Modesty blaze | South China Morning Post

HUANG MENGLA is no prodigy. It's a point the softly spoken 26-year-old repeats at 10-minute intervals. The Shanghai-born musician even explains away his enrolment at the prestigious Shanghai Conservatory of Music as being due to the dedication of his parents rather than to his skill.

'As a non-gifted nine-year old, I came in ninth [in an examination] and missed free-tuition privilege, which was granted to the first eight pupils. But my parents, both medical professionals, were determined to get me into the school by paying out of their own pocket,' Huang says.

For him, taking the top prize at Japan's Sendai International Music Competition in 2001 and Italy's Paganini International Violin Competition the next year aren't worth bragging about, either. 'It doesn't prove anything and makes no difference to one's ability or musicality,' Huang says. 'What the winner got is the endorsement of 10 or fewer individuals on the jury who thought you were OK. So the prize doesn't put you on the pinnacle of the world.'

But winning competitions does help in other ways. Huang has recently become the first Chinese violinist to release a recording on Deutsche Gramophone, joining the ranks of Lang Lang and Li Yundi, who had also signed to the label.

He'll play with the Hong Kong Sinfonietta on Friday for a one-off performance. The programme, which includes an original piece by local composer Stephen Yip Shu-kin, is part of this year's Hong Kong Arts Festival.

Huang says he owes his career to his mentor Yu Lina, who for 13 years taught him the importance of hard work. He says that his teacher's German-like discipline complemented his own 'Italian-like, free-rein mentality'.

Yu is famous for her solo role in the debut performance of the Butterfly Lovers' Violin Concerto in 1959, when she was an 18-year old student at the Shanghai Conservatory. 'I got very emotional while watching an old documentary of her playing,' Huang says. Yu inspired the young violinist, but it was his first competition when he was 19 that helped him rise above mere technical competence.

Although he was knocked out of the international competition in Paris, the city and its history transformed his attitude to music. 'The surroundings were the constituents of the soil that bred the music I'd been learning and playing for all these years,' he says. 'All of sudden, I felt I'd returned home. Everything started making sense. Beethoven's Spring Sonata becomes perfectly logical in such an environment. It was a spiritual awakening.'

Within six months of returning from Paris, he took the second prize in the National Violin Competition (Youth Category) in China. A year later, he became the second runner-up at the Yampolsky competition in Russia and then the first runner-up at Poland's Wieniawski competition. From there, he went on to win at the Sendai and Paganini competitions.

The array of honours has led to numerous performances abroad with, among others, the Stuttgart Radio Symphony, Japan Philharmonic and Osaka Philharmonic orchestras under conductors such as Neeme Jarvi and Tovey Bramwell.

Huang is pleased that this Friday's programme doesn't contain any of Paganini's concertos. 'They're mainly concerned with technique and it's difficult to turn them into something sentimental like Chopin's piano works.

'The Elgar concerto, however, is abundant in musical ideas,' he says. 'It's very long, almost 50 minutes in duration. But each phrase has its own musical meaning and not a single note is superfluous.'

To him, the attraction of the piece is not the melodic line, but the rhythmic freedom the composer expressed in the scores. 'I bet the concerto has the most markings any composer had written on any given work, but the challenge is how to understand Elgar's intentions,' Huang says. 'That's why I think the best version of this work is Sir Yehudi Menuhin's recording of the work when he was 13 years old because the conductor was the composer himself.'

Like pianist Lang Lang, Huang has recently dabbled in Canto-pop, performing in a concert with Hacken Lee. However, his heart remains firmly in the classical music repertoire.

'If one day everybody says, 'Classical music is dead', I will pick up the violin and play for myself and proudly declare, 'It's not dead yet',' he says.

Hong Kong Sinfonietta and Mengla Huang, Wed, 8pm, Concert Hall, Hong Kong City Hall, $100, $180, $280.

Inquiries: 2824 2430

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