This was a “revenge” event, as musical director and orchestra founder Grace Soedargo playfully called it. The more appropriate term, perhaps, is the settlement of a previous promise, as unwieldy as the phrase sounds. For the leisurely stroll through a gallery of musical treasures conducted this week by Henrik Hochschild from Leipzig, Germany, was payback for another event. 

Titled Journeys to London, polished and lovingly prepared three years ago almost to the date (scheduled for March 19 in 2020), was rudely canceled not by a power ordinance but by “a tiny virus which put a spanner in the works,” said Hochschild.

The Amadeus Music Foundation, who had successfully sold out almost every single ticket for the event at the Usmar Ismail Hall, South Jakarta, had to make a hurried notice: “We regret to inform you that the concert has been canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Please fill out our form to receive your ticket refund.” The good professor and his family had to hightail it back to Germany before his country closed its borders for incoming people from abroad. 

In fact, Hochschild, who is co-principal of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig and Special Concertmaster of the Pacific Philharmonic Tokyo 2023/2024 period, returned to Indonesia in the interim for the Amadeus Music School and Symphony Orchestra Foundation’s 30^th anniversary. 

The joyful event was celebrated in the last week of September 2022 with an uplifting concert titled Seaside to Countryside conducted by Hochschild, performing the works of Mendelssohn, Weber, Bruch and Beethoven.

Though, technically, Indonesia was still in the throes of COVID-19 (despite the pandemic rapidly flattening out), the concert was another sold-out performance and has become the wont of any Amadeus event. The concert featured clarinet soloist Nino Ario Wijaya and viola soloist Noah Joseph Wimadjaja, both teachers at the Amadeus Music School, being superb musicians in their own right.

As 2023 marched in, Amadeus showed it was back in fine mettle albeit the halt to all one-on-one coaching and group ensemble music practices for 30 months.  

On Feb. 11 the Amadeus Foundation presented the Kenopsia Percussion Concert, with the Amadeus percussion ensemble, Ampere, performing the world premiere by winners of the Indonesia Percussion Ensemble Composition competition.

The hall of the Goethe Institut, Central Jakarta, was filled with insistent beats and unfamiliar sounds as percussionist and teacher Adi Schober from Holabrunn, Germany, led the ensemble dominated by two full-sized marimbas, a tubular bell and a timpani drum.

Obviously, the other requisite percussion instruments were also there. Schober was followed by Werner Schulze from Austria, another regular academic and music collaborator of the Amadeus Foundation.

The music performed on Wednesday and Thursday at the Petra Concert Hall, South Jakarta, featuring harp soloist Carlin Eureka Yasin was a far cry from Kenopsia, as it should, seeing it was a Symphony Orchestra event. But a careful scan of the players showed that certain musicians, previously intent on the beat of new music in the February concert, also performed this week, some playing totally different instruments.

Suffice to say, Amadeus was on their usual excellent par, outdoing themselves in their rendition of the two Pavanes; the first by Gabriel Faure and the closing Pavane Pour Une Infante Défunte by Maurice Ravel. 

Symphony No. 40 in G Minor K.550, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, was clearly a crowd favorite, with some members of the audience actually humming several bars to the chagrin of the people sitting to their left and right.

But the outstanding piece in the concert, said certain members of the audience on Wednesday, was Richard Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll WWV 103; rich and resonant, highlighting the brass and woodwind sections. Carlin’s harp in the Danse Sacrée et Danse Profane had her fan-following crowing from the balcony seats.

Amadeus is clearly on a roll this year. As if to thumb their nose at the slow-down enforced by COVID-19 for over two years, in March Amadeus Indonesia will present a celebration by the school’s wind department and a Peko Piano Party in April.

And as a closing note, the Amadeus program book has written: Stay tuned for our next concert in September 2023.