Lang Lang: Ancient Paths Modern Voices

By: Gigi Yellen

I saw Lang Lang at Carnegie Hall tonight. Concert was part of the hall’s 3-week-long “Ancient Paths/Modern Voices: A festival celebrating Chinese Culture.” Program included a world premiere of a work for piano and orchestra commissioned by Carnegie Hall, “Er Huang” by Chen Quigang (music director of the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics). Michael Tilson Thomas conducted, with the Juillard Orchestra. Definitely not the Beethoven you’ll be hearing with Seattle Symphony at Benaroya Hall in Seattle this Sunday.

Lang Lang the flashy rock star was not so evident; the fluent athlete of the keyboard was. What he can do with extended arms and liquid wrists, the snap of a head, the careful suspension of a note: an audience that needed guidance got it. This was a hall filled with friends and families of student musicians, among other significant numbers of people who needed to know when to applaud and when not to.

Concert opened with Lou Harrison: “The Family of the Court” from Pacifika Rondo; then Lang Lang played four settings of Chinese tunes for solo piano. (The last and most contemporary item in that set, the 64-year-old Sun Yiquiang’s “Dance of Spring,” nodded to influences from cakewalk to tango.) Then “Er Huang” received its premiere (a bit more about that below).

The concert concluded with the complete “Das Lied von der Erde”/The Song of the Earth: by Mahler: Mahler, opening the 20th century by setting thousand-year-old Chinese poetry. Now here we are, beginning the 21st by returning borrowed inspirations to their native contexts. Soloists were the wonderful voices of mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter and tenor Gregory Kunde. In another context, these gifted performers would be headliners, but this concert was all about a new context.

Recently a Seattle music fan pointed out the importance of thinking of Seattle as a city in the Northeast: the Northeast of the Pacific Rim. If even a small version of this expensive festival could be mounted in Seattle, how resonant such an experience would be, given that perspective. Composer Bright Sheng, a former composer-in-residence with Seattle Symphony, is among the New York festival’s artists. So is Chen Yi, another composer whose work has been featured in Seattle; so is the ubiquitous Yo-Yo Ma.

The festival includes a well-funded series of 45 neighborhood concerts, bringing to public schools and centers some of the same internationally-renowned artists the Carnegie Hall patrons are getting to see. Maybe that’s another line of questioning Zach should add to his basket of suggestions for what to talk about as he interviews the parade of candidates to succeed Gerard Schwarz as SSO music director: how might this person envision the orchestra’s service to a community positioned in relation to the emerging Asian influence, both economic and cultural.

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That new piece, a crowd-pleaser, pleased me; a companion found it amorphous. I loved a glittering effect: piano echoed by celesta and then by vibraphone, so that a note would shimmer and linger. According to the notes, the title is the name of a family of tunes in the Peking opera tradition, “associated with solemn, forlorn situations,” a commentary “on the declining popularity of traditional Peking opera among Chinese youth, who instead embrace Western popular music.” I gather that Western classical music, especially piano performance, is also included in that embrace. Can we share that embrace back home?