And it's not over yet....
Tuesday night found Miles and me at the Shanghai Oriental Art Center in Pudong for a concert of the Sydney Symphony with conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy and young Uzbek pianist Behzod Abduraimov. It was an all-Russian program, beginning with an orchestration of Rachmaninoff's Vocalise, continuing with Tchaikovsky's B-flat minor Piano Concerto, and concluding with Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony. Abduraimov is 19, and looks even younger. But his playing is amazing. After taking Grand Prize at the most recent London International Piano Competition, he is surely going places. The Tchaikovsky is a great piece to showcase his command of the instrument: his delicate rendering of all the filigree-work passages made me remember how much I loved this work when I was younger. Ashkenazy's reading of the Prokofiev was really exciting. The Sydney Symphony may not be the strongest orchestra in the world, but Ashkenazy surely got some great playing from them. Abduraimov gave the Chopin C major Étude as his solo encore. The orchestra obliged with Elgar's Morning Song, a little bon-bon I'd never heard before.
The Shanghai Oriental Art Center is an ultra-modern affair architecturally. It's actually supposed to be a flattened orchid flower. I forgot to bring any sort of camera, so I didn't take any snaps. Here's something I got from the web:
It's a big complex. There are three separate halls: the Concert Hall (where we were Tuesday night), the Performance Hall (where we will be tomorrow night), and the Opera Hall. The acoustics in the Concert Hall were really good.
Yesterday was devoted to new music.
While Miles was busy at Fudan teaching, I spent the afternoon at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, for an informal concert in their 2nd "International Electroacoustic Music Week." The concert's subtitle was: "Rear Window: Non-academic Style Electroacoustic Music." I'm not too sure what that title was meant to convey, so I just quote it, faithfully, except for the addition of what I hope is illuminating punctuation marks.
I got to this event after hearing about it from someone I met through one of those "oh, you're going to be in Shanghai? you must meet ..." email exchanges that starts with the email equivalent of friends of friends and precedes to increasing degress of separation. That someone — Ben Houge — is an expatriate American musician, sound designer, and composer, who works quite a lot on tracks for video games, and who was presenting one of the featured works.
There were six performances on the bill, all active artists, groups, or bands in the Shanghai new music scene:
- Wang Changcun's compositions began with unpitched synthesized rhythmic material in the background, to which pitched material is gradually added in the foreground. His stuff was LOUD. (I was grateful I happened to have a set of earphones in my bag.)
- I think what was called MaiMai actually was a person named Olaf Hochherz (who also participated in the last performance, see below). His work was very delicate. There were little bursts of sound — like bird chirps.
- Next came Torturing Nurse, a "noise band." Their stuff was, well, amplified analog noise, and it was VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY LOUD (again, I resorted to the earphones, as did several others in the audience). The torturing part of their name is definitely truth in advertising, at least as regards their amplification equipment. About 4 minutes into their set, there began to be little wispy coils of smoke coming from one of the amps. At length, the wisps grew to be more of a real plume that was hard to ignore. Whereupon they stopped. They are definitely wild, crazy, and pretty much way out there.
- Ben Houge's piece was next up. It was a fascinating "sound installation" which I think began with recorded material (I think I heard trains, traffic, crowd sounds, ship sounds, sirens), which was then mixed and blended together. I only met Ben in person yesterday, and look forward to hearing more from him about his work. His web site is here. His blog ("Aesthetic Cartography") is here.
- Then came Yen Yi, who presented a couple of works, one of which featured an electroacoustic flute-like instrument played live against a track of bell-like synthesized sounds. The other was a really great audio/video work based on a typical scene of Shanghai traffic at an intersection. The sounds of of the beeping horns were remixed to last unnaturally long, and eventually they "took over" everything, while the video similarly seemed to freeze. The work develops like this for a time, and eventually a realistic flow of time re-emerges.
- The last act brought back Olaf Hochherz, this time together with Jun-Y Ciao, who, together, are Power Wood Quality. Ciao did some free improvisation on amplified analog instruments against a background track prepared by Hochherz. This was first on a bass clarinet, later on an alto saxophone. If not familiar with free improvisation, it's a little hard to describe. Whatever instrument is used, it is used almost accidentally. It is not "played" in the ordinary sense of the term. Sounds are made on it, but not necessarily in the way customarily intended for the instrument. The instrument may also be "prepared" in novel ways. Ciao used improvised "mutes" that looked like they were plastic bottles.
New music was still the order of the day yesterday evening.
The great Bang on a Can All Stars ensemble are in Shanghai this week, giving a big concert (that is what we are seeing tomorrow night back at the Shanghai Oriental Art Center), and a smaller concert this evening at the Conservatory, as part of their Electroacoustic week. Lucky me, I got to see them last night for an informal free gig in the garden of the James Cohan Gallery (a New York gallery which has opened a Shanghai "branch"). Forewarned to do so, I got there half an hour early and snagged one of the very few real seats (most people had to stand). Here's a quick snap I took (sorry for the clumsy light glare):
They did some pieces as an ensemble, and gave some solo turns to some of the individual musicians.
As an ensemble, they played a fantastic transcription (by the ensemble's clarinetist, Evan Ziporyn) of a rhythmically complex piece by Conlon Nancarrow, called 4 Piano Studies. They also played some movements of music (also by Ziporyn) from Shadowbang, a colaborative project with a shadow puppet theater company.
The electric guitarist Mark Stewart played Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint, a minimalist work where the performer plays live against multiple tracks of himself on tape. Ziporyn played an interesting piece written for him on bass clarinet — David Lang's Press Release. The piece consists of alternations of low and high notes, and the name is a bit of a pun. It's based on the conception that to play a low note you press keys down, and to play a high note, you release them. (This is actually a misconception, but ignore that.) The group's double bass player, Robert Black, also played a very impressive, even virtuosic, solo piece, but I'm sorry to report that I didn't catch what it was.
After the performance I went off to dinner at a Hunnan restaurant a short walk from the gallery with about a dozen people I met through Ben.
Today I have another duet session with my violinist friend. We are (probably) going to tackle the Schumann D minor Sonata together.
Tomorrow evening it's back to Pudong for Bang on a Can All Stars.
As I said, a busy week.
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