On the flight to Xi’an last month I watched the film adaptation of A Step into the Past, the time-travel adventure in which a modern-day protagonist tumbles back into the Qin dynasty and finds himself caught between those who wish to alter history and those determined to preserve it. It came back to me last Thursday evening at the He Luting Concert Hall of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, where five young composers offered their own version of that journey: a search not through a time tunnel but through sound, for a musical past rooted in China’s northwest. The concert, titled Songs of the Qin Wind, Musical Paintings of the Northwest, presented five new works for chamber Chinese orchestra. The northwest flavour announced itself in the sparing but well-judged deployment of the suona and the banhu, two instruments whose timbres carry an almost physical charge, and in the percussion writing that gathered force as the evening progressed, eventually reaching a fierce heat in the closing work. The plucked string section, anchored throughout by the ruan family, filled the hall with a rhythmic momentum not unlike that of a jazz rhythm section. In terms of sheer physical presence the ensemble was commanding, though the playing occasionally lacked that last degree of individual personality to match it. This is what made me think of the multimedia production Xuanzang’s Pilgrimage, composed by Jiang Ying and produced by the China National Traditional Orchestra, in which Feng Mantian’s sovereign command of the stage as a solo ruan performer transported the audience to the Loess Plateau through nothing more than the force of his artistry. On this occasion the performer who shouldered that responsibility was Zhang Meng, inheritor of the Huayin Laoqiang tradition, and he discharged it memorably in the final work. The concert’s visual production gave me pause. The semi-transparent screen serving simultaneously as programme listing and scenic backdrop, combined with a large LED screen and shifting lighting effects, created a sensory density that felt at odds with the musical imagination on display. The composers’ outputs were vivid enough to conjure their landscapes without assistance. I found myself hoping that such elaborate visual distraction does not become the default setting for concerts at He Luting Hall. A single bare stage, lit with intelligence and inhabited by musicians of conviction, would have served the music better and asked more of the listener. The five works were performed without interval. The first two, by Liang Nan and Xue Huixin, offered a measured, well-crafted opening, composers working within their established strengths. I have heard both before, in Düsseldorf and Nanning among other places, and their contributions here were assured without being revelatory. The third work, Ji Dongyong’s Marketplace and Lantern Festival, shifted the temperature of the evening dramatically. Two suonos in call-and-response mimicked cascading laughter; the plucked strings drove the harmonic rhythm forward with a robust, almost physical energy. Something of the spirit of Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel surfaced: the same wit, the same exuberance, the same delight in comic transformation. Ji’s name was unfamiliar to me before the evening, and it may be that I have heard his music without retaining it. Marketplace and Lantern Festival gave me reason to pay closer attention. Dai Weiyi’s North and South, the fourth work, introduced the sanxian and drew on the melodic idiom of Suzhou tanci to set the refinement of the Jiangnan region in dialogue with the rougher energies of the northwest. Cultural dialogue of this kind is a well-worn compositional strategy, and the idea here was appealing. The execution was somewhat mechanical, however: the contrasts were too clearly signalled, the seams too visible, the dynamic between the two worlds arriving by announcement rather than by discovery. The evening belonged to its final work: Ni Chenkang’s Huixiang (Echo). I have followed Ni’s work for some time, having heard his Exploding Dragon Carnival for violin, cello and piano at the Beijing Modern Music Festival and his Wandern in den wilden Bergen for guzheng and orchestra at this same hall. He is a composer who thinks seriously about instrumental colour, consistently challenges himself beyond his comfort zone, and brings a marked psychological intelligence to the structural arc of his music. He does not produce prolifically, and each new piece carries the weight of that selectivity. Huixiang confirmed his standing. Where the earlier works tended to keep the ruan section in a supporting role, Ni gave the percussion and suona genuine developmental space, and deployed the plucked instruments in rotation rather than as a homogeneous block. The stage lighting, which I had found distracting earlier in the evening, here became an asset, picking out individual performers in turn as the ensemble gradually thinned, in a gesture that recalled Haydn’s Farewell Symphony. Just as the hall had settled into the assumption that the concert was drawing to a close, the lights found banhu player Dong Kanghua and percussionist Wang Kun for a duet of concentrated, breath-holding intensity. Then Zhang Meng led the full ensemble back onto the stage from the wings, carrying a long wooden bench of the kind found in Xi’an noodle shops, striking it with a wooden block while simultaneously playing the yueqin, his voice cutting through the hall with the command of someone who has inhabited this tradition from childhood. What followed was five minutes of singing, stamping, horn-playing, percussion and humming in which the principles of Chinese traditional music and shadow puppetry, the full interplay of voice, movement, plucking and striking, arrived not as concept but as lived performance. Wang Kun and Zhang Meng, both inheritors of Shaanxi intangible cultural heritage, built together the most authentic northwest soundscape of the evening. The search for the Qin had found its quarry. The concert reminded me of a performance I had attended in Xi’an in September: the world premiere of Yan Huichang’s Xianqiang Rhapsody, performed at the Xi’an Concert Hall by the Shaanxi Broadcasting National Traditional Orchestra and the Heyang County String Puppet Theatre. No rear projection, no scenic screen, minimal lighting effects. Wang Kun alone played twelve instruments, animating the Heyang County theatre-singing tradition with inexhaustible virtuosity. The simplicity of the presentation focused everything on sound, and the sound was transporting, carrying me back across the centuries to the world of the Book of Poetry. In Huixiang I found the same quality of imaginative transport. It is a work that deserves an international stage. So, with certain reservations about its visual production, does this concert. After the performance I found myself outside the hall in conversation with Anastasia Freeman, a violinist and erhu player from Utrecht currently completing a doctoral degree at the Shanghai Conservatory with a research focus on northwest Chinese fiddle music, and two visitors from Rio de Janeiro: Lívia, a singer, and Fredericp José Ferreira, a composer and guitarist. They had flown halfway around the world for a residency project involving intangible cultural heritage performance, and had come to this concert the night before their own opening to seek inspiration. Lívia and Frederico incorporate elements of pingtan and kunqu into their own work and intend to return to China next year for a longer residency. It occurred to me, walking away from that conversation, that the international promotion of Chinese music has traditionally been seen as the responsibility of Chinese musicians. Yet in China the promotion of foreign repertoire, whether Haydn, Respighi, Britten or Copland, has always been the work of domestic ensembles and performers, not of the Berlin Philharmonic on its quadrennial visit or the Mariinsky on its annual one. Perhaps the real ambassadors of this music abroad are people like Lívia and Frederico: foreigners who attend a concert at a Shanghai conservatory on a Thursday evening, are genuinely moved by what they hear, and carry something of it home. I hope they find a way to bring a fragment of this northwest musical world back to Brazil. A journey from Rio to Shaanxi would be its own kind of search for the ancient past, and no less worthwhile for the distance. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit klassikom.substack.com
