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MUSIC REVIEW
A study in contrasts at Jordan Hall
By Matthew Guerrieri, Globe Correspondent | September 28,
2009
The Foundation for Chinese Performing Arts is spending its
20th anniversary season doing what it has always done:
bringing Chinese music and performers to Boston audiences.
Last Saturday’s concert was one of the foundation’s more
interesting, in that the commerce flowed both ways: a program
designed by violinist Lynn Chang
張萬鈞,
contrasting the Chinese-American composer Chen Yi
陳怡
with the American but Asian-influenced composer Lou Harrison.
Chen’s music grafts its arresting Eastern sonic surface onto
Western formal tension-and-release. “Sprout’’ brushes
sixth-century Chinese melody into a rhapsodic string-orchestra
arc reminiscent of Samuel Barber; “Romance and Dance’’ (with
Chang and Jae Young Cosmos Lee as beguiling violin
troubadours) more literally translates Chinese sounds, but the
barreling finale updates Stravinsky with clustered rhythmic
cogs and slashing accents. (Both pieces featured the local
string orchestra A Far Cry, providing intense phrasing and a
voluptuously rich sound.)
Most fun was “Ancient Dances,’’ a freewheeling duet for
percussionist Robert Schulz and Wu Man 吳蠻, who has, it seems,
single-handedly played the pipa’s way into Western classical
music. (If you already knew that a pipa is a traditional
Chinese lute, you can probably thank her indefatigable
evangelism.) Here a plaintive, dual-soliloquy opening
culminated in a driving catharsis, Chen leveraging Wu Man’s
rock-star charisma - even featuring a bit of Townshend-esque
windmill strumming.
In Harrison’s music, the Eastern influence pushes Western
practice down more personal paths. The entrancing Concerto for
Violin With Percussion Orchestra (1959) spun Chang’s
beautifully threaded serpentine line over the BeatCity Art
Ensemble, conducted by Schulz, drumming of world-music
provenance, but channeled through materials of American
transience - brake drums, coffee cans, flower pots: a hobo’s
gamelan of distant locomotive rhythms, a Beat enlightenment of
the road.
The road leads home in the 1997 Concerto for Pipa With String
Orchestra, one of Harrison’s last works. (He died in 2003.)
Aided by A Far Cry’s plushness and Wu Man’s panache, the music
reveled in the family resemblances inside the global village:
Chinese lute became Russian balalaika became Italian mandolin,
a diatonic landscape giving way to a romantic lament and a
medieval dance. But Harrison’s generous austerity was always
ascendant, the pluralisms intersecting at a unique point.
Wherever you go, Harrison reminds us, there you are. |
