BEIJING, BACKWARDS

4 November 2019
WRITTEN BY
Timothy Summers

Timothy Summers

Musician

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I didn’t start this China tour on the right foot.

The day after arrival in Beijing, I began to feel the effects of a stomach bug. Normally, that wouldn’t be a matter for the public record. But it did affect my impressions of what happened, so I mention it here at the outset, in the spirit of full disclosure.

To keep things brighter I’m going to write everything backwards and try not give the early part too much weight. Since I now know that everything is going to be alright in the end there’s no need for me to slow everything down before it has a chance to get started.

PROGRAMME 3

Zhou Tian Rhyme
Zhou Tian Reading an Anthology
Qigang Chen L’Eloignement
Du Yun A Cockroach’s Tarantella
Michel van der Aa Hysteresis

The last concert put the MCO where it needed to be: squarely in the flux and ferment of 21st century China, changing forms on-the-fly, exploring new territory, and making the most of the musical means of its members.

The previous programs had been resolutely Western Classical, with a 20th century Russian cast. This final concert was a big change, both in form and content. It was on the one hand very experimental, but it was also experimental in a way that was firmly grounded in the present place (China), the present time (now), and the present orchestra (ours).

Some of the most crucial elements of the program can’t be seen from print alone. It is of course clear from the titles and composers that we were presenting new Chinese compositions. But there was also meaning in the entire choreography, in the motion and organization of the whole set of works. The MCO works to maintain a group identity while hierarchies, priorities, personnel, and repertoire shift onstage. Sometimes there is a conductor, sometimes there isn’t; sometimes a soloist, sometimes not; sometimes a large group, sometimes a chamber group — but there is always the entity known as Mahler Chamber Orchestra on stage: a collection in motion.

What was not to be seen in the printed program is that the orchestra would be built before your eyes, forming and reforming itself as various individual musicians took on a broad range of responsibilities, beyond the bounds of their job descriptions. When they fell back to working within the orchestra, they would find a group reinforced by the breadth of their contribution.


To begin, Christophe Morin took all of the weight on himself, playing Zhou Tian’s intense and virtuosic Rhyme: a cello alone, controlling the large hall, with a gloved left hand. For Tian’s Reading an Anthology, Michiel Commandeur (violin) delivered a subtle, sweet spoken text on the subject of directness to the accompaniment of flute (Cecilie Løken Hesselberg), viola (Béatrice Muthelet) and harp (Anne-Sophie Bertrand). After that, the whole orchestra awoke for Qigang Chen’s L’Eloignement , with Vicente Alberola as conductor — which is rather more than just having a conductor. Of course, Vicente is a conductor, and an extremely good one — he conducts with a clean drive and flow, doubtless professionalism, and a lot of good humor. But he is also our principal clarinet player. We hadn’t really played with him as conductor before, aside from a few sound-check moments in scattered rehearsals, but now we know he’s also really good at this.


After the break, the roles onstage expanded still further: Du Yun appeared onstage as composer/narrator/actress for her own work with a string quartet. And finally our whole band reappeared with second clarinetist Jaan Bossier as soloist for Michael van der Aa’s ecstatic Hysteresis. Two clarinets, Jaan and Vicente, finally up front. I got to play the laptop part.

(Note: playing the laptop is nerve-wracking. Having the question "Will I do this right?" in combination with the question "Is this *$^! thing going to &$@# work?" is no %$!?# picnic. It did work, in the end, and now, a week later, I’m still feeling the relief.)

Meanwhile, Naomi Peters (violin), had slipped into the viola section.

Earlier in the day, as we had a group of Chinese guests come to be part of the group onstage, Verena Chen (violin) spoke to them in Chinese.


So many capacities. Everyone with much more than you can know.

Programme 2

Mahler Blumine
Prokofiev Violin Concerto No.1
Shostakovich Symphony No. 9

For this program, we were playing Shostakovich with Vladimir Ashkenazy, who grew up Soviet and dealt firsthand with the strains of being a Soviet expatriate (he even makes an appearance in Nikita Khrushchev’s memoirs). This personal proximity to Shostakovich is both amazing and unsettling. Shostakovich wrote in painful musical riddles about life under surveillance, and we needn’t pretend that surveillance is an issue that belongs to another time.


The Beijing Exhibition Center, where we had been rehearsing has a distinctly Soviet edge. Built in 1954 in the Marxist-Imperial manner, it recalls the startopped towers of the Kremlin. 1954 would have been around the time when Ashkenazy was preparing for the Chopin piano competition in Warsaw. It was also the first year of the premiership of Khrushchev, and the fifth year of the People’s Republic of China. We didn’t need to visit any libraries to conjure a feeling for Dmitri Shostakovich’s historical context.


But the Cold War also seemed strangely far away. The MCO came onto the scene not long after the hard-edged division of East and West fell suddenly away. Because its origins lie in the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester, the MCO has roots in an explicitly post-perestroika diplomatic mission: to bring together Eastern and Western European musicians who had been long separated by the weird cultural warp of walls and checkpoints. And more recently, we have become an  orchestra built on 21st century communication technology, coming together by virtue of electronically shared documents and globalized virtual contact. The end result is an intense sense of location in each project, built around the communicative possibilities within the physical, human orchestra, the real orchestra, the one that forms before your eyes, using all resources. A 21st-century project. So between orchestra and conductor here, there was a remarkably long and powerful history of cultural and political influences — a full century of radical change, staged in Beijing.

Adding to the cacophony of influences was the fact that the room we were using to rehearse belongs to the China Philharmonic Orchestra, which was founded in 2000, just about the same as the MCO. They have pictures of themselves in the Musikverein, and in front of the Berlin Philharmonie, and even with Pope Benedikt XVI. They too have been making their diplomatic overtures. We don’t see them ourselves; any sense of contact remained incidental, institutional, and untranslated.

Meanwhile, just outside the rehearsal hall, the exhibition center was being used as a staging ground for the 70th anniversary of the Communist Party in China. Periodically there is a small, informal parade of workers, walking to and from their duties in the commemoration festivities. A few of them wave, dressed like flight attendants.


And how does it work out? It is perhaps easiest to gather all impressions together around the cool North American virtuosity of the soloist, Canadian violinist James Ehnes. His command of the instrument was astonishing; his ability to navigate the delicacies of the first Prokofiev Violin Concerto leaves no question of intention or direction. He played three encores.


Under these circumstances, the old style of orchestra concert can deliver with full force. Chris Dicken floated us through Blumine, subtle as ever on the trumpet. Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony delivered its bright celebratory message — though one can never really be sure what, if anything, is really being celebrated.

Programme 1.5

Shostakovich String Quartet No. 8
Zhou Tian Rhyme
Mozart Clarinet Quintet, K581

Between the first and the second orchestral concerts, there was a chamber music concert at the German Embassy. Things had begun to get brighter for me by this time, and I was thankful for elements of closeness and familiarity. Seeing the mechanisms for diplomatic bridge-building at work was also something of a relief.

So was the program: we played the Shostakovich String Quartet No. 8 (with me, Naomi Peters, Yannick Dondelinger, and Christophe Morin); Christophe Morin played Zhou Tian’s Rhyme; Vicente Alberola joined us for the Mozart Clarinet Quintet.


I can speak briefly about the Mozart Quintet, since the future appearances of Vicente and Christophe and Zhou Tian and Shostakovich have all already been covered. If you’ve got an interest in clarity (or a need for it, as I had) then this is the piece for you. It has a sort of pentatonic transparency to it. Its slow movement rises and falls as an aria in the wind. In its last movement, the variations spread like colors — all aspects of the same light, opening like an explanation.

There was something relieving, also, about the various colors and times of the different pieces set against each other, and of the clarity of character that’s possible in small chamber music. Three centuries of music, in close proximity. A still longer history, writ small.


Programme 1

Vaughan Williams Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis
Vaughan Williams Songs of Travel
Shostakovich Two pieces for String Octet
Shostakovich Chamber Symphony, Op. 110a

Vaughan Williams and Shostakovich — strange bedfellows, these two. One for nostalgia, one for irony. One for the British Empire, one against (perhaps) the Soviet empire. Two works each. It was escapism on the one hand; the impossibility of escape on the other.

I wasn’t feeling so good in that concert.

 

And that’s how it began.

The first day after we arrived, when I was still feeling sort of okay, we went to the Forbidden City, right in the centre of it all. Strange that it’s called ‘forbidden’, and even stranger that it’s absolutely flooded with visitors. It’s as though a dam broke. There are a lot of buildings in the complex, but it’s hard to say how they might ever have been used. They have fragrant names (‘Hall of Supreme Harmony’, ‘Palace of Earthly Tranquility’) but don’t seem at the moment to be very distinct from one another. It seems though, that a large-scale renovation is underway, and much of the particularity may be regained. That will be interesting.

But for now, there’s not much rest in Beijing: no place to rest the eyes, even. A constant flow. The foot traffic, the street traffic, it’s like Brownian motion, molecules in a fluid. It’s not chaotic exactly — it seems to be going somewhere, though I don’t know where — but if someone were to tell me what the purpose of it all is, I think I might not understand. It flows and rolls, and bursts through things in its way. We will be there for the next few years at least, and I’m sure it will be a different city each time. You can’t step twice in the same river, they say. And this one is moving fast.

Photos: © Geoffroy Schied | © Martin Piechotta

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