The program for last night’s performance by the Kronos Quartet, joined by pipa player Wu Man, in the Forum at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) was entitled A Chinese Home. This was also the title of the major offering, the only work on the second half of the program. The composition “A Chinese Home” was conceived jointly by Wu, David Harrington (first violinist of the Kronos), and video artist Chen Shi-Zheng. While this was clearly a major project, it was well served by the first half of the program, which consisted entirely of Tan Dun’s “Ghost Opera.”
“Ghost Opera” was the first commissioned Tan received for an American ensemble; and it was funded by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Hancher Auditorium of the University of Iowa. Completed in 1994, it was scored for string quartet and pipa, with Wu joining the ensemble to perform the latter (and joining them again for the recording released on Nonesuch in 1997). Actually the full subtitle gives the instrumentation as “for string quartet and pipa with water, stone, paper and metal.” This reflects the overall cosmology of the composition, in which the musical instruments represent “Now” in the context of “Forever,” embodied by the physical objects of the four materials. Mediating between “Now” and “Forever” is “Past,” which provides much of the source material for the score, including the BWV 849 C-sharp minor prelude from the first Book of The Well-Tempered Clavier by Johann Sebastian Bach, Chinese folk songs, the syllabic chants of Chinese monks, and two short texts by William Shakespeare.
As might be anticipated, this music is highly spatial with a strong theatrical element. Indeed, one of the paper sources also served as part of the set, a long unwound scroll descending diagonally from the lighting framework at the top of the Forum to ground level. Musically, the composition is a highly evocative synthesis of Tan’s own rhetoric with his selection of appropriated resources. Those who recall the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players concert given in April of 2010 will recognize that his instrumental use of bowls of water would later mature into a “Water Concerto” in 1999 and a work for four percussionists (entitled “Water Music”) in 2004. What is particularly impressive is that the seamlessness with which Tan integrates his musical resources is just as applicable to his integration of music and theater.
It is that sense of a seamlessly integrated performance that made “Ghost Opera” such a suitable overture for “A Chinese Home.” If the former was basically a descriptive traversal of an imaginative cosmology, the latter is structured around a narrative. That narrative is of China from the eighteenth century to the present day. It was inspired by Yin Yu Tang, an eighteenth-century home in southeastern China that was disassembled and precisely reconstructed at the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts.
The music is in four parts performed without interruption:
- Return
- Shanghai
- The East is Red
- Made in China
It involves the collection and arrangement of a wide variety of sources, all performed in front of a screen on which Chen’s video is projected. There are also costume changes to reflect the passage of time as the narrative progresses through the four parts of the composition. The sources for the first part are primarily traditional. The second offers a selection of popular music (including a recording of Billie Holiday) consistent with the height of Shanghai night life prior to the Japanese invasion. The third draws upon the ballets directed by Jiang Qing (wife of Mao Zedong), with excerpts of those performances incorporated into the video projection. The final part is all collage as the musicians abandon their instruments to fill the floor of the stage with electronic toys, all made in you-know-where. Both Shanghai decadence and the propagandistic visions of Mao and Jiang have dissolved into contemporary consumerism; and those eighteenth-century origins are now a museum curiosity.
“A Chinese Home” is far more panoramic than “Ghost Opera.” What is important, however, is that, on the theatrical side, the Kronos and Wu bring a keen sense of pace to their respective performances. Whether one is exploring the intricate details of Tan’s cosmology or following the multiple-century narrative of “A Chinese Home,” there is never a sense that things are dragging. Because the sense of theater is so strong, the music tends to be secondary; but it is still essential to the conception of each of these works. While all of the performers are particularly accomplished musicians, it is their dedication to the overall vision that make this performance so effective.
Fortunately, this production will receive a second performance at the YBCA Forum tonight at 8 PM. The bad news is that tickets cannot be purchased through the YBCA Web site, which probably means that they have all been sold. However, those interested should try contacting the Box Office at 415-978-ARTS for information about returned tickets that have become available.
Comments