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.

Kunqu: Copper Coins

I just came back from a Shanghai Kunqu Opera Troupe’s production of Copper Coins (十五贯) at the National Centre for Performing Arts. Copper Coins is easily one of my favorite Kunqu operas, mainly because, with a heavy comedic element, it is less dry than many other Kunqu operas, where philosophical dream scapes and imminent deaths are often the norm. The protagonist was played by the indefatigable Ji Zhenhua (计镇华), arguably the grand master of old masculine Kunqu characters (老生). I had the fortune of attending one of master Ji’s performance a month earlier, when Shanghai Kunqu Opera Troupe was in town for a one-time only scintillating performance of 邯郸梦 at Changan Theatre.

For the evening, the singing was superb, but the acting was even better. Master Ji’s each and every gesture exuded the kind of regal authority befitting immortals just as other mortals on stage and off looked on in awe. The night, however, belonged to Liu Shenglong (刘昇龙), the clown figure who provided the comedic and playful counteraction to master Ji’s mastery and control. The performance flowed with a rhythmic consistency and a sinusoidal intensity, tossing between Ji’s tenacity and Liu’s mischief. It was drama at its best.

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.

A different kind of opera

Last weekend I attended a production of “Flower Girl”, an opera staged at the National Theatre by a North Korean opera troupe.

“Flower Girl” focuses on the plight of a Korean family whose fortunes were ravaged by the selfish behavior of a landowner and his family, saved only at the end by the glory of the revolution (i.e. the Marxist-Lenin communist revolution). Without a doubt, “Flower Girl” was designed to be a partisan, propagandist surrogate whose message was simple and easy to understand. By the time the opera ended, the only question left unanswered, as it seems to me, was how soon (or not!) the supposedly inspired audience would arm themselves and join the revolution.

According to the program notes, the opera was commissioned by and written in the 30s by Kim Il-Sung, the founding father of the DPRK and father of North Korea’s current leader, Kim Jong-Il. The Chinese public got their first taste of the opera through a film version of the opera, which was briefly released in the mainland in the early 70s and was well received. Since then, the opera has made various rounds in the mainland, playing mainly for small, strategically selected crowds (i.e. the PLA, young communist brigades etc.). It seems to me that while the opera has gained Chinese fans over the years, but because it has never been widely staged, it has never gained widespread prominence in the country’s psyche. Over the years, the opera has been reedited by and for its chief patron, the Kim family, probably to perfect its underlying proletarian and revolutionary messages. To me, such messages were unmistakable: the landowners are(were) evil, Jesus Christ offers(-ed) no helping hand, and the proletarian revolution is(was) every Korean’s ultimate salvation. The surtitles would punch out verses upon verses that sing the virtues of proletarian values, all the while ripping apart property rights and capitalistic misadventures. I felt like a cliff-side rock, looking helplessly as rapturous waves of such messages soldiered towards me in an endless repetition, finally engulfing and obliterating me, as if obliging me to accept its imminent and inevitable victory.

Politics aside, the opera was, strictly speaking, not an opera, because the main singers were given microphones to sing with. Unusual in an opera, a non-acting choir located on both sides of the orchestra sang not only the chorus, but more significantly the part of the heavenly voice seeking to explain everything to the audience — for example, who to blame for all the poor people’s plight (the landowner) and who to get credit for saving the poor (the revolution). Without a sliver of a doubt, Kim Il-Sung was to live vicariously and eternally through the united voice of the choir –an arrangement that, in itself, was a fitting, if not accidental, metaphor. Operatically, it was somewhat difficult to pinpoint exactly where “Flower Girl” would fit. The music was comprised of a chain of short tunes, each of which was tonally structured like a romantic aria, but each also woven with more sincere philosophical discourse and less floral sentimentality. “Flower Girl” is, thus, as it seems to me, Wagnerian in its content but romantic in its delivery. The singing was superb, despite the horrifying presence of the microphone. The production direction was amply satisfying, especially a prison scene whereby prisoners, understood to be locked down by the autocratic class, thumped through the prison ground as if they were laboring mindlessly in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. In the end, I was convinced that the mezzo soprano (the protagonist) and probably a few others could have sung their entire roles without the help of any electronics. Another mezzo soprano (the protagonist’s mother) also sang superbly, and I found it somewhat tragic that her role was small and limiting.

The highlight of the evening was at the end, when I made my way to the orchestral pit and shook hands with a couple of musicians. I could hardly speak Korean (and I would assume they could hardly understand a word of Chinese –though I could be wrong), but I found no such need to communicate verbally. We exchanged smiles in a way that spoke a thousand words: theirs, being appreciative of a keen audience and the sincerity of those who chose to stay behind to greet and thank the musicians; and ours, being thankful for a lovely spring evening imbued with fine music, talented singing and, most importantly, the North Korean’s rare but priceless presence. For different reasons, the night was special to each involved. I couldn’t help but felt the urge to summarize the evening with a tinge of romantic sentimentality: that while the exchange of human warmth was a small gesture between a few men (and women), it was a giant gesture for all of mankind, in an act that verily shows how humanity by way of musical and facial proxy can transcend language, politics, ideology. No word needed spoken, for music and facial gestures cultivated the seeds of understanding and mutual admiration. That moment was, to me, the singularly most heartwarming and unique experience I have ever had in an opera house.

Le roi d’Ys

Édouard Lalo is well known for his string compositions, for a good reason: he was an accomplished violin and viola player himself. His Spanish Symphony, a violin concerto, is considered to be an important rite of passage for many aspiring violinists.

His opera compositions, however, are less well known. Le Roi d’Ys, considered to be Lalos’ most well-scored and sophisticated opera, is rarely staged. (The Met, for example, staged Le Roi six times in its 120+ years history –and these six were performed in a single season: 1921-1922.) This rarity was the primary reason why I was excited to learn that Le Roi would be staged this week at the National Theatre in Beijing, in a production co-produced by the National Theatre and the Theatre du Capitole de Toulouse.

Last night I went to the second of four Le Roi performances this weekend. Honestly, I don’t have much exposure to Lalo’s work prior to last night, and I was somewhat surprised by the Wagnerian nature of the composition. By the second Act, I was convinced why Lalo’s work remains in the back bin of any company’s repertoire: one simply can’t market a Wagnerian feature under the banner of a French composer. The two concepts just don’t mix…selling Le Roi, as it seems to me, is like selling existential philosophy at a burlesque factory. I am not trying deliberately to make a direct and parallel analogy here: my point, however, is that no easy way exists to fuse the two perceptibly differing concepts into one coherent, marketable product.

But last night’s production was as close to achieving something monstrous as I could possibly imagine. Even so, the production was not devoid of misses: the singing, by most standards, was lackluster. The tenor singing the role of Mylio was simply not up for the challenge. His voice was weak and unable to project adequately to all corners of the hall (I sat in a perfectly located orchestra center seat but felt that his delivery was timid, particularly towards the end when Lalo obviously expected Mylio to be brazen and bold). Rozenn, a soprano role, delivered technically but was incapable of establishing any emotional connection with the audience (perhaps she was merely effectuating the role, which was supposed to be simple but oblivious to most of what went on?). It was due to the miscast of both Mylio and Rozenn that I found Margared, a mezzo-soprano role, to be sumptuously fulfilling, perhaps simply by comparison. The villainous role was hardly bel canto in nature (after all, Le Roi is, at least to me, Wagnerian), but the singer was able to deliver a top quality voice that not only danced powerfully with the orchestral score, but invited the audience (or just me?) to feel her villainous rage.

But Margared alone was not enough to save the day. What made Le Roi work, or rather, this Le Roi work was the production stage. The set includes a beautifully painted, two-story stage with plenty of ornamental details and fabulous engravings. The opera also calls for a dramatic flooding scene in the final scene. Common sense would dictate that no production would actually flood the stage with real water, but would only metaphorically do so through stage effects (e.g. blue lighting, and/or dancing ribbons) to falsify an imminent tidal surge. But no, the production designer actually flooded the stage, not merely with a few metaphoric buckets but with gallons upon gallons of fresh water gushing from the top of the two-story stage down a central stair piece and onto the stage floor! (The water was, as it seemed to me, then captured by slits across the stage.) It was as magnificent as real elephants in Aida or marching horses in Khovanshchina, except, of course, that this water design was so much more difficult to pull off not merely because of the logistic nightmare of recapturing the water but also of the #1 issue in any stage design: safety.

According to the production notes, the stage seems to be conceptualized and managed by folks at the National Theatre. If anything, this Le Roi set proves that Chinese production designers are world class, and that the Theatre’s mechanics can deliver such a technical marvel, so seemingly unfathomable anywhere else, that the production was saved from mediocrity.

José Carreras recital

I almost missed out on a great opportunity to listen to Carreras because by the time I learned about the recital earlier this week, it was already sold out. If I hadn’t exhausted all my contacts and traded some favors, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to catch one of the finest living opera singers in my lifetime.

The concert: while Carreras has lost some of his range (the highest note he hit all night, if my pitch hasn’t failed me, was a Ab5 –and that was delivered with visible strain), he more than made up with an impassioned, controlled delivery. His intense concentration was amply projected through his voice and, to an even greater extent, his facial emotions. Notwithstanding a few strained high notes, Carreras’ voice oozed with a mature, dutiful yet non-threatening perfection. The dramatic highlight of the evening was a superbly crafted encore piece –Verdi’s Libiamo ne’ lieti calici, together with soprano Po-ching Ip (no, I don’t believe Carreras hit the last Bb…but who cares…the capacity audience, including I, went absolutely berserk after a prolonged, rousing third-last note, the G5). In an earlier encore (he did a total of three encores), Carreras first confounded the audience by revealing what seemed to be a hastily scribbled cheat sheet, and then turned the house into a pandemonium when he began singing to the tune of “在那遙遠的地方”, in accented (but arguably well spelled-out?) Mandarin Chinese. While Carreras was taking breaks on backstage between his 10 arias of the evening, Ip (who was a classmate of mine at music school in HK, over 10 years ago) filled in with memorable performances, including Puccini’s O mio babbino caro and, as an encore, Gounod’s Je veux vivre dans ce reve.

To end, a little about the performance venue: it was held at the white-themed Concert Hall at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (or The Egg, as it is affectionately known). Similar to the opera house (which I visited two weeks ago when it first opened), the concert hall’s interior is subtly tasteful and, thank goodness, without the kind of excessive exuberance that seems to define the modern Chinese taste. My only complaint: the existence of pieces of glass-like material separating the grid lights from the ambiance. When these grid lights hit the side of this glass-like material, a magnified refraction is casted on the side of the concert hall. Because the grid is suspended through wires from the ceiling, it could move, if ever so slightly, enough to cause the magnified refraction to move, in a musically miscued and visually annoying manner.