Bright Sheng

* China Dreams
* Two Poems from the Sung Dynasty
* Nanking! Nanking!  A Threnody for Orchestra and Pipa

Juliana Gondek (soprano)
Zhang Qiang (pipa)
Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra/Samuel Wong
Naxos 8.555866 TT: 65:44

Summary for the Busy Executive: Talent edging into something more.

Bright Sheng has won more medals and prizes than Seabiscuit, as pianist,
conductor, and composer.  His artistic mission, apparently, is to explain
China to the West, and in largely Western terms.  I first encountered
him as the orchestrator of the late Bernstein work Arias and Barcarolles,
and he did a swell job.  I've since heard his original work.  It's not
particularly difficult, although it is well-made.  It's also eminently
forgettable.  Listening to China Dreams, for example, made me appreciate
more greatly the Respighi "Roman" tone poems.  Apparently, it's harder
to do this sort of piece than I had thought.  There are nice, even poetic,
moments, including a lovely string solo at the end of the third movement
and a virtuosically-orchestrated finale, but ultimately very little
sticks.  A half hour later, you're hungry again.

The Two Poems sets wonderful texts (Sheng translated).  The first --
about a woman lamenting her unhappy marriage, strikes me mainly as, I
hate to say it, a modernist exercise in chinoiserie.  Stravinsky did
this shtick in the Teens.  Sheng's second setting, however -- this time
of a poem of a woman mourning the death of her husband -- is another
kettle of soup: very vivid, very attentive to the poem's subtle shifts
of meaning.  The orchestration is brilliant, somewhat in the manner of
the early Seventies, but it doesn't meander or gibber.  It shows a strong
dramatic line throughout.  It seems appropriate to the text.  This is
more a scena than a tune you can hum, and the setting lays out the complex
psychology of the poem and skillfully avoids the musical cliches of Great
Emotion..

We save the big work for last.  Nanking!  Nanking!  is Sheng's
death-song to the city brutally overrun by the Japanese in 1937 --
his equivalent of Martinu's Memorial to Lidice or of Strauss's
Metamorphosen.  By now, we take the spectacular orchestration for granted.
The piece opens with foreboding (dominated by low strings), then bursts
into a "barbaric" section depicting the pillaging soldiers (brass and
percussion).  The savagery dies down, and we get a cadenza-like section
from the pipa, a Chinese stringed instrument requiring great virtuosity.
Sheng creates an extremely difficult part besides.  The pipa's meditations
are alternately shattered and lightly accompanied by the orchestra until
the conclusion, which becomes increasingly marked by strings and harp,
a kind of meditation on the horror and a search for transcendence.  It's
a conventional plan, baldly recited like this.  But the plan alone doesn't
convey the considerable power of the music itself, which ends with a
brutal surprise.  At more than 26 minutes, it could easily fall apart,
but Sheng keeps the listener's attention.  The odd surface (to my Western
ears) of Chinese music this time expresses something deeper within the
composer than a travelogue.  If Sheng has a better work in his catalogue,
I don't know it.

Wong and his orchestra do well, but not exceptionally well by the composer.
Granted, China Dreams is a piece of Grofe fluff updated, but one can
easily imagine a performance that makes you forget that.  In general,
Wong and the Hong Kong players give a truthful, rather than a generous
performance.  Gondek and Qiang, on the other hand, make music out of the
fiendish parts Sheng has given them.  One doesn't think of the technique,
but the complexity of expression.  Both communicate like nobody's business.
Gondek once or twice steps over the line from genuine emotion to All-Purpose
Opera Emotion, but it probably amounts to a grand total of a second in
thirteen minutes worth of music.  I listen to Qiang, however, with my
jaw on the floor -- virtuosity and poetry are that tightly woven.

The sound quality isn't noteworthy, neither remarkably good nor mud-fence
ugly, and I imagine that Sheng's percussion-laden scores and wide dynamic
contrasts must have given the engineers fits.  The good news is that
nothing went really wrong.

Steve Schwartz