Dudamel conducts Bernstein and Mahler in Beijing

This past Friday evening, my friend and I attended a concert by Simón Bolívar National Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, conducted by the 27-year-old phenomenon, Gustavo Dudamel.

Gustavo Dudamel in Beijing.

Simón Bolívar and Dudamel performed two pieces: Bernstein’s West Side Story Symphonic Dances and, after intermission, Mahler’s First. The rendition of Bernstein’s West Side Story was, for me to put it mildly, less than enthusiastic. The outcome was stiff and uninspiring, and lacked the interplay between jubilance and mellowness, as well as the mischievous energy that was called upon by Bernstein. The performance was sourly disappointing, not least because I was eagerly looking forward to this performance after having read and heard so much about Dudamel, who was to become L.A. Phil’s youngest-ever music director starting next (2009-10) season, and the Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolívar, one of more than 200 youth orchestras in Venezuela funded by the Venezuelan government with the aim of uplifting poor neighborhoods and children who live in them through structured music education. Simón Bolívar, considered the apex of this wildly successful art and social experiment, has won accolades and praises not just for its narrative as a pioneering, broad-reaching social program but also for its symphonic prowess and artistic balance. Therefore, when we heard something that was more like my high school band than one with multiple DG recordings, at least I was so crestfallen that, before the Bernstein was half completed, my mind was drifting away, not into Manhattan’s west side as Dudamel probably had hoped, but to endless permutations of how to salvage this Friday evening if we were to skip after intermission.

After intermission, we went back nevertheless, with her Proustian reminder that, even if we had tried, we couldn’t have found a better place to be on a brutally cold Friday night in Beijing than in the embrace of the National Centre for Performing Arts. And boy, we were glad we didn’t bail! When the first sets of A chords came out, we knew right away that our concerns were unnecessary – they came out with plenty of force and confidence, projecting one-part of controlled balance and one-part of sensual opulence. The Gesellen passages were superbly rendered with meticulousness — evoking, rightfully so, memories of listening to the Wayfarer Lieder with Kubelik and Fischer-Dieskau, on which part of the first movement is based. The galore continued with a majestic entrance to the second movement, intermingled with a velvety, triple-time mid-passage. The third movement was spacious but not in any way dragging. The voicing of the Frère Jacques passage was smooth and gleeful, with a perfect relay of windwinds meandering through Mahler’s handcrafted dazzle. By the fourth movement, I was wondering how much, during the Bernstein, I had missed under the cloak of my suspicion and unwarranted anxiety. The fourth movement was perhaps the high point of the evening, with monstrous horns, plush strings, and a percussion section that made me feel inadequate.

Without a doubt, Dudamel’s baton managed to control all of that artistry with precision, raising Simón Bolívar’s spirit and energy as he saw fit. And mind you, Simón Bolívar was not an easy baby to control: it had about 150 musicians for the Mahler and over 200 for the Bernstein. By the time the Mahler was marching towards its grand finale, Dudamel was at his best, unleashing a galloping orchestral splendor filled with dramatic outbursts, ending the evening with a feeling of finality and authority. I have always been a huge fan of Mahler, but always in a subdued, measured kind of way. But the way I reacted to Dudamel’s Mahler was alien to me — it was warm, emotional, and fulfilling. Toasting to that, this Mahler by Simón Bolívar and Dudamel was as good as any Mahler’s First I have heard.

Anne-Sophie Mutter in Beijing

Anne-Sophie Mutter has never moved me to tears. Until yesterday.

I have heard ASM a handful of times, most recently a few years back in the U.S. before her repertorial shift to focus more on pre-Romantic string works. By most accounts, she has few peers when it comes to nailing down the technicality and artistry of Romantic-period and Impressionist works, including Tchaikovsky’s marvel, and Sarasate’s lyricism. But with her technical achievements so flawless and her performance so consistently, emotionally juiced, I wonder if she could also rise as a star on the other side of the spectrum of great violinists: the kind who has the cerebral clarity and intellectual acumen to tackle the subtleties hidden in classical period pieces. Sure, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons was exuberant (and it was one of two pieces she performed last night; the other was Bach’s Magnificat, BWV1042 ), but it seems best amplified when performed (at least also) with the kind of intellectual seriousness that, for example, the legendary Isaac Stern would bestow upon his each and every melodic phrase, and in it, each and every played note — bringing a composition so alive as to genuinely connect with the audience.

Obviously, I went into the concert hall with trepidation, knowing that anything other than an exceptional experience would be a disappointment. Like any great violinist would do, she imposed her authority on her chamber players as soon as she basked in her spotlight. Soon enough, Bach’s notes gracefully filled the Concert Hall of the National Centre for Performing Arts, each with determination and nobility. Her string work was luxurious, with neither a slight feeling of decorative impurity nor excessive oomph. The only flaw was perhaps that she looked, it seems to me, a little stiff going into the glissando passages in the middle of Allegro non troppo. But as ASM worked through the Bach, she more than redeemed herself, ending before intermission with a joyous, jubilant Allegro assai that galloped towards a rapturous applause.

ASM looked noticeably pleased after her Bach, and that seemed to build onto her confidence in her post-intermission Vivaldi. ASM tackled the Four Seasons with the same elegance, care, and grace that she so effortlessly displayed ever since she was a teenage phenomenon. A few absent notes notwithstanding, she was magnificent and, more importantly, in full control of the Vivaldi and Trondheim Solistene, the excellent Norwegian chamber orchestra. Her expression with Winter’s Largo provided ample evidence that ASM is not just a technically masterful violinist, but an expressive and intellectual artist that renders each note into part of a lyrical conversation with her audience.

Her composure was a sign of her experience, not of her age (she will be 45 in June). Considering that she was somewhat handicapped by a majority Chinese audience who was not exactly respectful: ringing cellphones, what seemed to be cameras hitting stubbornly onto the hall’s wooden floor (and why were they being fidgeted in a place that prohibited photography, anyway?!), and what seemed to be a bizarre, one-second-long dog howl (don’t get me started on why and how it happened), I have no doubt that she delivered her goods.

But delivering her goods was not why I went to an ASM concert, and certainly not why I was so moved as to shed a tear. After a regurgitation of Summer’s Presto as a cookie-cutter, uninspiring encore, I was ready to call it a night and leave. But after the sixth curtain call (and the third after the first encore), ASM walked up to the stage, and hinted to the concertmaster as if she was going to dictate something unusual. And she did. She turned to the audience, and, with her flawless English and terse to the point, she dedicated Bach’s Air (Suite No. 3, BWV1068 ) to the victims of the Sichuan earthquake. At that very instance when she finished her dedication, there was a slight commotion in the audience (with probably a few, unable to understand her, trying to get/guess what ASM just said). Soon thereafter, she engaged into Bach’s monumental, albeit perennially overplayed, Magnum Opus. Overplayed always, but not last night. The majestic tranquility of ASM’s air almost betrayed (or perhaps faultlessly portrayed?) the subject matter to which the piece was dedicated. The legato was one of the longest in my musical experience, not least because, as ASM ran with her fingers, a seemingly neverending surge of sad, somber images came rushing through my mind. I could also, right at that beginning moment, recall a Dallas Symphony concert I attended soon after 9/11, when the mood was similarly dreary, but because Maestro Andrew Litton picked DSCH’s 11 to reflect President Bush’s resolve, that night’s audience could not help but felt a little resilient and upbeat with DSCH’s faithful chimes and glorious symphonic march to the symphonic finale. Had ASM played something along the lines of DSCH 11’s majestic, monumental ending, her effort would have been valiant, and almost entirely predictable (and in fact, that was what I was expecting, given the not-to-be-soon-forgotten hindsight of the Chinese audience’s preference for big, optimistic endings, such as DPRK’s performance last month). But not Bach’s Air. And ASM’s Air started where it ended — morne et sombre, tranquility as an inevitable prelude to death, picture perfection as an antonymous juxtaposition to a harrowing episode of human tragedy. Bach’s Air described Sichuan in a way that Litton’s DSCH did not, in a way that, as it seems to me, was humane, genuine, and so calm as to condense the enormity of thousands of lost lives into three minutes of haunting stillness. I was totally plugged into that imagery. And right there, she nailed me.

And that was the very reason why I shed a tear.

My first classical music concert in China

The China Philharmonic opened its 2007-2008 Season last night with a heavyweight program featuring the world premiere of a composition by Chinese composer Ye Xiaogang, and the Piano Concerto No. 3 by Sergei Rachmaninoff.

Ye’s new work, The Lofty Kunlun Mountains, is a monumental piece of music commissioned by and written for the China Philharmonic, and was completed barely a month ago. Continuing his ongoing series of scores featuring the customs and cultures of China’s various regions, Ye borrows from Qinghai province’s instrumental and vocal elements to carve out a substantial piece of work with three contrasting symphonic movements. Kunlun Mountains’ orchestral footprint is similar to that of Ye’s other work, Twilight in Tibet, in that Kunlun Mountains weaves through an intricate balance of rapturous Mahlerian moments and delicate pianissimo harmonics to illustrate the imposing and undulating landscapes of the region. The first movement, “The Lofty Kunlun Mountains”, is a testament to Ye’s frequent practice of east-meets-west ideals in which Holstian orchestral frameworks were gorgeously realized through the application of cascading pentatonic scales. The second movement, “The Ode to the Kunlun Mountains”, is an emotional interlude that reminds the audience of the tranquils of Howard Shore’s middle earth. Its baroque, careful string structures also provide perhaps the most poetic and original moment of the three movements. The third movement, “The Chinese March”, is the most symphonically bold, yet also stylistically least interesting, as if the piece tried to gallop to a Khrushchevian closure. In Poly Theatre’s foyer after the concert, I had a brief moment to congratulate Ye on finishing the composition, but I stopped short, for whatever lame reason including, out of deference, of complaining that Kunlun Mountains, while successful in evoking an impressive array of ethnic elements, lacked a fundamentally unique style that I often attribute to the composer’s other more satisfying compositions.

Rach 3 was performed by Kun-Woo Paik, a Korean-born pianist most famous for his interpretation of Liszt. Last night’s performance was average, although anyone who knows more than a thing or two about Rach 3 would testify that any pianist who can sprint through the extremely difficult, “finger-breaking” piece without major lapses deserves at least a few rounds of standing ovations. And Paik got his share and more, at least half a dozen of them. Paik’s performance wasn’t necessarily bad –in fact, his rendition of Rachmaninoff’s legato moments in the first movement was as lyrical as any I have ever heard –but, on the overall, Paik’s Rach 3 seems to lack a sense of controlled fragility that seems, at least to me, to be the hallmark of Rachmaninoff’s piece. The third movement was also slow –a tad slower than Ashkenazy’s typical, leisurely pace of 15 minutes and a lot slower than Argerich’s exuberant pace at just over 13 minutes (in the legendary RSO Berlin/Chailly recording). To be sure, nobody will ever accuse a pianist of dragging in a performance, although if Paik had admitted that his performance dragged last night, it would not necessarily have been his fault: there were times when it seems obvious that Paik was trying to race the orchestra to a tempo of his liking, only then to be suppressed by the baton of conductor Long Yu. It was not easy to conclude who dragged and who raced, but there were moments when I had a clear impression that there wasn’t enough communication between the concerto conductor and the concerto performer.

In any case, it was an incredible night not least because it was my first time to listen to classical music in Beijing, but also because I always fancied finding out what kind of crowd I would get at a classical music concert in mainland China. I was quite impressed – other than a slight mishap in which an audience sitting not far behind me felt the need to ruffle his/her plastic bag (whose act was then promptly verbally abused and denounced by other audience members nearby) – the crowd was very courteous, and did not clap, contrary to my earlier expectation, between concerto movements. I went to the concert with Carrie, a smart auditor who often lets her disengaged, emotion-less self spill over to her personal life. So it was only fitting that the highlight of my evening was to see her face light up, and her emotions flow, as she raved about Ye’s sweetness and Rachmaninoff’s genius.