Zukerman’s China ties go back decades
NACO director’s music was played for Communist elites in the 1970s
Pinchas Zukerman is an old China hand. He can talk about the food, the economy, the culture and the people because he has seen them up close.
The music director of the National Arts Centre Orchestra and virtuoso violinist started performing there in the mid-1990s and has returned several times since, both as a performer and, perhaps more importantly, as a teacher. And now he is going back next October on one of the National Arts Centre Orchestra’s largest tours ever.
In his early trips, Zukerman could see the coming wave of Chinese musicians, and he was determined to play a part through his teaching.
“I’ve been in touch with a lot of Chinese people over the years, both students and performers,” says Zukerman. “There is a new generation now, and the depth is extraordinary. But the real problem is the teaching, still.”
He described one class he gave about chamber music that required a pianist, but one had not been made available because some official had decided that was not important. “What we need to do is train teachers,” Zukerman says, because the “calibre of playing (in general) is not that high,” he said. Chinese players have potential; it just needs to be realized, he added.
Long before his first show and his first Chinese students, though, Zukerman’s music had preceded him. In the late 1970s, China was in the grip of Maoist Communism even though the Great Helmsman, Mao Zedong, had died. His widow, Jiang Qing, a former actress, was exercising great power, and although the importation of foreign recordings was not allowed, she pursued her passion for classical music. Among the recordings she took into the country were some featuring Pinchas Zukerman.
Gathered around Madame Mao was a small group of talented musicians who escaped the many purges to perform and practise together at the highest level of Chinese society. In that group was a young man named Li Kuo Chang. He heard Zukerman’s work and was inspired by it.
The two men would eventually become friends, as happens in the international music scene. Chang now is the second chair in the viola section of the Chicago Symphony, and he has been helping smooth the way for the NACO trip. He’s played such a role before. In 2006, Chang helped arrange a visit by Zukerman to Shanghai to conduct and lead a mass master class. That both men are set to return — if Chang can be freed from commitments in Chicago — to China for the largest-ever tour by a western orchestra seems only fitting.
As Chang puts it: “For string players all over the world, Pinky is our idol. He’s very influential for many young up-and-coming Chinese musicians.”
Zukerman is one of the few remaining world-class artists carrying on the tradition of music making and teaching from what is considered a golden era of string playing in the 1950s and 1960s.