HONG KONG—The National Arts Centre Orchestra’s epic two-week, seven-city tour of China is all about building bridges between Canada and this country. So it was entirely appropriate that the first piece the orchestra from Ottawa played in the opening concert of the tour was written by a third-generation Chinese Canadian composer.

But Alexina Louie, who was born in Vancouver and lives in Toronto, didn’t find a way to express her Chinese roots in music until she was having a mid-career identity crisis.

“I didn’t have my own voice,” she recalled in an interview while taking in a spectacular view of the Hong Kong harbour.

That’s because she grew up with an education that emphasized the classical music of the Western world, and it wasn’t until she had launched a career teaching and composing that she realized something was missing.

“I wanted to write music that was a real statement of who I am,” she says.


The result was a short but beautiful and haunting piece called “Bringing the Tiger Down From the Mountain.” It started in 1991 as a piece for cello and piano, but later she developed the orchestrated version that led off the NAC Orchestra’s Hong Kong appearance on Sunday.

Juno-winning cellist Amanda Forsyth, who joined Louie at our interview, has played both the duet version and the full orchestra version.

“Amanda embodies the tiger,” says Louie.

That prompted Forsyth to explain: “I’m a whining tiger when I play with just the piano. But when I do it with the orchestra, I’m more of a growling, pouncing tiger.”

Coming soon, with the encouragement of Forsyth: a longer third version of Louie’s Tiger composition, turning it into a three-part concerto.

Sunday’s concert was a joint venture in which the NAC Orchestra was teamed with the Hong Kong Sinfonietta. The star of the night was unquestionably Pinchas Zukerman, the NAC Orchestra’s music director (and Forsyth’s husband), who led 70 musicians from Ottawa and 60 from Hong Kong in a memorable performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony that drew an ecstatic response from the audience.


Midway through the symphony, in a musical-chairs move, Zukerman had members of the two orchestras trade seats.

Before intermission, Zukerman dazzled the sold-out house and demonstrated both sides of his talent by performing the violin solo while conducting the Sinfonietta in Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 3.

Indeed, if huge billboards near Hong Kong’s Cultural Centre Concert Hall emphasizing Zukerman’s name and face are any indication, it was his status as a global classical star that drove ticket sales.

The interplay of the two orchestras was a clear sign that the agenda of this tour is to strengthen ties between Canada and China. So was the inclusion of Louie on a program featuring Mozart and Tchaikovsky.

It was a great moment for her when she joined Forsyth and Zukerman onstage to take a bow, but the occasion also had a touch of the bittersweet.

That’s because while this night was a homecoming for Louie, it was also a reminder that she had lost contact with her relatives in a village not far from Hong Kong, in the province of Guangdong.

“Our family has lived in that village for 20 generations,” she explains. “And if my father were alive, he would be delighted to take me to that village.”

He had taken her there just once, in 1973, which triggered her search for her Chinese musical roots.

Pinchas Zukerman in rehearsal with the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Hong Kong.

Four years ago, shortly before he died, he took his three youngest grandchildren to that village. But now nobody in the family knows how to find their relatives in that village.

Louie remembers that after taking his grandchildren on that visit, her father told his family: “Now I can die a happy man.”