HK Duo | Hong Kong | July 2025
1. Your musical partnership has been described as “a pair of old shoes” – comfortable yet irreplaceable. After 25 years, what core elements remain unchanged, and how has your collaboration evolved? How does this bond help you navigate challenging worlds like Schubert’s “Fantasie” or Pann’s “Circumnavigator”?
Julie: I would further describe us as a pair of AB-style shoes. We are actually very different from each other. For years I have associated myself as water while Ling as fire. The chemistry between water and fire gives the duo its unique essence. Our partnership moulds itself over time while retaining its essential shape through arguments, exploration, compromise and our individual growth in musical perception. The core of our collaboration – trust, spontaneity and passion – hasn’t changed, but how we communicate has deepened. We finally feel that we are old enough to try playing emotionally complex works like Schubert’s “Fantasie”, which manifests human love, loss and solitude, or Pann’s “Circumnavigator”, with its rhythmic complexity and whimsy. Our bond lets us take risks. We’ve learnt to anticipate each other’s phrasing, almost telepathically, yet still leave room for surprises on stage. That balance of familiarity and discovery keeps the music alive.
2. Your anniversary programme on 5 December 2025 at Hong Kong City Hall’s Concert Hall moves from Beethoven’s monumental architecture to Schubert’s intimacy and McCray’s playfulness. What does this carefully curated journey reveal about HK Duo’s artistic identity?
Ling: This programme mirrors, as Julie mentioned, our AB-style identity: versatile yet cohesive. The programme starts with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, 1st movement for duet, which is not only about grandeur and precision – architectural in its power – but the destiny for Julie and I to meet and become music partners. Schubert’s “Fantasie” strips that down to raw emotion like his “Wanderer Fantasy”, a challenge for us to collaborate in a deeper level dealing with complex inner feelings, longing, loss, resignation and solitude. McCray’s “Circus Suite” injects playfulness and coolness in modernity. Balancing rigour with joy, tradition with innovation also punctuates the duality.
3. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony carries such orchestral weight. What special challenges emerge when translating this expansive work for piano duet and how do you maintain its fill expressive range?
Julie: We’ve learnt a lot in attempting to evoke an orchestra’s force without its colours. We treat the piano like a full ensemble – layering textures, highlighting contrapuntal lines, producing tone and using pedal judiciously to mimic the essence of different orchestral instruments. The famous “fate motif” must sound seismic even without brass, so we focus on articulation and dynamic extremes. It’s about illusion: 20 fingers suggesting a hundred musicians. Sounding Mission Impossible, right? Hahaha…
4. How does the profound musical dialogue required for Schubert’s “Fantasie” differ from the dazzling showmanship of Pann’s “Circumnavigator”?
Julie: The one-movement Schubert’s “Fantasie” is in an intimate confession that requires sensitivity in tone production, harmonic colours and rubato that feels inevitable. Pann’s “Circumnavigator” has three movements that convey love, death and fun (perhaps life is like a game, after all). This requires structural plan in the energy flow and dealing with tricky rhythms and thrives on virtuosic flair. The emotional contrasts are thus more extreme. Both demand precision, but Schubert breaks your heart, while Pann makes you grin in its last movement.
5. What inspired you to include McCray’s “Circus Suite” in your anniversary programme? How does its vibrant theatricality play against the refined elegance of the Saint-Saëns/Debussy piece?
Ling: Mac McCray was my teacher at San Francisco Conservatory. Playing his music would be an additional moral support and blessing to our event. I want to celebrate the joy with his theatrical and vivid “Circus Suite”. It reminds audiences that classical music doesn’t always need to be solemn. It also echoes with Pann’s last movement that “life is like a game”. You know, it’s like there are always buffa elements in Shakespeare’s tragedies. Juxtaposed with Saint-Saëns/Debussy’s elegance, it highlights HK Duo’s range: we’re equally at home in refined salons and under the big top.
6. Julie, as both composer and performer, how does your new commission reflect HK Duo’s artistic journey while pointing to new creative possibilities?
Julie: My new work acts as a relief to Schubert’s music. I have borrowed themes from Gregorian chant, classical to pop music, even from the second movement of Pann’s “Circumnavigator”, “Song for the Dead – ancient Tongan legend”. Those themes bear symbolic meanings of fate, death, release and enlightenment. The fear of death, the obsessions and realisation that death is just a beginning of an unknown cycle, are challenging to write and to play. This would be an attempt to elevate our artistic journey in dealing with philosophical contents. I am also experimenting with blending different styles of musical fragments while keeping the coherence. This echoes with our “versatile yet cohesive” approach.
7. Throughout your past concerts, you’ve embraced boundary-pushing collaborations and new commissions. How does this anniversary concert continue your tradition of artistic innovation?
Ling: This concert continues our mission to defy boxes. Whether it’s reimagining symphonies for piano or premiering Julie’s work, we treat the stage as a lab. Anniversary programmes often look backward but we’ve included new commissions to say: our story isn’t finished. Innovation isn’t a departure – it’s how we honour the past.
8. As educators, how do you balance deep respect for classical traditions with introducing fresh, unconventional works to Hong Kong’s emerging musicians?
Julie: The present comes from the past. We learn from traditional concepts in order to know what to break in generating new ideas. As a composer, I personally set a limit to how far the new ideas can get to while maintaining music’s fundamental power in communicating or expressing specific ideas. It is a valuable mind-training process in figuring out all kinds of relation between the past and present. It can be fascinating, for example, to hear how composers from past to present can provoke the same themes with different musical language. It makes music appreciation exciting.
9. If you were to compose a musical portrait of HK Duo’s future, what colours and textures would dominate the canvas?
Julie: I would like to see rainbow reflected on water. I invite all possibilities.
Ling: We are the canvas; you can paint anything on it!