EUGENE - "SILENCE!" shouted the conductor.  No, it was not my old fantasy
come true, admonition delivered forcefully to a noisy audience.  Those in
Silva Hall Sunday afternoon did not need to be hushed: this Oregon Bach
Festival audience sat as one, enthralled, mesmerized, some just plain
dumbfounded.  And that's how they stayed for two hours while Tan Dun
presented three of his orchestral works.

No, Sarah Ioannides yelled "silence" from the podium to the orchestra,
reading from the score.  The other conductor, the composer himself, cued
brass players scattered in the auditorium and they responded with random
sounds from small, kazoo-like instruments.  BOOM went the brass, percussion
and some big old gong somewhere.  Orchestra players hummed and shouted,
bass soloist Stephen Bryant declaimed, electronic fortissimos shook the
hall, the players turned pages of the score in unison to make a whooshing
sound, Tan's trademark amplified water bowls gurgled, and David Cossin
played strange objects in a mind-blowing percussive orgy.

Was this a timewarp or perhaps an homage to the decades-old experimental
music/performance art/long-hair bad-boy inheritance of John Cage, Edgar
Varese, George Antheil, Luigi Russolo and his "art of noise," Nam June
Paik or the entire Fluxus Group? Is Laurie Anderson lurking about with a
fake mustache, singing bass? Not so because no one else has Tan's unbridled
enthusiasm, fearless playing with the "medium" of music, as if for the
first time.  More importantly, none of those good people had Tan's awesome
hold on the audience.

What were they all charmed by? "Orchestral Theatre I: XUN," "Orchestral
Theatre II: RE," and the "Crouching Tiger Concerto." The last one, running
45 minutes, is a suite from the soundtrack to the Ang Lee film, accompanied
by a video installation of images related to the movie (and not, as in an
incongruous shot of the World Trade Center).

In many years of attending new-music festivals, I have never seen anything
like this - not the work, which is all too familiar and fast becoming
tiresome, but Tan's power over his listeners.  Not only did he make them
participate by humming and singing some nonsense words, a la Bobby
McFerrin, but he showed sustained star power, a keen sense of dramatic,
entertaining, "interesting" presentations, no matter how old the genre.
The question is what he will use it for.  He could yet create some
remarkable and really good new music of old-fashioned values, beyond his
current state of razzle-dazzle, mass hypnotism and commissions galore.

Signs of real talent are clearly evident in Tan's work: he writes
skillfully for all kind of instruments (although faced with the orchestra,
he reverts to unison writing constantly), he certainly has flair, even if
his structural attention span runs to about one-tenth of a a 30-second TV
commercial.  He uses long, "pregnant" silences, but they are not juxtaposed
with something cohesive; silences between widely, illogically parsed
phrases don't communicate much except making listeners hold their breath.
Effect on top of effect, constant attack on the listener's attention,
nothing evident from or to the heart.

Occasionally, beautiful phrases come up - both Western and Chinese - but
they are fragmentary, not developed, not sustained.  The Farewell section
of the concerto stands out as a comprehensive piece of music.

An undeniably Tan strength is his selection of collaborators.  Ioannides,
for one, a young, impressive conductor; the amazing cellist Maya Beiser,
who makes everything sound important and gigantic (and so becomes somewhat
monotonous, however impressive, quite without Yo-Yo Ma's humility and
lyricism); Renyang Gao, a virtuoso player of bawu and dizi (Chinese
flutes); and Cossin, playing a kind of electronic erhu, brilliantly.

Janos Gereben/SF
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