Coming Full Circle

So you think Carnegie Hall’s Ancient Paths, Modern Voices festival is over in New York? Not so fast. A number of China-themed gallery exhibitions in Chelsea will remain on view as late as mid-January 2010; in addition, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibit Silk and Bamboo: Music and Art of China, a primarily archaeological look at China’s ancient music, runs through February 7.

At Tuesday night’s closing performance, Clive Gillinson hinted that Carnegie Hall and China will be drawn closer together after Ancient Paths, Modern Voices. For audiences in China, the future starts later this month.

On November 21, television audiences in Shanghai will get a taste of Carnegie Hall—and of last year’s festival—as Leonard Bernstein: The Best of all Possible Worlds makes its Chinese broadcast debut as the weekly featured concert on Shanghai Oriental Television’s arts channel. The gala performance, which opened Carnegie Hall’s season last year, features Michael Tilson Thomas conducting the San Francisco Symphony, along with guest artists including Yo-Yo Ma, Thomas Hampson, and Dawn Upshaw.

I discovered this timely coincidence when I called Xie Lixin, the program director for Shanghai’s arts channel, and told him about the strong showing the Shanghai Symphony—his hometown band—made at the festival’s closing night. Although Xie was sorry he couldn’t be in New York, he was very much looking forward to the broadcast. “Bernstein was an iconic figure in popularizing classical music,” he said. “Most people in China know him only as a conductor; few know about his multifaceted career.” Unlike most broadcasts in this time slot, he added, the Bernstein program also features interviews and extra footage from within Carnegie Hall.

“Chinese people know about two great concert halls in the world: Vienna’s Musikverein, and Carnegie Hall,” he added. “It is not so easy for any of us to see inside Carnegie Hall.”

Posted by Ken Smith

The Chinese Angle

Anybody who’s tripped over a tripod trying to get to their seats at Carnegie Hall (or even at neighborhood and partner venues around the city) probably wonders where all those cameras are from. Ever since the lanterns went up and the lions danced through the lobby, there has been a significant increase in the amount of Chinese-language media at Carnegie Hall.

One particular Chinese-language channel, Sinovision, has included Carnegie Hall as a nightly staple in its regular news coverage for the past three weeks, from lively footage of the opening lion dance and features on the Quanzhou marionettes, to the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra and interviews with featured artists in the festival. Most of these clips are archived and available to anyone with open access to the internet.

For a brief sampling (of just one channel, mind you), here’s local Chinese coverage of the festival opening, the Zankel Hall photo exhibition, an interview with Wu Man, the HKCO’s Neighborhood Concert at Flushing Town Hall, interviews with Tan Dun and Chen Qigang, and an excerpt from an interview with Clive Gillinson, Carnegie Hall’s Executive and Artistic Director, with Chinese subtitles.

Posted by Ken Smith

Iris dévoilée unveiled

A brief word about Iris dévoilée: Its orchestration includes female singers (both bel canto and Peking opera styles) and traditional Chinese instruments (erhu, pipa, and zheng). In nine movements, the piece runs through various states of womanhood from “Chaste” to “Hysterical.”

This week I finally had a brief word about the piece with Chen Qigang himself. Its unusual form was partly an extension of his earlier piece, The Five Elements, an orchestral suite of five short movements that marked the first time he’d attempted such abrupt changes in mood. In content, Iris owes much to Chen’s Raise the Red Lantern ballet for director Zhang Yimou and the National Ballet of China, which had incorporated elements of Peking opera in the score. “We had worked on that piece for more than a year,” Chen says. “There were many ideas we never used.”

More important than specific musical sources, though, was the collaborative sense that the ballet had instilled. Working with a director, choreographer, and dancers as well as musicians had brought home the idea of conveying multiple viewpoints in a single piece.

“This essentially represents the nine different ways I’ve observed women presenting themselves,” Chen explains. “Right up to its publication, I was facing the dilemma of whether or not the subject matter was appropriate. There hasn’t been anything like this before in Chinese music.”

In France, where Chen has lived since 1984, this was hardly a problem. Most people who heard about the piece found the Chinese elements exotic but the subject matter appealingly universal. But, as Chen had feared, exactly the reverse proved true in China, where the people found the piece strangely Western in its openness.

“Many people in China who heard this piece felt uncomfortable,” he said. “When I discussed this piece with students at the Shanghai Conservatory, I got a stern warning from the school authorities: ‘You talk too much about women and romantic love in front of college students.’”

But women, he insists, are intricately connected with men’s lives, beginning with their mothers. “Women have all the qualities of men, but men don’t share all the qualities of women,” he said. “All men need women. Without women, men could do nothing.”

But back to the roots of the piece, does Chen Qigang have an iris? Was there a particular muse at the heart of the piece?

“No,” he says, a little too quickly. “There was no muse. You cannot say there was a muse.” Which, of course, is fooling no one. Unless, like the Greeks, he had several of them.

Posted by Ken Smith

Iris dévoilée veiled

Chen Qigang’s Iris dévoilée, a 40-minute work examining the various faces of womanhood that closes the Ancient Paths, Modern Voices festival, not only landed the composer a multi-recording relationship with EMI Classics, but has also become a popular showpiece for Chinese orchestras up and down China’s East Coast. When the Guangzhou Symphony needed a Chinese piece to perform on its US tour in 2005, Iris was the work chosen. The piece requires a balanced understanding of Chinese and Western idioms; as with Beethoven or Mahler in the West, I often use it to compare various orchestras in China. The Hong Kong Philharmonic emphasized its French qualities; at its Chinese premiere, with the Beijing-based China Philharmonic, it was unambiguously Chinese.

That premiere, which took place at the 2002 Beijing Music Festival at an all-Chen concert conducted by Muhai Tang (who had premiered and recorded Iris in Paris a year earlier), was also a logistical mess. Some 20 minutes after the scheduled starting time, when the orchestra had still not arrived, a radio presenter came onstage with Chen. After discussing the inspiration for the work, Chen, who normally speaks in flowing paragraphs, began to hesitate. His face quickly turned red.

The festival’s director, Long Yu, then came out. He was clearly apologetic, though I could barely make out a word he said. The audience started to leave. On the way out I approached the composer Guo Wenjing, whose English is as halting as my Chinese; Guo explained, “Percussion, uh, no show.”

By 9 PM, the augmented percussion section had fully arrived, and, well after 10 PM, Iris finally received its China premiere. It remains among the most memorable symphonic performances I’ve heard in Asia.

And it made me think that I really had to ask Chen more about this piece, preferably when he wasn’t standing in front of 2,000 people.

Posted by Ken Smith

Cell Division

I think I’ve finally learned that you really can’t be everywhere at once. I can’t be in New York and Asia; composer Liu Sola can’t be at rehearsals for the New Juilliard Ensemble’s program tonight at Alice Tully Hall and the Orange County Museum of Art, where she was scheduled to speak as part of the West Coast offerings in Ancient Paths, Modern Voices. But at least there’s always Skype.

Thanks to the miracle of VoIP, I was able to not only track down our elusive composer, but also find out what she talked about at the panel discussion Designing China, which was held last Thursday in conjunction with the California Humanities Research Institute. “I was on the panel with the artist Liu Dan,” she said. “My subject was sound.”

For her, the art of composition is broken down not into themes and motifs, but into shapes and cells. “How I hear the sound is the shape,” she explains. “The cells are the aesthetic. They make the music come alive.”

Looking at Mr. Liu’s art, for example—which often uses stones and rocks as its subject matter—Ms. Liu could already hear a musical shape. After that, she just needs to figure out the cells to fill those shapes.

So is this a strategy to keep in mind while listening to all new Chinese music?

“This is not just simply how I write music,” she says. “You can trace other people’s inspiration backwards. I can even trace free jazz, the way players like Ornette Coleman shape their music.”

How is a cell, then, different from a motif or theme?

“With motifs, you always look forward to development,” she explains. “Cells are there to make their own statement. They are very individual, and they can change very fast. That to me is much more exciting than a motif.”

Posted by Ken Smith

Scarfing up Culture

I’m still in Hong Kong, but I can still feel Carnegie Hall in the air. That’s mostly because I passed by Shanghai Tang last night, where Lang Lang’s signature black-and-fuchsia piano-print scarf has been carrying word of Ancient Paths, Modern Voices back to Asia. (It retails here for HK$980, by the way—about US$125, compared to US$150 in New York. The Chinese love their bargains.)

The idea of a classical musician teaming up with an international fashion brand might still seem novel in the West, but it falls squarely within the modern Asian concept of holistic shopping. New York’s Time Warner Center—with its commercial offices, destination restaurants, high-end retail stores, a luxury hotel, and multiple performance spaces—is pretty much Hong Kong’s idea of perfection.

Even more prominent than Lang Lang’s scarf display in Shanghai Tang’s flagship store in Central is the exhibit at the company’s new boutique at 1881 Heritage, where the pianist’s famous scarf drapes over a copy of his autobiography and his new recording of Russian piano trios, resembling a miniature shrine including everything but the incense.

That location, a one-time Marine Police Quarters and now a hotel-restaurant-retail space, appropriately faces the harbor-front Hong Kong Cultural Centre, which is where Lang Lang is most likely to be found when he’s in town. Lately, he’s here more frequently: In November 2006, the pianist became a Hong Kong resident under the Immigration Department’s quality migrant admission program, which has allowed notably talented mainlanders (including fellow Chinese pianist Yundi Li and Olympic gold medalist Fu Mingxia) to settle in Hong Kong legally without first securing a job. A Hong Kong passport allows the pianist to keep his Chinese citizenship, while making international travel much easier.

Posted by Ken Smith

A Question of Identity

At some point, someone somewhere is bound to ask the obvious question: Is Angel Lam a young Hong Kong woman who lives in America, or a young American woman who was born in Hong Kong? Having divided her life almost evenly between two cultures, she usually answers "both"—but that will hardly please the identity purists.

As Lam herself admits, her Chinese side has largely steered her artistry. ("I find myself drawn much more to stories from Chinese history than the Boston Tea Party or the American Civil War," she says.) That may partly be the "James Joyce factor," since the novelist claimed he was never more Irish than when he lived in Paris. But Lam, in fact, has such a thorough Hong Kong profile that her life story could be approved by the city's Legislative Council.

The daughter of a small-businessman father and a financier mother, Lam relocated with her family from Hong Kong to southern California after 1989, returning to the territory shortly before the handover to China. After her undergraduate studies at the HK Academy of Performing Arts, the overachiever left to pursue two master's degrees at Baltimore's Peabody Conservatory and is currently a doctoral candidate at Peabody and an artist diploma candidate at Yale University.

From where I'm sitting, though—in Ho Man Tin, Kowloon, to be precise, halfway between her father's tropical fish store in Kowloon Tong and her mother's banking firm in the city's Central District—the composer has removed all doubt about which side dominates. When we met for tea last summer in Wan Chai, Lam admitted that she came back to Hong Kong not only to finish composing her piece, but also to have the dress for her Carnegie Hall debut made across the border in Shenzhen, where large numbers of Hong Kong residents regularly seek out bargain goods. My Cantonese mother-in-law would be proud.

Posted by Ken Smith

Putting Herself in the Picture

Looking at the liner notes to Angel Lam's Empty Mountain, Spirit Rain on the Silk Road Ensemble's new collection Off the Map, you soon get the sense that there's much more to her piece than the music. There is, in fact, an elaborate backstory—a short poetic piece of fiction that at times seems as if it wants to waft off the page and into the actual performance.

In Awakening from a Disappearing Garden, the composer's written words do just that. When Lam's new piece comes to Carnegie Hall this Saturday night with Yo-Yo Ma and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Lam herself will be narrating on stage.

"I took a taxi," her piece begins. "It wouldn't take long to reach this luxurious mansion, where I have been invited for a party. A calendar on the dashboard showed in bright, red letters, May 10th, 1953." The second movement opens on September 9, 2007: "I was not in hurry, but the taxi driver was." Two different women, two different generations, two different taxi rides are reconciled in Lam's story.

"Every piece I write has a story behind it," says the composer. Having the confidence to put herself in the middle of it, though, has been a gradual progression. Lam wrote her first narration in a piece titled Symphonic Journal: Ambush from 10 Directions for the Hong Kong Sinfonietta in 2005. Two years later, she was encouraged to record her own narration for Midnight Run, a theater-dance piece directed by Martha Clarke, who later integrated into the performance a video of Lam reading the poem.

Posted by Ken Smith

"Guanxi" is not a province

The first word anyone working in China should learn is guanxi, which refers to a system of connections and obligations that weaves inextricably throughout Chinese culture. For a lesson in guanxi and its practical application in music programming, consider Joel Sachs, whose New Juilliard Ensemble program on Monday, November 9, at Alice Tully Hall—part of Ancient Paths, Modern Voices—offers a concise overview of contemporary music by composers currently working in China.

"I'd known Chou Wen-chung for a long time, so I knew the usual suspects," says Sachs, referring to a Columbia University professor who recruited a number of composers—including Tan Dun, Chen Yi, and Zhou Long—from China's Central Conservatory. Sachs's introduction to composers still living in China came in 1996 through a phone call from the Asian Cultural Council. "They asked if I'd like to meet a Chinese composer they'd brought to New York," he recalls. As a result, Jia Daqun's Intonation was included on the NJE's opening program.

Two years later, Sachs got another phone call from the ACC, this time recommending the composer Guo Wenjing. "We gave the US premiere of Guo's Inscription on Bone, which has some very distinctive vocal requirements," he says. "Guo strongly recommended a certain young singer who'd just moved to New York from London. Her name was Liu Sola." Guo's Concertino and Liu's In Corporeal 1 appeared soon afterward on NJE programs.

Sachs's guanxi continued to pay dividends when Jia, whose daughter was attending school in the US, was looking for a way to return. Through the renewed graces of the ACC and the NJE, Jia returned to complete his Three Images from Ink and Wash Painting.

The relationship with Ye Xiaogang, another Class of 1978 composer, was more complicated, Sachs says. Ye had invited Sachs's professional ensemble Continuum to appear at the Central Conservatory's new-music festival in spring 2009, and even offered to write a new piece. But Continuum's trip to China was cancelled because of a flu outbreak, and Ye's commission was delayed due to his administrative duties both at the conservatory, where he is now vice-president, and the National Party Congress, of which he is a member.

As a result, Sachs—and US audiences—will now get their introduction to Li Shaosheng, a junior at the Central Conservatory (and a student of Ye's) whose Skyline on the Moon was commissioned by Juilliard for Carnegie Hall's China festival.

Posted by Ken Smith

Chinese or American?

Two months since reopening in its new Maya Lin–designed space, the Museum of Chinese in America has made no secret of its ambitions to become the national focal point for Chinese immigration and its impact on American society. That means not only sifting through history with a curator's eye, says playwright and museum trustee David Henry Hwang, but also examining the changing complexities of how US-China relations affect Chinese Americans today.

In Friday's panel The Evolving Cultural Identity of Chinese American Artists, held in conjunction with Carnegie Hall's Ancient Paths, Modern Voices, Hwang will gather composer-conductor Bright Sheng and San Francisco Chronicle "Asian pop" columnist Jeff Yang to share their perspectives.

"The Chinese American identity has become more international," says Hwang. "The movement started out saying, 'We're American, not Chinese.' We wanted to be treated as Americans, and didn't want much to do with China proper in the 1980s. That's now changed, and many more people go back and forth freely between both."

Shanghai-born Sheng, who came to the US in the 1980s, has his own perspective. "I was very angry about the Cultural Revolution and what it did to China. At the same time, I'd selfishly left the motherland behind me in search of a better life," he says. "As I began making headway here, China also began picking up. This made it more complicated: I feel happy for China's rise, even though I had no part in it."

Hwang and Sheng, whose 1997 opera The Silver River was an exploration of cross-cultural Chinese identity, have begun to re-examine that dynamic today. Shifting cultural identities has also been a frequent topic for New York–based Yang.

"Jeff and I have talked about the fact that lots of things that were negative when we were growing up have now become positive," says Hwang. "Obviously, our well-being depends on the relationship between the US and China. But what does it mean when we were trying to disassociate ourselves from China when it was poor and powerless, yet claim that we're Chinese when China is on the rise? Where's the line between personal identity and opportunism?"

Posted by Ken Smith

Listening to Angel Lam

While I'm on a CD kick, I thought I'd mention another composer coming up on the Carnegie Hall festival schedule. Angel Lam's piece Empty Mountain, Spirit Rain has finally been released on a commercial recording.

Another of Lam's works, Awakening from a Disappearing Garden, which will be performed at Carnegie Hall on Saturday night with Yo-Yo Ma and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, is actually the composer's third Carnegie Hall commission. Her second, Empty Mountain, Spirit Rain, was initiated in conjunction with Ma's Silk Road Project. Until now, one could only listen to the piece in part on Carnegie Hall's website or in its entirely on a special edition of the Silk Road Ensemble's Sony release New Impossibilities, available exclusively through barnesandnoble.com.

Since I didn't get my copy of the disc online, I was happy to hear that a new recording of the piece (with a few of the same musicians) has been included on the Silk Road Ensemble's recent collection Off the Map, on World Village Music. There's definitely a theme here. Each of the US–based composers—including, in addition to Lam, Gabriella Lena Frank, Evan Ziporyn, and Osvaldo Golijov—brings at least two cultures to the table. Happily, Lam (at 31, the most junior of the group) holds her own with her more experienced colleagues, spinning musical lines of lyrical, almost ethereal beauty. The CD will be released in the US on November 10, but the download is already available.

Posted by Ken Smith

Redefining Tradition

Last night at (Le) Poisson Rouge, pipa player Min Xiao-Fen and composer Huang Ruo offered a taste of this Thursday’s China Institute presentation, entitled “Traditional Chinese Music in the 21st Century.” Just in case you didn’t make it down to hear Ms. Min perform Mr. Huang’s Written on the Wind, the third in his Drama Theater series, you can still find the piece on Huang’s new Naxos CD To the Four Corners, which offers several of the Drama Theater pieces as well as his First String Quartet.

I’m in Hong Kong at the moment, which is quite far from (Le) Poisson Rouge but quite close to the home office of Naxos Records, and I can say that Min’s recording of Written on the Wind for pipa and voice—conceived both as a pure composition and a multimedia experience—is quite dramatic even without the visuals. The text, incidentally, is not Chinese. Huang, having sat through his share of vocal recitals in the West where he can’t understand the languages, has made it easier for Westerners to approach Chinese music. His piece is filled with all sorts of vocal nuance and textural color—except that the words are in a language of his own creation. For once, neither Chinese nor Western listeners have an advantage.

Thursday’s talk at the China Institute will cover Huang Ruo’s use of traditional sources in orchestral composition (such as Still/Motion, his recent companion piece to “The Butterfly Lovers” Violin Concerto), as well as Min’s rather liberal uses of traditional music. The reigning pipa crossover queen will also be performing with her jazz-tinged Blue Pipa Trio on November 8 at the Museum of Chinese in America, and has a much more traditional solo pipa performance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on November 19.

Posted by Ken Smith

Tan Dun: Visual Music

Of all the events that could possibly feature Tan Dun at Carnegie Hall’s China Festival, you might not expect the composer to be a featured solo visual artist in a Chelsea gallery, but there he was. Or at least his hands were.

Chambers Fine Art, which has worked to introduce Chinese visual artists to American audiences since 2000, inaugurated its new location on 19th Street last week with an exhibition devoted to the composer’s Organic Music. It is a bit of a homecoming for Tan, since it was downtown in the experimental milieu of the late 1980s that his music first started incorporating natural elements like water, paper, and stones. In pieces like Ghost Opera and his subsequent Water Concerto (which the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra performs with soloist Colin Currie tonight), the dripping and splashing of water emerges as a full-fledged musical vocabulary with unusual dramatic resonance.

But why at a gallery? Back in 2004, Tan was first invited to assemble an installation of his performance works by artist Cai Guo-Qiang for Taiwan’s Bunker Museum of Contemporary Art. Entitled Visual Music, the exhibition later traveled to the Shanghai Gallery of Art in 2005.

The current exhibition—consisting of a cross-shaped, cross-lit arrangement of transparent water bowls from Tan’s Water Passion After St. Matthew (topped with a video screen of the composer’s hands playing with water) and a room of deconstructed pianos that represent “reconstruction and resurrection”—originated in 2008 at Chambers Fine Art Beijing in conjunction with the premiere of the composer’s Organic Music Tears of Nature at Beijing’s National Centre for the Performing Arts.

Posted by Ken Smith

Catching Up with Long Yu

You'd think it would be difficult to keep up with someone like Long Yu, who in addition to his new post as Music Director of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra also maintains music directorships of the Guangzhou Symphony, the China Philharmonic, and the Beijing Music Festival (where he seemed to be omnipresent, though usually in the background).

Actually, that commuter path—the equivalent of Boston to Washington to Miami and back—is all too common among business people in China today. That point was driven home once again when I ran into a Hong Kong friend in the lobby of Beijing's Poly Theatre.

Michelle Garnaut, the Melbourne-born restaurateur whose flagship M on the Fringe was just rated Time Out's Best Restaurant in Hong Kong, also garnered a piece in the New York Times last weekend for her recently opened Capital M in Beijing. Partly because of her own passion for music, Michelle's restaurants also attract a disproportionate number of musicians. Fringe has practically been a canteen for principal players and guest soloists at the Hong Kong Philharmonic.

In honor of her recent two-city media blitz, Michelle invited me to Capital M for a bite, where we ran into … Long Yu. Our conversation about the opening of the Shanghai Symphony season, as well as recent concerts by the Guangzhou Symphony (she also has a pied-à-terre facing the Xinghai Concert Hall, the orchestra's home) seemed to have summoned the man himself.

Long Yu was still hovering over an after-dinner glass of wine. It was the longest I'd seen him in one place, so of course I had to go over and ask him about the dramatic "new" Shanghai Symphony.

"There aren't so many new faces," he said. "Only about 25." Only later did it sink in that, in an orchestra of 83 musicians, more than a quarter of the personnel was playing together for the first time. "They are all Chinese—well, no. We also have two Russian musicians, playing the tuba and the trumpet."

Posted by Ken Smith

From the Other Side of the World

Don't tell anyone, but I'm back in China. I made sure I was in Beijing last Friday for the closing of the Beijing Music Festival, which became a 30th anniversary celebration for both Isaac Stern's From Mao to Mozart tour as well as the resumption of Sino-American relations.

Murray Lerner's 1980 Oscar-winning documentary still resonates today, although seeing it in China has as much resonance with the current times as seeing a black-and-white Depression-era film in New York. You see it as part of the historic continuum, though you're not always sure how we got to the present day.

As befits their audience and their resources, both the BMF and Carnegie Hall's Ancient Paths, Modern Voices answer that question in separate ways. The BMF led with the players themselves, reuniting seven of the soloists who had originally played for Stern as soloists with the China Philharmonic conducted by the violinist's son, David. The stage was flanked by high-definition video screens; the musicians performed Beethoven's Triple Concerto and a Vivaldi four-violin concerto, often in visual counterpoint with their youthful selves playing for Stern in 1979.

The range of players gathered conveyed the breadth of China's past 30 years in the classical music world. Not only did the evening feature a handful of star soloists (including cellist Jian Wang and violinist Vera Tsu), but also professional chamber musicians (Weigang Li of the Shanghai Quartet) and orchestra players from abroad (Pittsburgh Symphony Assistant Concertmaster Hong-Guang Jia and Los Angeles Philharmonic violinist Yun Tang).

Carnegie Hall's festival, on the other hand, fleshes out the history of Sino-US cultural exchange more fully on the screen. In conjunction with The Paley Center for Media, Ancient Paths, Modern Voices leads with a screening of From Mao to Mozart on November 7. The next day features CBS coverage of the Boston Symphony Orchestra's 1979 tour, PBS journalist Bill Moyers's 1983 coverage of Arthur Miller directing the first Chinese production of Death of a Salesman, and a 2008 documentary of dancer-choreographer Jacques D'Amboise directing a cross-cultural dance ensemble, entitled The Other Side of the World.

Posted by Ken Smith

Is it Chinese, or Is it an Orchestra?

For those who don’t live in Hong Kong—sometimes even for those who do—the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra can be a baffling institution. Is it traditional, or is it modern? For a town that thinks nothing of wrapping a slice of bacon around a piece of shrimp (hardly a traditional Cantonese delicacy), this shouldn’t even be a question. The HKCO is fusion cuisine for the ears.

Compared to the Hong Kong Philharmonic, and even the more localized Hong Kong Sinfonietta, both of which have the weight of bearing Western tradition in a strange environment on their shoulders, the HKCO wears tradition lightly and develops its repertory aggressively. In three decades, the orchestra has commissioned more than 1,700 new works and arrangements, making it a role model for any musical institution in the world in cultivating a repertory for the future.

I’m pretty sure none of that matters to the audience, though, and the orchestra has managed to cultivate one of the most fiercely devoted followings in town. This has to do with the playing, which bridges the whopping gap that most organizations face. How do you reach a weekly subscription series that would satisfy audiences from both The New York Pops and the American Composers Orchestra? By remaining playful even in art and finding gravitas even in frivolous pieces. Compare the HKCO version of Tan Dun’s “Eroica” Symphony for YouTube (arranged for Chinese instruments by resident conductor Chew Hee-Chiat) with the London Symphony Orchestra’s performance and you’ll see exactly what I mean.

Posted by Ken Smith

Don't Feed the Pipas

For those who’ve already gotten as close to the qin as possible without touching it, the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra now offers its instrument petting zoo. That may be a little exaggeration, but HKCO resident conductor Chew Hee-chiat insists that after the orchestra’s workshop presentation this morning at Flushing Town Hall (and again tomorrow at the University Settlement at the Houston Street Center), members of the audience should touch and at least attempt to play some of the instruments.

“I suggest the zheng (zither), because it’s tuned in pentatonic and you can never hit a ‘wrong’ note,” says Chew, who has been with the orchestra since 2001.

Both in Hong Kong and on tour abroad, the HKCO has introduced the concept of “modern Chinese traditional music” with missionary zeal, not only in concerts but also in lecture demonstrations incorporating audience participation. Largely following the format the orchestra uses in Hong Kong, Chew will lead an ensemble of a dozen players—equally balanced between Chinese wind, plucked-string, bowed-string, and percussion instruments—in a trio of works including a contemporary composition, a traditional folk tune arrangement, and (obviously playing to the home team) an arrangement of “Oh, Susanna.”

“Actually, what we do for Western audiences is not so different from what we do at home,” says the Malaysian-born, US-educated Chew, who conducts the HKCO workshops for English speakers. “You’d think that Chinese listeners might know more about their own tradition—and they usually are more used to hearing the sounds of the instruments without knowing exactly what they are. But we’ve found that Western audiences who seek out our events actually know a lot more.”

Posted by Ken Smith

The Other Conservatory

With all the attention being given to the Central Conservatory of Music, Bright Sheng—the only composer on the Ensemble ACJW’s Class of 1978 program to attend the Shanghai Conservatory—was probably feeling a little lonely. That is, until last night.

Sheng, who attended the Ensemble’s performance at Weill Recital Hall (and even gave a short introduction to his Third String Quartet), had an impromptu, smiling reunion before the concert with his classmate Yan Huichang, now the music director of the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra. Yan, who had landed in New York only a few hours earlier, rushed over to Weill Recital Hall as soon as he heard about the composers being featured on the program.

The Shanghai Conservatory, as former students Sheng or Yan will be quick to tell you, is the oldest conservatory in China—founded in 1927 as the National Conservatory and holding that position up until the Central Conservatory of Music was founded in Beijing in 1950. Rivalry between the two has been fierce over the years, but it stops at the professional level. Yan, a longtime friend of composers (and indeed an occasional composer himself) programs Chinese composers almost exclusively, and will even feature Guo Wenjing—a Central Conservatory alumnus featured on the Ensemble’s performance last night—on the HKCO’s own concert on October 30.

Posted by Ken Smith

10/26 Ensemble ACJW @ Weill Recital Hall and Tan Dun w/ the Juilliard Orchestra @ Alice Tully Hall

You’d think I’d have learned my lesson on Saturday, but here I was again. Who in their right mind would schedule two programs of contemporary Chinese music on the same night in different venues? Who in their right mind would try to go to both? At least this time I didn’t have to travel on the subway.

Even with Saturday’s preview from the Ensemble ACJW’s Neighborhood Concert at Flushing Town Hall, I was unprepared for the sheer force of hearing those same pieces in the acoustics of Weill Recital Hall. Perhaps it was the presence of the composer in the hall, but Chen Qigang’s Instants d’un opera de Pékin spun off into another world entirely. Chen Yi’s Qi continued that effect, having emerged glistening from the darkness—literally, the house and stage lights having been turned off for atmosphere. Bright Sheng, who was also in attendance, added considerable focus to his Third String Quartet with his brief introduction of the piece as his personal tribute to Bartók (a composer he explored at length some 10 years ago in his essay “Bartók, the Chinese Composer”).

Then came intermission and I had to dash, which meant that I again missed Guo Wenjing’s Parade and Zhou Long’s Taigu Rhyme. At least there’s YouTube for Parade, and the Beijing New Music Ensemble’s recording of Taigu Rhyme on Naxos. [Note to self: buy Guo and Zhou a beer and apologize.]

Over at Alice Tully Hall, the scene was a madhouse. Tickets had been hard to come by for days, and the line for returns had stretched through the lobby earlier in the evening. I got to Tully at the end of Secret Land, Tan Dun’s piece for 12 cellos, and I can report that the lobby screen and speaker system for latecomers is one of the best in town.

After intermission, Tan briefly introduced his Violin Concerto, The Love, as three stages of romantic life. It was certainly three stages (at least) of the composer’s life, ending with a large stretch of his 1994 mini-concerto Out of Peking Opera, with a lush reworking of material from his 2000 Oscar-winning Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon soundtrack in the middle, and beginning with a new and aggressive percussion opening that showed off the Juilliard Orchestra to its fullest. This was some of the most energetic orchestral playing I’ve heard in a while, filled with a palpable sense of excitement and discovery.

Posted by Ken Smith

What's an Extra Vowel Among Friends?

Putting groups from both Shaanxi province (the Zhang Family Band) and Shanxi province (the Li Daoist Band) on the same program sounds like either a strange coincidence or a deliberate attempt to confuse Westerners. In fact, the similar name highlights one of the problems in rendering the Chinese language in Roman letters. Under conventional pinyin, now the standard Romanization system in Chinese, the word for both neighboring provinces should be spelled “Shanxi,” though pronounced with different tones (the “Shanxi” with one “a” is high, “Shaanxi” with two “a’s” is flat and low). To indicate the difference without using tone markings, Shaanxi got the extra “a” (making it the only Chinese province that doesn’t follow strict pinyin).

A demonstration of the difference in pronunciation between Shanxi province and Shaanxi province.

Ironically enough, both the Zhang Family Band and the Li Daoist Band spoke in different local dialects (as opposed to the Dong singers the night before, who speak a different language entirely). Though still recognized as Chinese, the performance languages of the Zhangs and Lis were unintelligible even to those Chinese speakers who understand only conventional Mandarin. This probably had some bearing on why there were no translations provided at the event.

Posted by Ken Smith