10/25 Neighborhood Concert: Ensemble ACJW @ Flushing Town Hall

Tonight, at 7:30 PM in Weill Recital Hall, Ensemble ACJW will reprise Sunday’s Neighborhood Concert, which took place at Flushing Town Hall in Queens. I can assure you that although this music was fascinating to get to know from recordings and Academy Fellows’ anecdotes, it has a much greater impact when heard live from the concert stage. I had mentioned in my previous blog posting that I was looking forward to hearing Bright Sheng’s Third String Quartet live, and I got that opportunity twice yesterday—once at the dress rehearsal and again during the concert! The group shone in a vigorous rendition of this work—accentuating the violent drive that makes up the majority of the piece, while reserving a poignant sensitivity for the closing elegy.

I had never heard Guo Wenjing’s Parade for Six Peking Opera Gongs, until yesterday. I had no idea these instruments were so versatile in the variety of sound they could produce, but was quickly schooled by the percussion trio’s skilled performance. It was very clever programming on the part of the artistic committee to juxtapose this piece with Bright Sheng’s work—each piece played on the subtle (or, not so subtle) differences in timbre, technique, and register possible from instruments belonging to the same family.

Since my little brother happened to be in town this weekend, and had a plane to catch to Chicago, I had to cut out early and was unable to listen to the live rendition of Zhou Long’s Taigu Rhyme. However, from the feedback through the grapevine, I got the impression that this piece makes an excellent closer to the concert, and I can’t wait to hear it live, tonight!

I refuse to play the part of the narcissistic pianist and comment on the performances I played in myself (Chen Qigang’s Instants d’un Opéra de Pékin for Solo Piano and Chen Yi’s Qi for Flute, Cello, Percussion, and Piano), but I do have to say that it was a joy to work on and perform this music with such daring and dynamic players. I hope to see you tonight!

Excerpt from Zhou Long's Taigu Rhyme
Beijing New Music Ensemble
Naxos

Posted by Gregory DeTurck, an award-winning pianist and current Fellow of The Academy—a Program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, and The Weill Music Institute, in partnership with the New York City Department of Education.

Bright on the Mark

Bright Sheng’s Third String Quartet is the centerpiece of Ensemble ACJW’s Class of 1978 concerts on October 25 and October 26. Strictly from a listener’s standpoint, this piece invokes the quartets of Bartók and Janáček—innovative sonorites, impulsive rhythms, and intelligent construction. The silvery chant-like atmosphere of the opening of Sheng’s work is juxtaposed with a dance-like fury, developing over a period of ten minutes into outright violence. An elegiac coda closes the piece, reminiscent of the opening rhythm and pitches, but now much more serious, earthbound, and resigned. Sheng explains in his program notes for this quartet, that although the two initial textures were inspired by a Tibetan folk dance he saw in Chinhai, he didn’t try to recreate that exact scene. He also explains that the closing elegy, composed in 1993, is in memory of his friends who had recently passed away.

Sheng gives particular attention to detail when creating textures. The kaleidoscopic means by which he navigates from one sonority to the next gives the piece a tight cohesion, despite radical differences in each section’s tempo and character. He achieves a marvelous effect about halfway through the work, creating a pipa-like sound out of the instrument’s four strings. Though rhythmically much like the opening, Sheng substitutes fluidity for a sharp pizzicato line; if you were blindfolded at the concert, you might mistake the resulting timbre for a Chinese folk instrument. He also tips his hat to Shostakovich in this section with the wonderful detail of occasionally having one instrument pluck a note as another begins to bow the same pitch (with or without displacing the octave), resulting in a “delayed-decay” effect.

Brenton Caldwell, the violist for this performance, spoke of the absolute focus it takes to pull off such an extreme work. “It takes all of your concentration to perform it … but it’s definitely worth it.” The quartet for this performance is rounded out by Joanna Frankel and Yonah Zur, violinists; and Nick Canellakis, cellist. I’m looking forward to hearing this piece live for the first time, especially from a quartet of this caliber.

Excerpt from Bright Sheng's String Quartet No. 3
Shanghai String Quartet
BIS Records

Posted by Gregory DeTurck, an award-winning pianist and current Fellow of The Academy—a Program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, and The Weill Music Institute, in partnership with the New York City Department of Education.

Connect the Dots ...

It’s humbling to think that exactly a year ago, I was actually in Beijing performing Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue in the Forbidden City Concert Hall. This was part of a project established by the U.S. Embassy to celebrate 30 years of artistic exchange with China. The circumstances couldn’t have been more apropos: an American pianist playing an iconic American piece with a Chinese orchestra in one of the more famous Chinese landmarks. The clincher is that now, a year later, an American pianist is performing a Chinese masterwork in America’s most famous concert hall, also to celebrate and encourage cultural exchange.

On October 25, I will have the honor of kicking off Ensemble ACJW’s Class of 1978 concert with Chen Qigang’s Instants d’un Opéra de Pékin for solo piano. Chen wrote this work as the compulsory piece for the 2000 Concours d’interpretation Olivier Messiaen (he revised the piece in 2004). Messiaen accepted Chen as his final student after he left the Paris Conservatoire, being impressed with Chen’s intellect and compositions as well as his ability to merge Chinese and European musical idioms in an individual way.

In Instants, however, Chen had to incorporate a third influence. Compulsory pieces for international piano competitions are usually between four and 10 minutes long and often feature a slow opening followed by a faster section in which pyrotechnics are concentrated, testing the player’s stamina. While these elements are all present in this work, Chen maintains a beautiful marriage between French and Chinese styles. The opening five-note motive (around which the entire piece is built) is first presented over the lower five octaves of the piano, evoking a late-Debussy sonority. Soon afterward, this motive becomes more melodic and is harmonized with a succession of perfect fifths that reminds us of the opening of Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges. In the atmospheric sections, successions of dense chords with complicated voice-leading recall moments from Messiaen’s Vingt Regards de l’Enfant Jesus. Through this French veil, the recurring pentatonic theme and its percussive treatment remind us of the jinghu, yueqin, gu, and ban, instruments that accompany traditional Peking opera.

Excerpt from Chen Qigang's Instants d’un Opéra de Pékin
Joel Fan, piano
Reference Recordings

Posted by Gregory DeTurck, an award-winning pianist and current Fellow of The Academy—a Program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, and The Weill Music Institute, in partnership with the New York City Department of Education.

Say Qi

Chen Yi’s quartet Qi for flute, cello, piano, and percussion will be the first chamber piece on Ensemble ACJW’s Class of 1978 concerts on October 25 and October 26. The Chinese word Qi (pronounced "chi") describes a metaphysical flow of energy in the universe. It has little or no relation to the physical concept of energy, referring instead to a kind of spiritual vitalism—one that continually changes in order to restore and maintain harmony in all things.

Dr. Chen's musical portrayal of Qi is simultaneously extreme yet cohesive. Textures change rapidly, from cadenza-like passages in the cello and flute to driving motoric rhythms in the percussion and piano. Evolving atmospheres delineate the structure of the piece; often the same sonorities will return with slight alterations, giving the whole work an “ambiguous rondo” feel. It is absolutely fascinating to listen to the piece this way, substituting the Western idea of thematic development with the metamorphoses of sonic blocks.

Excerpt from Chen Yi's Qi
New Music Consort
CRI Records

More fascinating still—to the four of us playing the piece, anyway—is the way the treatment of each of our instruments changes with these textures.

ACJW Meets the Class of 1978

Carnegie Hall’s Director of Artistic Planning, Jeremy Geffen, spoke at a recent Professional Development session about The Academy’s role in the upcoming Ancient Paths, Modern Voices festival. The five works featured on Ensemble ACJW’s concerts on October 25 and October 26, were each written by composers who entered the Central Conservatory in Beijing in 1978 when its doors reopened after the Cultural Revolution had sealed them since 1966 (with the exception of Bright Sheng, who entered the Conservatory in Shanghai the same year).

Part of Geffen’s presentation included a short video with Tan Dun speaking about the sudden, drastic change in the lives of the ’78 class when they were admitted to the conservatory after a period of “re-education” in the countryside. “After the Cultural Revolution, we came in from real life,” recounts Tan Dun. “We were standing on the ruins, thinking, How could we create our musical kingdom again? … Then, of course, China opened.” Western musical ideals, along with the ever-evolving concept of modernism, flooded into Chinese musical thought. This newfound wealth of sonic and cultural influences, coupled with the experience of having been exiled to the countryside and exposed to varying dialects and folk songs, gave the composers of the class of ’78 two diametrically opposed aesthetics to draw from. And although they shared a similar history, their futures beyond the conservatory—and the music they wrote—are all very distinct.

Composers Tan Dun and Chen Qigang discuss their membership in the Class of 1978.

Preparing for this concert has presented Ensemble ACJW with a unique and exciting challenge. For the better part of our season thus far, discussions in rehearsals have