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.