by Liesbeth Tryzelaar
Orchestra Hall took a refreshing break Monday, March 3, from the perennial works of the great Western composers when it opened its doors to the National Traditional Orchestra of China. Like its predominantly Chinese-American audience, the Orchestra brought together East and West with its diverse repertoire, giving Chicagoans a rare opportunity to hear arrangements of China's traditional folk melodies played by some of its best musicians.
The performers came on stage without tuning or warming up, and prefaced their concert with the reverent playing of the Chinese and American national anthems. If this invocation of patriotism surprised an audience unused such a marriage of art and diplomacy in a concert hall (some self-conscious laughter and murmurings of discomfort were heard), the rest of the concert kept them breathless with the stirring and often strikingly beautiful Chinese folk tunes.
The Orchestra's Chinese instrument players, ably conducted by Mr. Hu Bingxu, were distributed across the stage in a manner mirroring their Western counterparts: those playing bowed string instruments on the left graduating to the wind instruments and horns with percussion behind, then Chinese cellos and basses, and ending with the guitar-like pipas and juans--the only section unfamiliar to Western orchestras--on the far right.
The entire repertoire was strong, beautifully played, rich in color and imagery constructing symphonic poetry. The concert began with lush arrangements of two traditional pipa melodies (the pear-shaped and resonant Chinese lute). The second piece, "Spring on a Moonlit River," featuring soloist Wu Yuxia on pipa, was complex and evocative, having a lovely, solemn melody culminating in a pensive passage after a jig-like climax.
Hua Yan Jun's "Reflections of the Moon" demonstrated the beauty of the erhu, a bowed instrument with the sound of a far away violin, interpreted with heart-rending virtuousity by soloist Song Fei. The orchestra played some of the finest music of the concert here, manifesting their remarkable ability to build tension and sound, holding the audience transfixed before gently letting them back down again.
The Chinese Orchestra also played harmonies and melodies more familiar to western ears in "Ga Do Mei Lin" (named for a Mongolian war hero) by Xin Hu Guang, and "Spring Dreams" by American composer Bright Shen. The former piece, with its dramatic shifts of theme and dynanamics, evoked Dvorak, and even "cowboy and Indian matinee music" in its tribute to the tragic hero after whom it is named. While the piece did not seem very coherant musically or dynamically, it played beautifully to the delight of the audience.
Shen's striking "Spring Dreams," commissioned for the cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the National Traditional Orchestra of China, emerged as another high point of the concert. In the first movement, it brought the dark, rich sounds of the Western cello, played brilliantly by Hai-ye Ni, to the sharp and crisp sound of a Chinese orchestra, and then pitches them against one another. No release comes in the alternately nightmarish and comical second movement that leaps into a frantic chaos of sound. In a surprise encore following this piece, the Orchestra gave a second look of the extraordinary cellist in a melodic duet of cello and pipa commisioned for the event called "Four Seasons."
The show stopper of the evening was "Battle at the Golden Beach" by Jin Jian Shu. The Orchestra created a stikingly vibrant image of the battle scene, from a sense of sinister stillness before the fighting began to the neighing horses in the midst of it; climaxed by a rousing eruption of percussion (played with true pinache), and back down again.
The National Traditional Orchestra of China will be sharing its virtuousity with 17 American cities before leaving the United States. We must now wait and hope they return to play again soon.
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