Conductor
Bruno Ferrandis

featuring
Maya Beiser, Cello

BRIGHT SHENG: Tibetan Swing
TAN DUN: Crouching Tiger Concerto
BERNSTEIN: Symphonic Dances from West Side Story
GERSHWIN: An American in Paris

January 20, 21, 22, 2007
Wells Fargo Center
$27 - $50

Dance-like qualities dominate the offerings for this program, beginning with Bright Sheng’s Tibetan Swing and continuing with Bernstein’s symphonic dances extracted from Broadway’s West Side Story. In the 1920s, Gershwin, America’s foremost combiner of Classical and Jazz music, composed An American in Paris while on vacation in that gorgeous city—listen for the taxi horns! And, anyone who has seen the film Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon knows the thrill of that music. In the Crouching Tiger cello concerto, Maya Beiser evokes the sweep of this romantic film score combined with the mesmerizing sounds of traditional Chinese music.

Bright Sheng: Tibetan Swing

Bright Sheng was born in Shanghai, China, on December 6, 1955, and lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He composed Tibetan Swing in 2002. The work was commissioned by the Brooklyn Philharmonic through a grant from the Koussevitzky Foundation. Robert Spano led the Brooklyn Philharmonic in the world premiere on April 26, 2002. The score calls for three flutes (two doubling piccolo), two oboes and English horn, three clarinets (doubling E-flat clarinet and bass clarinet), three bassoons (doubling contrabassoon), four horns, three trumpets, two trombones, bass trombone, and tuba, timpani, three percussionists, harp, and strings.

Bright Sheng’s musical education was seriously interrupted by the Cultural Revolution. He was still in junior high school when the Red Guards were set loose on the country. The family’s piano was confiscated. After finishing his schooling, he was due to be sent for “re-education” working with peasants on a farm far from home and family. He applied repeatedly to join a performing group in the army or some urban center, but owing to his family’s educational background, he was turned down time and again. A provincial band in far-off Tibet accepted him. He worked as a pianist and timpanist with a dance company in Chinhai, the province that borders Tibet and collected the folk songs used as the basis of the present composition.

After the Cultural Revolution, he was quickly accepted by the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. After earning his degree in composition, he moved to New York in 1982 and attended Queens College and Columbia University. Among his major influences there were Chou Wen-Chung, Jack Beeson, Leonard Bernstein, George Perle, and Hugo Weisgall. The variety of approaches offered to him was invigorating as he sought to link the Chinese tradition in which he grew up with modern techniques of mostly European and American origin.

In an interview with Bob Edwards on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” soon after winning a MacArthur award for his continuing work in bringing Chinese and Western musical ideas together, he explained the essential difference between Chinese and Western music. In China, the music is essentially pure melody, without harmonic underpinnings. Expressiveness comes from the details of that single line: “so the bending, the pitches, the little decorations of the notes, even going out of tune, these are styles which add the flavor to the music.” In Western music, composers think in terms of several melodic lines running along at the same time, creating polyphony and harmony. Sheng’s work takes into account both sides, sometimes concentrating on the Asian mode, sometimes in the European/American approach—and sometimes blending them in unique ways. “I grew up in China and moved here. I have been living in the West for almost 20 years, so I’m a totally mixed-up hybrid. My work has to reflect the fact that I’m somebody who can appreciate both the Western and Eastern music.” But it is a lifetime commitment and I’m still trying my best and continue my study of both sides.

As the title Tibetan Swing suggests, the work emphasizes its rhythmic characteristics. Bright Sheng offers a brief explanation of the source of his ideas for this piece:

Based on a typical Tibetan dance rhythm, this work tries to evoke both the beauty and the savagery of a particular mountain dance, an expressive dance well-known for swinging the long sleeves of its traditional costumes and for its rhythmic foot stomps. — Bright Sheng

Tan Dun: Crouching Tiger Concerto

Tan Dun was born in Simao, Hunan, China, in 1957 and now lives in New York City. He composed the Crouching Tiger Concerto, employing musical ideas from his score to Ang Lee’s film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, for Yo-Yo Ma, with whom he premiered the work in London’s Barbican Centre on September 30, 2000. In addition to the solo cello, the score calls for alto flute (doubling piccolo) or, optionally, their Asian counterparts, bawu and dizi, five percussionists, harp, and strings.

Tan Dun’s complex and colorful orchestral works fuse elements of Asian and European music. (According to Chinese practice, his surname, Tan, comes first, followed by his personal name.) During the Cultural Revolution he was required to serve as a rice planter; he also collected folk songs and played erhu (a Chinese fiddle) with a Peking opera troupe. In 1982 he was able to study at the Beijing Central Conservatory, where he encountered composers and music from outside China. The 1985 orchestral score On Taoism revealed his gifts at cross-cultural expression. Within a year he was studying at Columbia University, where he earned a doctorate in composition.

In the ensuing two decades, Tan has built an astonishing reputation, combining both modernist and accessible elements in his work, while at the same time fusing the worlds of East and West. He links parts of the world that have long been isolated from one another, and does so with rare imagination.

As the title Crouching Tiger Concerto suggests, the musical content is related to the score Tan Dun wrote for Ang Lee’s romantic film Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2003). When the score received an Academy Award as the best film score of the year, Tan decided to reimagine the piece as a work of formal concert music—still making essential use of the cello, which played such a major role in the film score.

He cast the concerto as six movements linked by cello cadenzas. The concert work was inspired by cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who had played the cello solo in the film score and who has spent the last several years studying, gathering, and presenting music from the many cultural traditions present along the Silk Road, the pathway connecting East and West in the centuries before the discovery that the world was round and that Asia could be reached by water. Tan Dun has become fascinated by these historical cultures as well, and he has composed the Crouching Tiger Concerto (as well as the film score) with musical instruments and thematic ideas that are part of the Silk Road cultures. These include a North African frame drum (tar), a bamboo copper-reed flute brought to China from southeast Asia (bawu) and a high-pitched plucked-string instrument (rawap). Tan Dun has reinvented their characteristic tunes and playing styles for the cello and orchestra in the concerto. In particular, the cello also evokes the erhu, a bowed stringed instrument that came to China from India.

It is commonplace to say that the world has grown consistently smaller in the last century or so, owing to the much faster rate of travel and communication. But it is also growing smaller through the fusion, in works like the Crouching Tiger Concerto, of musical ideas that were once separated by boundaries of time, distance, and ignorance.

Leonard Bernstein: Symphonic Dances from West Side Story

Leonard Bernstein was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, on August 25, 1918, and died in New York on October 14, 1990. He composed the score to West Side Story in 1957-58, in collaboration with choreographer Jerome Robbins, who had the basic idea for a modern version of Romeo and Juliet, dramatist Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book, and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. The show opened in New York on September 26, 1958, with Max Goberman conducting. The concert selection of Symphonic Dances from West Side Story was first performed by the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Lukas Foss on an all-Bernstein program given in February 13, 1961. The score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets, E-flat clarinet, and bass clarinet, alto saxophone, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (a large and varied collection), harp, piano, celesta, and strings.

At its appearance in 1958, the musical West Side Story was immediately recognized as a new high-water mark for the American musical theater, an extraordinarily powerful amalgam of Leonard Bernstein’s brilliantly unified, nervously jazzy score, Arthur Laurents’s book, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and Jerome Robbins’s electrifying dances. The dance music was sophisticated enough to find its way directly into the concert hall—a remarkable feature. Ballet music from operas or excerpts from the scores of classical ballets have often become concert material. But the dance music of Broadway shows was almost never written by the composer of the main show.

Most composers for the musical theater were songwriters who, whatever their gifts in that area, simply did not have the training to conceive and score an elaborate dance number, so they turned the ballet music over to assistants. But Bernstein had already written two formal ballets as well as remarkable dance music for his earlier shows, On the Town and Wonderful Town. So it was no surprise that he would craft remarkable dances for West Side Story.

As laid out in the Symphonic Dances, we hear the Prologue (rivalry between the Jets and Sharks); “Somewhere” (a visionary dance sequence in which the two gangs are friendly); Scherzo (a continuation of the vision, as they break out of the city into a world of open spaces); Mambo (a competitive dance between the gangs); Cha-Cha (Tony and Maria see one another for the first time); Meeting Scene (a short musical underscoring for their first words together); “Cool” Fugue (the Jets practice controlling their hostility); Rumble (in which the two gang leaders are killed); Finale (love music and a procession that recalls “Somewhere,” but now in a tragic mood.)

In this dance score the treatment of the songs passes far beyond the level of simple orchestral arrangement to become part of the dramatic unfolding of the tragic tale, the means through which the two rival gangs show off their style and challenge one another with aggressive vigor until the fateful meeting of Tony and Maria sparks a doom-laden love.

George Gershwin: An American in Paris

George Gershwin was born in Brooklyn, New York, on September 26, 1898, and died in Beverly Hills, California, on July 11, 1937. He composed his orchestral tone poem An American in Paris in 1928; the work had its first performance on December 13 that year in Carnegie Hall, with Walter Damrosch conducting the New York Philharmonic. The score calls for three flutes, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, side drum, cymbal, bass drum, triangle, bells, xylophone, alto, tenor, and bass saxophones, celesta, and strings.

The overwhelming success of Rhapsody in Blue in 1924 sparked Gershwin’s interest in further explorations of the ground where classical, jazz, and popular traditions meet. At the time there were few composers tilling that particular soil. Gershwin was moving in the other direction, from a position of being completely at home in the popular realm to encounters with more demanding large-scale musical forms, in which he consciously attempted to fuse elements of traditions that had been largely separate until then.

An American in Paris found its first inspiration in a short visit that Gershwin made to the French capital in 1926. He walked all over the city, soaking up the atmosphere and inventing the title of the work and its opening theme, which a friend of the composer’s described as “jaunty...just in the tempo of his own walking.” He even bought some authentic Parisian taxi horns in an auto parts store, with the intention of using them in his new score. But he found himself stuck, and the work was put aside while he composed the shows Oh, Kay!, Strike Up the Band, Funny Face, and Rosalie.

In March 1928, George and his brother Ira returned to Paris, where George spent a great deal of time listening to recent European music and making the acquaintance of Berg, Weill, Ravel, Poulenc, Ibert, Prokofiev, Milhaud, Walton, and others. He purchased the complete works of Debussy and studied them carefully. In fact, while An American in Paris was still in progress, he told a journalist that it would be “the most modern music I’ve yet attempted...in the manner of Debussy and the Six, though the themes are all original.” But that aim did not prevent him from writing some memorable themes that immediately stick in the ear and help hold An American in Paris together.

Gershwin disclaimed any particular program for the piece, simply noting that it captured certain general impressions, “so that the individual listener can read into the music such episodes as his imagination pictures for him.”

© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)