Ensemble is welcomed with open ears
SHANGHAI— The music conservatory stands on a busy side street behind gilded iron gates, not a single building but a campus, with a steady stream of students flowing through.
Since the gates seem routinely open and since the security guard seldom looks up, there is nothing penal about the atmosphere at China’s oldest facility for the making of musicians.
It is so welcoming, in fact, that Toronto’s Soundstreams Ensemble was invited over the last month to take part in Shanghai New Music Week, an international festival of contemporary music held under its auspices for the past 11 years.
Just as Chinese musicians represent an increasing presence in western concert halls, the Middle Kingdom, as it used to be known, is admitting increasing numbers of their western counterparts to perform and teach.
An anniversary volume published a few years ago by Shanghai’s Grand Theatre pictures a large number of top-tier visiting western artists, from pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy to the seemingly inevitable tenor/baritone Placido Domingo, so when Soundstreams turned up on the conservatory’s stages no heads turned.
The Torontonians kept good company in Shanghai, appearing alongside internationalclass colleagues from Paris, Amsterdam, and Athens, performing before overwhelmingly young audiences, and to Soundstreams fell the particular responsibility of representing North American music, presenting works by three Canadians, R. Murray Schafer, Nicole Lizée and Juliet Palmer, and two Americans, John Cage and Steve Reich.
Reich, one of America’s foremost minimalists, also happens to be featured composer (through his “Six Pianos”) at the opening concert of Soundstreams’ Toronto season Friday at Koerner Hall.
As famous as he is in Canada and the United States, like most composers from North America, Reich is still little known in China. The composers highlighted at New Music Week were either Asian or European, including Finland’s Kaija Saariaho, Germany’s Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, and France’s Gérard Pesson and Frédéric Pattar.
What was fascinating to observe was the commonality of musical language they employed.
There are obviously many musical dialects spoken in mainstream classical music these days, but the vocabularies are often more similar than different.
Small wonder then that the musical doors of China are opening. Tens of millions of students are studying western composers banned during the Cultural Revolution.
What Lawrence Cherney, artistic director of Soundstreams, finds especially encouraging is the willingness of the Chinese to engage now in cultural exchange.
This was his third visit to Shanghai, having already lectured on Canadian music at the conservatory, and he is looking forward to the presentation in Toronto of an opera co-commissioned from a Chinese composer.
He points out that Shanghai has been identified as one of 13 major international cities in which the Canadian govern- ment has chosen to pour extra resources to facilitate cultural exchange.
“We’ve had governments talk a lot,” he says, “but few have activated a policy. The current government is taking action.’’
With government support, Soundstreams sent an ensemble of five musicians: pianists Midori Koga and Gregory Oh, percussionists Daniel Morphy and Ryan Scott, and mezzo-soprano Andrea Ludwig, who outfitted herself in black, looking almost like a dominatrix, to perform Schafer’s Tantrika, a gesture that would probably not have gone unpunished in Chairman Mao’s China.
But then, today’s Shanghai is a vastly different city from the one visited by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra on its historic 1978 tour of the People’s Republic, when people where still wearing Mao suits. Today’s citizens (those able to afford them) can buy elegant Italian suits from shops identical to those found in Milan.
One of the more interesting features of Soundstreams’ visit was an international master class for young composers, Chinese and foreign, before an international jury including Nicole Lizée. The Toronto musicians provided performances at an impressively high level for this master class. It reminded me of a comment attributed to Arnold Schoenberg: “My music isn’t really modern. It’s just badly performed.’’
Well, with performances like these, the emerging generation of composers can feel lucky not to have been Schoenberg’s contemporaries. In Shanghai as well as Toronto, ears have opened. William Littler is a freelance music critic for the Toronto Star.