Eastern instruments such as the stringed pipa and reeded suona blended with Western orchestral sounds at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York on Sunday night, as musicians from China and the United States came together to mark the Chinese New Year.
For the seventh consecutive year, the US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music presented its Sound of Spring Chinese New Year concert, in partnership with the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. With more than 1,000 people in attendance, the program featured prizewinning young soloists, and brought together Chinese and Western works inspired by the Year of the Horse.
“I think Chinese New Year is a very good opportunity, especially in New York, to introduce Chinese culture to local audiences through music,” said Cai Jindong, director of Bard Conservatory”s US-China Music Institute and conductor of the concert. “We chose the horse as a theme and then looked at how different cultures describe and express the spirit of the horse. So you hear not only Chinese works, but also Western ones.”
The concert opened with Spring Festival Overture and featured a mix of Chinese and Western works, including the pipa and orchestra concerto Cloud and Blossom, French horn Concerto in E minor, Op. 45, the violin piece Sunshine over Tashkurgan, Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 4, Ride of the Valkyries, Shanxi folk percussion A Grand Victory, Light Cavalry Overture, and the symphonic capriccio Xu Beihong.
“When people talk about China-US relations, they often look at it from a political angle, or sometimes from a trade or economic perspective, and you see many conflicts. But if you look at it from a cultural perspective, from music, Eastern and Western music can be connected. We can use a theme like the horse to allow everyone to express their feelings together,” said Cai.
The performance, presented alongside Orchestra Now, featured French horn soloist Jin Zhicheng and violinist Luo Chaowen, both laureates of major international competitions including the Tchaikovsky Competition, as well as pipa soloist Luo Xiaoyan, winner of the Bard Conservatory Concerto Competition. They were joined by suona virtuoso Guo Yazhi and suona and guanzi performer Hiu Man Andrew Chan.
“It was a wonderful concert, very varied. Varied in repertoire, varied in timbre and sounds,” American composer Daniel Asia told China Daily after the concert.
Reflecting on the musical structure, Asia said: “Chinese music is mostly pentatonic, and therefore has a very deep and rich understanding of the pentatonic scale. And the composers work well with that and work with the orchestra.” He added, “It’s nice to hear them, one against the other, and hear some great young players playing.”
Asia said the suona, in particular, offered strong potential for further cross-cultural experimentation. “I think suona has very interesting possibilities,” he said. “I’d like to see more done with Chinese instruments, probably with American composers, to see what they do in terms of pushing them into an aesthetic that’s beyond or outside of a purely Chinese aesthetic. It would be interesting to see what they do with the instrument.”
Midway through the concert, a group of nine children sang Chinese New Year songs in Mandarin.
Ernest Bertuzzi, whose four-year-old granddaughter Elena was among the performers, said: “I thought that the whole performance was wonderful, and I thought she did great, and the whole group did. I’m happy she’s been introduced to Mandarin. I think it’s very important to learn the language.”
He added that Elena had been practicing for “just about three months” and “really likes Mandarin”.
“I could hear the sounds, the different instruments that are being used that are not common here. I thought it was a great performance. When I go home, I’m going to look up when China was introduced to Western instruments, when they combined them together,” he told China Daily.