This concert opens with a folkloric work full of charm and optimism, written by Bao Yuankai, one of China’s most celebrated composers. Bao graduated in 1967 from the Central Conservatory and since 1973 has taught at the Tianjin Conservatory of Music in northern China, also serving as visiting faculty at Nankai University, Tianjin Normal University, Taiwan’s Nanhua University-Conservatory, and Xiamen University. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including a special grant from the Chinese State Council, a Golden Bell Award for musical composition, the best Chinese musicologist award by the Department for Cultural Affairs, and the outstanding music educator award from the Chinese Ministry of Culture.
Bao is deeply connected to Chinese musical traditions but also influenced by Western music. The latter interest landed him in prison for five years during the Cultural Revolution, a period when the government forbade all activities associated with Western art, a terrible irony given that Bao has played a large role in bringing Chinese music to international attention and forging a national identity for his nation’s music.
Bao’s music seamlessly combines Chinese folk traditions and scales with Western elements. He was especially fascinated by the music of Bartók, which also unites folk music with symphonic structures. According to the composer, “It was in 1990 when I began to restudy various Chinese folk songs, dance music, ballad music, traditional operas, and instrumental music. My plan was to compose orchestral works based on the best tunes selected from our musical tradition in order to make the colorful and charming Chinese traditional folk music to be enjoyable for all people in the present world. I supposed that the new works should be both ‘Western’ in form and ‘Eastern’ in essence ... To combine Chinese folk or traditional music with Western modern musical forms is a practical way to break up the isolation of Chinese music and bring it to the world’s stage.”
Written in 1991 and premiered the same year in Tianjin, Chinese Sights and Sounds consists of 24 orchestral pieces on themes selected from Chinese folk songs. Bao later transcribed the work for solo piano, striving to make Chinese folk traditions available to the widest possible audience.
“Happy Sunrise” opens the three selections on this program with an exuberant children’s song from Sichuan that is full of fanfares surrounding a brief woodwind interlude. “Bamboo-flute Tune,” a love song from southern Jiangsu province used in Peking opera, features a serene theme sung by sliding strings and passed on to other instruments. The final selection, “Dialogue on Flowers,” based on a new folk song popular during World War II, depicts flowers in various seasons with lively syncopations, dynamic contrasts, and fragmented phrases interrupted by a kite-flying song, a tune of disarming innocence. The piece ends with a triumphant affirmation sounded out by a timpani-powered orchestra.
The unique sound of the pipa, twangy and percussive but also surprisingly liquid and lyrical, is on full display in Zhao Jiping’s colorful, disarmingly melodic Pipa Concerto No. 2, which receives its New York premiere on this afternoon’s concert. A renowned concert and film composer, Zhao has collaborated with such “Fifth Generation” filmmakers as Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, and He Ping. Among his film scores are the folkloric Yellow Earth, the exquisitely lyrical Raise the Red Lantern, and the operatic Farewell My Concubine.
Zhao was trained at the Xi’an Conservatory of Music, graduating in 1970; following the Cultural Revolution, he was accepted there for postgraduate studies. His output is huge and varied. He first gained renown as a film composer when Chen Kaige asked him to write music for Yellow Earth. In 2000, he was commission by Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Project to write a chamber work, Moon Over Guan Mountains, which premiered at Tanglewood and remained in the Silk Road Ensemble’s international repertoire throughout 2002. His other works include two symphonies, a violin concerto, the symphonic picture The Sunbird, the cello concerto Zhuang Zhou’s Dream, the erhu concerto The True-Hearted, the dance drama The Desert Smoke, and numerous songs.
Pipa Concerto No. 2 is a strikingly original and inventive piece, an ideal introduction to the composer’s music. Zhao has provided the following note:
In 2012, I was approached by the pipa virtuoso Wu Man to write a concerto. Having known and admired Wu Man for many years, I was immediately taken by the prospect, and in fact, had wanted to write something that could feature her incredible artistry. This is my second concerto for pipa, an instrument that resonates so closely to my heart. Commissioned by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra for Wu Man, this concerto was composed in the summer of 2013 in Xi’an, China. Wu Man has accumulated a wealth of playing experience and has a unique perspective on the interpretation of music, particularly on the integration of Eastern sounds with Western ensembles. I see the piece not so much as a traditional Western concerto, but more an exploration of poetic expression of thoughts and emotions, able to stimulate many levels of the audience’s imagination. The orchestra and Wu Man are the canvas, and I have the privilege to paint the picture. My goal was to create a pipa concerto with a strong Chinese flavor combined with a sense of global musical language. The movements represent various expressions in different textures and tempos; these are inspired by the most elegant Chinese traditional music style, pingtan, from Wu Man’s hometown in the Suhong area. I am confident that this powerful collaboration will touch a new light!
The various layers of Zhao’s style—global musical language, traditional Chinese motives, and cinematic sweep—are sounded out at the beginning. The somber bass opening motive is darkly symphonic, while the brightly sensual second subject featuring harp and strings reminds us of the best film music, especially the works of John Williams. Interrupting and interacting with these and other ideas is the tangy, twittering pipa solo, the most distinctively Chinese element, setting up a dramatic contrast in color and timbre.
Majestic brass fanfares enter, followed by playful woodwinds, leading to a series of climaxes for full orchestra as the pipa continues its conversations with flutes, brass, and an eloquent cello. A crashing dissonance halts the music for a hypnotic cadenza followed by a return of the second theme, even more wistful than before, and a recapitulation of the soloist’s dialogues with chirping flutes and delicate brass. Rather than concluding with a conventional virtuosic coda, the work winds down to a near-subliminal conclusion, the pipa whispering the last word, fulfilling Zhao’s vision of the work as “a poetic expression of thoughts and emotions” rather than a traditional concerto.
One of the most frequently performed orchestral works, Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony was premiered in 1888 in St. Petersburg. The symphony was for several generations what Beethoven’s Fifth was to a previous era and Mahler’s Fifth has become in our own period: a statement of struggle and gradual triumph over terrible adversity. The symphony was especially popular as an inspirational piece during World War II (much like Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony) and was played by the Leningrad Radio Symphony Orchestra during the siege of Leningrad in a famous performance broadcast live over the radio in London.
The heroic immediacy of the symphony exists in ironic contrast to the torturous hesitancy that plagued every step of its composition and early performance. “Have I written myself out?” asked Tchaikovsky in a letter to his brother Modest upon beginning the symphony in 1888. Feeling “no impulse for creative work” and despairing that his imagination was “dried up,” he grudgingly embarked on the work, writing his patron Nadezhda von Meck that composition was slow and that he was “very tired.” His Manfred Symphony from three years earlier had flopped, and he had not written a major symphonic piece since the Violin Concerto of 1878.
When he finally completed and premiered the Fifth Symphony, the public reception was wildly enthusiastic, yet Tchaikovsky decided the work was “a failure. There is something repellent in it, some over-exaggerated color, some insincerity of fabrication which the public instantly recognizes.” Since the public loved the symphony, Tchaikovsky decided it was “clear” that the applause and ovations referred not to this, but to “other works of mine.”
What is really “clear” is that Tchaikovsky was extraordinarily self-destructive. His self-recriminations were connected to the trauma of his homosexuality, hinted at in sketches for the first movement referring to “complete resignation before Fate,” and to “murmurs, doubts, plaints, reproaches against XXX.” Recent commentators are certain that XXX (elsewhere referred to as Z or THAT) stands for Tchaikovsky’s sexual orientation, which he dreaded being uncovered by “inquisitive people among the public” who would “tear aside the curtain behind which I have striven to conceal my private life.”
The Fifth Symphony is a stately and confident work, with little of the frenzy of its predecessor or the outright despair of the “Pathétique.” The introductory clarinet theme, which recurs cyclically in all four movements, has a chorale-like dignity, doleful in its first appearance but gradually more optimistic. Each time, it bears a different emotional message. In the famous second movement, with its delectable horn solo, the theme is a shattering, typically Tchaikovskian interruption of happiness; in the ballet-like waltz movement (based on a young street singer’s song that Tchaikovsky heard in Florence), it appears quietly at the end, with only a hint of menace. In the Finale, where the theme opens and dominates the movement, the minor key is transformed to major, and the symphony takes on a decidedly upbeat character. At the very end, the austere Allegro theme of the first movement is blared out by the horns in a surprise reappearance, but it now wears a broad smile.
In fact, the Finale is so aggressively heroic that hostile critics saw not a smile but a grin of dementia. One Boston critic compared the Finale to “a hoard of demons struggling in a torrent of brandy … pandemonium, delirium tremens, raving, and above all noise worse confounded!” That the Romantic Tchaikovsky, spurned by modernists, was once denounced as a wild radical is an irony he would have appreciated.
—Jack Sullivan