Orchestra's second "East Meets West' program

East meets West, Episode 2:
Farewell, Colonel Blimp

TOM PURDOM

In the 19th Century, Asian societies adopted Western classical music and European composers became fascinated by Asian music. At the dawn of the 21st Century, legions of Asian performers grace Western concert stages, and Beethoven and Mozart share programs with performers like Bright Sheng and Toru Takemitsu.

Chinese Emperors may have sneered at Western barbarians and Colonel Blimps may have condescended toward backward natives, but traders, artists and intellectuals have always maintained a two-way traffic pattern on the highways between East and West. Noodles traveled to Italy and became pasta. Eighteenth Century Enlightenment philosophers turned to Confucius and Chinese society for evidence that people could lead moral lives without belief in a supernatural power. The Chinese exported gunpowder to Europe, and the Europeans returned it in the barrels of flintlock muskets and breech-loading rifles. Sushi and karate, Zen Buddhism and Hindu ragas, Japanese woodblocks and Chinese brush paintings have become part of our day-to-day life.

The Philadelphia Orchestra’s second “East Meets West” program at the Mann explored more aspects of the musical interchange. Works by Ravel and Debussy represented the Asian influence on Western composers. Midori played the Tchaikovsky violin concerto. Tan Dun's Dragon and Phoenix overture displayed the work of a Chinese composer who is becoming a familiar name to concert audiences.

Midori's strengths and weaknessses

The Mann’s cavernous space requires a bigger tone than Midori produced on this occasion. She is a world-class expert in the art of pulling audiences into the quieter, unaccompanied sections of a concerto, however, and her work in those passages compensated for the parts in which she got lost in the orchestral background.

The big moments in this concerts were the selections from Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite and the Tan Dun overture. The Ravel contained Chinese melodies and rhythms, as conductor Rossen Milanov pointed out in his remarks, but it was constructed, in addition, with a spareness that I associate with some kinds of Asian art.

Present at China’s Hong Kong takeover

Tan Dun’s symphony Heaven Earth Mankind was commissioned for a historic event in East West relations: the moment when Hong Kong reverted to Chinese sovereignty. The overture is taken from the first section of a three-part work that requires a full orchestra, a children’s chorus and a Chinese ceremonial bell orchestra when it’s played in its entirety. The Dragon and the Phoenix are variations on the classic Yang and Yin, male and female dichotomy (another concept that has become a commonplace in American culture).

The Overture opens with big foghorn blasts that turn into silvery fanfares and bright pulsing melodies. In the symphony, a solo cello (played by Yo-Yo Ma at the premiere) weaves the different sections together. The cello plays a smaller role in the overture, but its solos represent the Phoenix— the yin to the Dragon’s yang— and the overall structure ends in a synthesis. The cello solos were played, appropriately, by the Orchestra’s principal cello, Hai-Ye Ni. In the history of our species’ slow rise to its ultimate destiny, the fact that she is the first woman to hold that position may be more important than her ethnic origin.