1873) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti is incredibly beautiful. In it, he uses deep, rich greens and golds for the woman’s robe and the lush foliage that surrounds her. Rossetti’s subject looks directly at the viewer while playing a gilded harp. Musical instruments figure prominently in Rossetti’s work. His Morning Music captures an intimate domestic scene complete with a musician playing a type of lute.
Edmund Blair Leighton’s The End of The Song (c. 1902) depicts one of the world’s greatest legends - the tragic tale of the forbidden but undying love between the Cornish knight Tristan and the Irish princess Isolde. In this painting, Tristan, a gifted harpist, has just serenaded his beloved Isolde with a song of love.
You can imagine the music to come…
