[Harp-L] Day 6 in Hong Kong

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Hello all.

Yesterday was the last official day of the festival, although tonight there
will be a concert given by some of the 'rising stars' of the Asia-Pacific
harmonicaworld.

As usual there was some very fine playing on the 'open stage' where player/s
could just go up and put their name/s down for a 15 minute spot to strut
their stuff. Itwasn't only the amatures getting up but also many of the guest
artists and officials also taking the opportunity to entertain the 1000-plus
crowd gathered in the lobby of the Hong Kong Cultural Center. Their was asymposium
in the morning dealing with composing for harmonica, unfortunately most of
it was in Chinese and Japanese, but the music played to demonstrate points
being made was nice. There were chromatic seminars given by He Jia Ye and,
later, by Franz Chmel. Brazillian player Fernando Bresslau did a great job
of translating Franz's German in to English, that was then translated into
Cantonese! Suffice to say Franz'splaying inspired all that were there.

Also in the afternoon was a seminar dealing with customised harmonicas. Juko
Saito talked about and demonstrated some of the modified tremolos made for
the Japanese and wider Asian market, while Georg Polle from Norway went into
detail about the construction of the Pollestad chromatic, and Jimmy Chan
from Hong Kong explained the great deal of thought and work that goes in
to one of his custom chromatic. It is interesting to note that the winner
of the chromatic solo competition played one of Jimmy's chromatics! As an
aside, I witnessed competitors in the chromatic competion play Herings, Silver
Concerto's, Suzuki's, CX-12's, 270's, and 280's, and to be quite honest the
biggest variation in sound was between players, not between instruments!
Still, some players preferred the tone of different chromatics for different
pieces they played 

Last night was the presentation night for all of the competition winners.
It was a great atmosphere, with the participants and supportersfrom each
of the participating countries going crazy when one of the playersfrom their
country was announced as a place-getter. The enthusiasm these folks have
for the harmonica is really inspiring. 

I'm on the plane back to Australia tomorrow night so I'll sign off for now.

Cheers and best wishes to all,

Paul