PERFORMING ARTS
Tuesday, October 11, 2005; C14
Washington Post
Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra

Most genres of music evolve organically, but Chinese traditional orchestras are a recent invention, created by a government directive in 1949. Sunday night, the Kennedy Center Festival of China brought the unusual sounds of the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra stateside.

Striking in both its similarities to and differences from Western orchestras, this ensemble is like a symphony orchestra in terms of form and forces, but comprises traditional Chinese string, wind and percussion instruments. Some, like the erhu, a bowed violin-size string instrument, go back over a thousand years. Others are 20th-century relatives of ancient instruments, developed especially for this type of orchestra.

Inspired by travelogue drawings, composer Zhao Jiping's "Silk Road Fantasia Suite" featured virtuoso suona (Chinese oboe) player Guo Yazhi. The subtle beginning bordered on impressionism and, bolstered by Yan Huichang's mellifluous and coherent direction of the 88-member group, the music was cinematic. The suona's melancholy timbre was soulful in Guo's hands, with his sensuous vibrato enhancing its expressiveness. The central section of the suite was like an opera recitative, with Guo accompanied by an entrancing zheng (zither). Both orchestra and soloist showed off their extraordinary technique in the final dance.

The spatial effects of Tan Dun's 1995 "Fire Ritual" had heads swiveling to see the instrumentalists placed strategically around the hall. Tan's unusual orchestration techniques included musicians humming and exhaling syllables, blowing into just the reed of the suona to produce a wailing scream, and using the sheet music as percussion by fanning the pages on the stands. Gaohu (violin) soloist Wong On-yuen jammed with zeal, and the emphatic smash of timpani ended the half-hour odyssey.

The orchestra capped off the program with encores of popular Chinese tunes and an unlikely arrangement of Glenn Miller's "American Patrol."

-- Gail Wein

Los Angeles Times October 12, 2005
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK

Minds ask, music replies
A visit to Kennedy Center's Festival of China poses questions on cultural aesthetics. Then enjoyment makes them seem less pressing.
By Mark Swed, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — America's obsession with China and what its economic development means for the West may have fallen off the front page lately — there has been too much else to worry about — but that doesn't mean China isn't on Washington's radar. And just to make sure, the Kennedy Center is engaged in an extensive Festival of China.

It's a monthlong extravaganza of dance, opera, music, acrobatics, films, exhibitions and the occasional talk. With nearly 900 performers, most from China, the idea seems to be to balance the traditional (which in China means 5,000 years of tradition) with the contemporary. On the terrace level of the center's sprawling complex, for instance, two of the famous terra cotta warriors and a horse found in Emperor Qin's 2,200-year-old tomb stand guard to a display of chic gowns by hot new Chinese designers.

Perplexing cultural questions loom over the dozens of offerings. To what extent is China a society built upon its past and to what extent is modern China patterned on the West? How do we as cultures (and hence as peoples) communicate?

These are crucial issues for our times, and they kept running through my mind Sunday night during the performance of the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra in the Kennedy Center's concert hall. Founded in 1977, the ensemble consists of 88 musicians playing traditional Chinese instruments. But since it is patterned after a Western orchestra, centuries-long tradition requires refashioning.

The convention of Chinese music is the poetic expression of individual or small groups of players with instruments that, like the musical sounds of the language, are high-pitched. To make an orchestra, bass versions of traditional instruments had to be invented. They sound convincing but they look, somehow, wrong.

Still, the notion of mass instruments or mass anything hardly seems alien to a country with a population of 1.3 billion. Indeed, those two terra cotta warriors in the Kennedy Center look awfully lonely without their 8,000 brothers. And the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra certainly has a fondness for numbers. On Saturday night it presented a free concert with 250 drums.

The players wore black robes but otherwise looked like a formally arrayed Western orchestra with sections of strings, winds, brass and percussion in roughly the same layout as any Euro-centric philharmonic. Yan Huichang, the artistic director and principal conductor, uses a baton. His technique is Western and strong. Zubin Mehta appears to be a model. Even so, this is a hybrid orchestra that is true to no culture that existed before it.

Most of the music on the program was symphonic in scope but folk-like in inspiration. Zhao Jiping's "Silk Road Fantasia" Suite, which featured Guo Yazhi as soloist on the guanzi — sometimes called the "sad oboe" — sounded as though Rachmaninoff might have been an inspiration for orchestrating, harmonizing and generally romanticizing entrancing folk melodies. In Peng Xiuwen's "The Terra Cotta Warriors Fantasia," a tone poem about the suffering of Qin's troops under a cruel emperor, I heard the flashy side of Shostakovich. A couple of scores from Western movies also flashed by.

Of course, I bring my Western orientation, an ear trained to hear this as kitsch. And my first reaction to an ensemble as dazzlingly well-drilled as this virtuoso band is to note a lack of spontaneity. The orchestra clearly doesn't have a large repertory, and it sounds as though it knows these pieces by heart.

But my prejudices are suspect. Self-expression and individuality mean different things for different cultures. It is entirely possible that this orchestra is exactly what it should be for its audience. We in the West lust after ego-gratification in our art, but that isn't always what is best for society.

Then there was Tan Dun's "Fire Ritual," which was written for this orchestra in 1996. It is a wonderful piece that plays against Chinese traditional music and the Western avant-garde in strikingly dramatic fashion.

A group of players stood in aisles of the auditorium, involving us in their individuality, just as court musicians must have done in ancient China. Wong On-Yuen, the concertmaster, was a soloist on stage; at one point, he played a beautiful solo cadenza on a Chinese violin.

This was a drama between the one and the many, the small and the large, the old and the new, East and West. Tan's way is to enchant more than challenge. The opposing worlds did not compete or conflict. Instead, a composer who grew up in China but made an important international career in America seemed to suggest that we can have it all. His ear is attuned to both cultures, and he selects what he likes.

I was drawn to this concert because of Tan, and the curious thing for me was that hearing "Fire Ritual" made me more open to the other pieces. Most in the audience presumably came for the more popular-styled works, yet they responded with delighted enthusiasm over his inventions.

If the Festival of China can do more of such snapping us out of cultural stereotyping, it will be worthwhile. This is a remarkably ambitious and expensive undertaking, an example of how the Kennedy Center likes to think big in ways that other American performing arts centers don't seem able to emulate. But you can never have too much context, and I would have liked more. Where is John Adam's "Nixon in China" when we need it?

Seen and Heard International Concert Review

Oct. 2005 Music Web

As my friend and I walked to our seats in a packed Avery Fisher Hall, we passed near the front of the stage and admired the gorgeous instruments onstage, beginning with a row of large bass gehus, their lower portions covered with snakeskin. We marveled at the intricately carved and decorated pipas (resembling lutes) not to mention an entire section of erhus (slender wooden stringed instruments) which made us smile with anticipation. This is an enormous ensemble of over 85 musicians, including bowed strings, plucked strings, wind and percussion, and uses traditional and modernized Chinese instruments as well as “suitable” Western ones. I have to confess that although this type of music is not my usual haunt, after hearing their totally infectious concert, I defy any listener not to emerge delighted and enthralled by their artistry. Not only was the music extraordinary, but the precision and passion of the ensemble would be welcome models for any type of orchestra, any time, and the group’s charismatic conductor, Yan Huichang, directed the afternoon with sophisticated elan.

Founded in 1977, the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra incorporates traditional and modernized Chinese instruments, as well as the occasional Western instrument (especially in the percussion section), and of the dozens of similar ensembles throughout China, is generally acknowledged to be at the pinnacle. Although they don’t play Bartok per se, much of the folk-infused music has an occasional, almost Slavic flavor, emphasizing the universal appeal of certain rhythmic patterns and instrumental combinations.

Elegantly attired in long black robes with white cuffs, the musicians seemed to flow onstage, before plunging into the piquant, magical Grand Victory, the oldest work on the program. Opening with three gong strokes, the piece is marked by dramatic percussion crescendos, and some extraordinary effects, such as an ear-catching “laughing” in the winds, all displaying a keen sense of color from the arranger, Zhang Shiye. The work is intensely modal, with long iridescent phrases that eventually accelerate, leading to a final climax: a long held note, again in the winds. As the musicians poured out a rock-steady tone, Maestro Yan turned and smiled to the audience while his left hand, almost with a life of its own, directed the musicians behind him.

Zhao Jiping began composing in 1970, and in the early 1980s, scored many well-known films such as Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern, and Farewell My Concubine. As a boy he watched his father at his desk, painting landscapes, and these memories inspired his Silk Road Fantasia Suite for orchestra and solo guanzi, here played by the modest Guo Yazhi with amazing intensity. The instrument looks like a small flute about twelve inches long, but sounds uncommonly like a reedy saxophone – indeed, some of the first movement, The Song of Baliu, resembled work by say, jazz great John Coltrane, especially in some of the higher registers. The second Lilt of the Ancient Roads begins with a graceful pizzicato section for the gehus (similar to low basses), followed by the presto romp of The Music of Liangzhou and then the sensual Dream of Loulan, featuring an instrument that is sort of a cross between a lute and a harp. The final section, Dance of Qiuci, is an exhilarating prestissimo with prominent castanets, some of the few Western instruments in the mix.

Tan Dun’s exciting Fire Ritual was created in 1995 for this orchestra, which, it should be noted, has requested new works at an astonishing pace – over 1,500 commissioned pieces. Fire Ritual features a continuing dialogue between the onstage musicians and instrumental soloists scattered around the hall. It is solemn, dramatic and colorful, and in the words of the composer, dedicated “for the memory of dear friends who left us,” and more specifically, 300,000 Chinese who were killed in the Nanjing Massacre. The piece includes syllabic chanting from both the musicians and conductor, an unusually gentle rustling effect as the musicians’ turn the pages of their music back and forth in unison, and the stark clack of rocks knocked together. The final movement uses the entire ensemble to evoke a huge flock of birds. As the huqin soloist, placed center stage, the orchestra’s concertmaster Wong On-yuen was superbly focused and received a huge ovation.

Peng Xiuwen is known for his symphonic poems Flowing Water and Nostalgia, also written in 1984, and has adapted a number of Western compositions by Bizet, Debussy, Stravinsky and Mussorgsky for Chinese orchestra. Fantasia on Terra Cotta Warriors opens with a gentle pizzicato, as an army is seen at dawn. The sounds grow louder as the enemy forces approach, climaxing with gongs and cymbals. The second movement depicts the soldiers missing their wives, with wood blocks painting a quiet, lonely evening sky, and a haunting passage for the guzheng, a plucked stringed instrument played horizontally. The final movement opens with a furious allegro, before changing to a sober march as the sky darkens and snow begins to fall. The orchestra’s musicians pulled out all the stops in a stirring panorama of sound and emotion, and once again were led with bracing, masterful control by Maestro Yan. Over and over, one could only marvel at the group’s sound, distinguished overall by a lightness in much of the timbres, in apparent contradiction to the number of musicians filling the stage.

The generous and intriguing encores – virtually insisted on by the cheering audience – were as much a highlight as the formal program. The festivities began with a striking work by Doming Lam, Buzzing bees making honey, a movement from Insect World (1979) with portions that resembled Ligeti, and continued with a traditional work from Northern China called Horse Race (c. 1960s), before ending with Stepping Higher, a traditional Cantonese favorite done with irresistible energy. In between, the orchestra surprised and delighted us all with a brilliant arrangement – yes, for Chinese instruments – of Glenn Miller’s American Patrol.

Bruce Hodges