JIA
Daqun (b.1955)
Ensemble
Les Amis Shanghai, Han Quartet recorded in Shanghai, November 2015
NAXOS 8.579011 [70:07]
NAXOS 8.579011 [70:07]
The history of Western
classical music in China dates back barely a century. Several Chinese composers emerged in the
middle years of the last century who wrote music in the Western tradition
strongly flavoured by Chinese elements – especially scenery, poetry and folk tradition
– before the Cultural Revolution put a lid on it, and it seemed as if Chinese
music was destined to revert back to being a purely domestic concern. But Mao’s hostility to western influence in
music backfired spectacularly, and in the 40 years since the end of the Cultural
Revolution, Chinese composers have not so much been emerging as bursting on to
the international scene. Music by Bright
Sheng, Tan Dun, Zhou Long and Chen Yi are to be found in the repertory of ensembles
and soloists across the globe, and while these composers all live and work in
the West, their music makes a deliberate attempt to celebrate their Chinese
heritage in a language which is immediately identifiable as contemporarily
Western.
But what of those
composers who lived through the Cultural Revolution and then chose to remain in
China? Among the most significant of
these is Jia Daqun who is currently Professor of Composition and Theory at the Shanghai
Conservatory – incidentally the oldest music conservatory in China, founded in
1927, and, effectively, the cradle of Chinese interest in Western Classical
Music.
Jia’s story is a
fascinating one. A native of Shanghai,
his early interest in music was stifled by the Cultural Revolution during which
he studied traditional calligraphy and painting at the Sichuan Fine Arts
Institute. However with the end of the
Cultural Revolution in 1976, his interest in music was re-ignited and he took
up the study of composition. Whether
this was because the study of Western music was once again permitted or
because, as Jia has suggested, his eyesight was causing him problems, he
nevertheless developed a style of writing which imported the principles of
form, line and colour from Chinese calligraphy and painting. He has received considerable support from the
Chinese government, which named Flavour
of Bashu for two violins, piano and percussion, as the “Chinese Classical
Music Composition of the 20th Century”.
This disc, the second in
a series from Naxos devoted to his chamber works, gives us all a chance to hear
that work and identify what made such an extraordinary impression on the
Chinese government. From the very
opening, with the wailing of the violin, the explosive punches from the piano
and the energetic knocks and scrapes from the percussion, we are thrust into the
world of traditional Sichuan opera (“Bashu” was the name of states from which Sichuan
was formed). Clearly this is music which
wears its ancestry not just on its sleeve but allows it to permeate every sinew
of its body. But vivid Sichuanese
effects are not the sole musical feature of this intriguing score. Before we have reached four minutes into the
first movement (“High Pitched Tune”), we are firmly in the sound-world of
Messiaen, and with the motor rhythms of the piano and the interweaving violins
of the second movement (“Veins in Rock”), we are revealed a musical language
which derives as much from the masters of 20th century European
music as it does from the traditions of China.
We read that this movement depicts the “strength of the mountains” and
the “changes in the mountains’ structure” so much a characteristic of the
Sichuan landscape. Visual stimulus was
obviously at the forefront of Jia’s mind, but this is music which needs no such
picturesque imagery to justify itself on purely musical grounds. Perhaps only the third movement (”Masks”),
which “is based on the different types of facial makeup”, seems to need its
visual imagery to make sense. It is in
the form of a disjointed dialogue between the two violins (Wu Shuling and Tian
Junjun) with operatic effects from the three percussionists (Song Yuchen, Zhu
Tianyao and Ma Li) and some reflective, Messiaen-like outpourings from the
piano (Yu Xiangjun). It is a fascinating
work, and one can only admire the dedication the six members of Ensemble Les Amis
Shanghai in presenting it in such a powerfully committed performance.
Counterpoint
of Times is
a four movement work for a conventional wind quintet in which Jia shows his
fascination with musical theory and structure.
It is tightly organised and coherently devised, employing a musical
language which is unrelentingly atonal but which includes some effective instrumental
gestures. Although visual imagery has no
obvious part to play in the work – the movement titles are abstract (Prelude,
Intermezzo, Scherzo, Postlude) – Jia’s commentary on the piece draws attention
to the use of various mathematical sequences which hints at Jia’s background in
fine art by describing the Golden Ratio, employed in the final two movements,
as “particularly pleasing to the eye”.
This may be abstract music, but it is abstract music with a whiff of the
tangible.
Despite the lack of
titles for the three movements of the String Quartet, this is clearly more visually
oriented. Jia recalls that he wrote it
“to express the feelings and to communicate a wider understanding of Chinese
spirits and culture”, and while the musical language is very much rooted in the
late 20th century, with much use of tonal indeterminacy and harmonic
ambiguity, the frequent use of instrumental effects – knocking on the cello
wood and the very pliable melodic figures from the violins (notably in the
second movement) – do add a feeling of Chinese-ness to it. The Han Quartet, faculty members of the
Shanghai Conservatory, make a lot of sense from Jia’s complex score.
Only in the most recent
work on the disc, The Prospect of
Coloured Desert, does the multi-instrument Ensemble Les Amis Shanghai
include traditional Chinese instruments – the Sheng and the Pipa. Commissioned by the Silk Road project, this
work depicts a number of richly descriptive verses, and the music is clearly
wholly concerned with evoking this visual imagery. As with all the performances on the disc,
this is a model of concentrated and committed effort which serves the composer
and his music extremely well.
[This review was for musicweb-international.com from which website the disc can be purchased]
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