Wu Man lifts a mixed outing by the Beijing Youth Orchestra
A little of the wow went out of Carnegie Hall’s WOW! festival on Sunday afternoon.
The stage was still overflowing with young musicians, and the auditorium was still hopping with other players from the international cast of youth ensembles featured during World Orchestra Week. Their energy lit up the august hall.
As ever this week, there was attractive music from the performers’ home country, and a timeless symphonic classic, all greeted with ovations from an audience giddy with the joy of international exchange and good will.
The Beijing Youth Orchestra, conducted by Lü Jia, had three very hard acts to follow: WOW! concerts on previous nights by the U.S.A’s NYO2 under Teddy Abrams, the National Children’s Orchestra of Venezuela under Gustavo Dudamel and the Africa United Youth Orchestra under William Eddins, which at their best were astonishing in their technical assurance and expressive power.
When their turn came on Sunday, the young Chinese players charmed listeners with folk-inspired symphonic pieces by Bao Yuankai and a concerto by Zhao Jiping composed for, and performed by, the charismatic pipa virtuoso Wu Man. For reasons to be explained later, this expansive music sometimes put one in mind, oddly enough, of western movie scores by Max Steiner.
But it was the actual so-called Western music, Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5, that seemed to overtax the Beijing ensemble. There was what looked like a clear beat and appropriate encouragement from conductor Lü and some lovely moments, including the famous horn solo of the Andante cantabile, sweetly floated by principal hornist Jin Zhicheng. Yet the performance sounded muddy and rhythmically insecure for much of its length, at least until the finale’s propulsive Allegro vivace pulled it together.
Through the eventful first movement and even in the Andante, one heard good dramatic instincts not quite making their point. Tchaikovsky’s whiplash mood shifts often sounded more like whipped cream. Strings had an elegant sheen in the waltz movement, but the dance rhythm needed more lift. In all, this rendering seemed more an approximation of the symphony than a full realization of it.
The concert had begun promisingly with a boy and girl from the orchestra cheerily welcoming the audience and giving a country-by-country shout-out to the other happy campers in the front of the house and the balconies, who cheered and waved back.
Then three movements from a suite by Bao Yuankai titled Chinese Sights and Sounds offered a kind of fusion cuisine of Chinese melodies in Western symphonic sauces, a process described in Jack Sullivan’s informative program notes as “striving to make Chinese folk traditions available to the widest possible audience.” (It’s been a while since one has heard a symphony concert described in those terms.)
The pentatonic scale of those Chinese tunes is of course shared by folk traditions around the globe, from Bohemia to the Scotch-Irish and African roots of the U.S.A. That’s why a particular cello line in the second movement, “Bamboo-flute Tune,” put one in mind of Dvořák, and a vigorous tutti (oddly titled “Dialogue on Flowers”) seemed to send cowboys galloping across the range and dancing on Saturday night. The first movement, a brief fanfare titled “Happy Sunrise,” was too short for such globe-spanning associations.
The orchestra rendered all this with color and flair. Just as the silky, massed strings were about to lift one over a sonic Grand Canyon, a squeal of piccolo and a whack of wood block reminded one where this music actually came from.
From music that sounded like a movie soundtrack, the program turned to an actual film composer—Zhao Jiping, known for his scores to international hits such as Raise the Red Lantern and Farewell My Concubine, as well as vivid concert works such as the Pipa Concerto No. 2, composed for Wu Man in 2013 and receiving its New York premiere at this concert.
Wu Man, for her part, brought star power to Sunday‘s concert through her associations with Kronos Quartet, Silk Road Project, and Philip Glass, to name just a few. Her instrument, the pipa, looks like a small lute, and sounds congenial to American ears because it’s picked and strummed like a banjo and sustains long notes with a mandolin-like tremolo.
Zhao’s one-movement concerto had a movie-like mise-en-scène, beginning with a tense dialogue between pipa and low strings (not unlike the slow movement of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto), then gliding through moments of flowing tremolo melody, a dance for orchestral soloists with cheerful ripostes from the pipa, runs and strums leading to a soaring pentatonic theme, and a dialogue with a solo cello that leaves the pipa alone with its thoughts in a brief cadenza.
In its intense moments, the concerto displayed Wu Man’s dazzling dexterity at her instrument, but always moving forward with an expressive goal. It also rejected the customary bang-bang virtuoso finish in favor of a poetic epilogue for the soloist and a diminuendo to silence. And in a concert series replete with encores, Wu Man smilingly acknowledged the audience’s warm applause, then went on her way.
As previously mentioned, the program-closing Tchaikovsky symphony was rescued—in the last reel, so to speak—by an exciting finale. Conductor Lü and the orchestra responded to the ovation with encores in the literal sense—that is, repeats of the lyrical “Bamboo-flute Tune” and the brassy “Happy Sunrise” movements by Bao Yuankai.
WOW! continues with the National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America, conducted by Marin Alsop with pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, in works by Barber, Gershwin and Rimsky-Korsakov, 7 p.m. Monday. carnegiehall.org
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