China'smusicians journey to the West

By Daniel J. Wakin and Joseph Kahn
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE, NEW YORK AND BEIJING
Monday, Apr 16, 2007, Page 13

Poony Poon, 10, practices piano at New York's prestigious Juilliard School in February. Poon, one of a growing number of Chinese-born students at the school, came from Hong Kong on a scholarship. PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE

With stunning swiftness, China's surging ranks of classical musicians have found a home in Western concert halls, conservatories and opera houses, jolting a musical tradition born in the courts and churches of Europe.

Large solo fees, plush orchestra jobs, an established audience and the presence of teachers steeped in the tradition have lured them to US and European cities. The phenomenon, which has been building for at least a decade, has gathered steam in the last few years, injecting new vitality into the US classical music scene after historic influxes of Italians, Germans and Russians, and more recently Japanese, Taiwanese and Koreans.

"I honestly think that in some real sense the future of classical music depends on developments in China in the next 20 years," said Robert Sirota, the president of the Manhattan School of Music. "They represent a vast new audience as well as a classical-music-performing population that is much larger than anything we've had so far. You're looking at a time when, maybe 20 to 40 years from now, Shanghai and Beijing are really going to be considered centers of world art music."

"It is not our own music, so we cannot make [Chinese musicians] feel it is their own. For that, they have to go abroad."

--- Lin Yaoji, violin teacher at Beijing's Central Conservatory of Music

Cultural generalizations are always perilous. But many Western musicians and educators interviewed cited similar qualities in Chinese virtuosos: passion and refinement, expressiveness and brilliance. Chinese players seem less bound by the culture of conformity sometimes found in Asia, those Westerners said.

"Mainland China has a tremendous sense of going for it," said Paavo Jarvi, music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. "There is something open. They are reaching out rather than holding back." And they have arrived.

Consider that the hottest artist on the classical music planet may well be the Chinese pianist Lang Lang (郎朗), 24, the darling of fans worldwide. The biggest event in the opera world last year was a Metropolitan Opera premiere by Tan Dun (譚盾), The First Emperor, which the Met hopes to take on tour to China next year.

In 2005, at the most recent Van Cliburn piano competition, a deeply Texan tradition in Fort Worth, eight of the 35 participants were Chinese, up from three in 2001 and one in 1991. One of the six finalists, Huang Chufang (黃初方), went on to win the Cleveland International Piano Competition in 2005. Chinese violinists and pianists now regularly win prizes in the world's other major competitions as well.

Along with Lang and another highly praised Chinese pianist, Li Yundi (李雲迪), also 24, a new crop of stars in their teens or barely out of them are on the way up. They include Wang Yuja (王羽佳), 20, a pianist studying at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, already under major artists' management, and Chen Sa (陳薩), 17, another 2005 Cliburn finalist.

For several decades, Japanese and Korean musicians have formed a major presence in the West. In particular, they have long populated the string sections of professional orchestras. Chinese musicians have joined them in force and are winning high-profile positions. Ni Haiye (倪海葉), who was born in Shanghai in 1972, was appointed principal cellist of the Philadelphia Orchestra last fall. The Chicago and Pittsburgh symphony orchestras have assistant concertmasters born in China.

And not only string players: Wang Liang (王梁), 26, was recently named principal oboist of the New York Philharmonic, one of the most prestigious chairs in orchestral music.

Chinese talent has entered almost every area of the classical music world. A diverse group of composers like Tan, Bright Sheng (盛宗亮), Chen Yi (陳怡), and Zhou Long (周龍) have opened up a new sound world of Chinese-inflected rhythms, melodies, and harmonies for younger US and European composers. Chinese singers, whose culture has its own rich opera tradition, round out casts in major opera houses around the US.

Chinese conductors have in the last five years made the leap to prominent podiums, shaping orchestras and opera companies in music's most prominent role. Their arrival is felt especially in Europe, but the rising star Xian Zhang (張弦), 33, was recently named associate conductor of the New York Philharmonic.

It is in the elite Western conservatories that the presence of Chinese is perhaps most significant for the future. Talented Chinese have become a bonanza for music schools, where they are raising the technical bar and joining the already robust ranks of Koreans, Japanese, and Taiwanese. The wellspring is China's almost limitless pool of young musicians, a mounting number driven by increasing prosperity and nurtured by Chinese society's desire to compete with the West.

Music schools are sending administrators on recruitment trips to China or holding auditions there. Online applications from China to the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston have doubled in the last three years. The Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, sent its admissions director on a scouting mission in October, and the school has about 100 Chinese applicants for next year, twice what it had a decade ago.

Lin Yaoji, a prominent violin teacher at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, makes every effort to have his brightest students study abroad at the earliest opportunity, he said, and he has placed many at top schools in Germany and the US. "It is not our own music, so we cannot make them feel it is their own," he added. "For that, they have to go abroad."

So, at Curtis, seven of the 20 piano students are China-born. Graffman, the former president, who still teaches there, said that four of his five current students are Chinese, including Wang Yuja, who performs with major orchestras around the world. Another, Hao Chen Zhang, 16, learned the 10 Rachmaninoff Op. 23 preludes over Christmas break.

"That's no joke," said Gary Graffman, the former president of the Curtis Institute and a member of the generation of piano virtuosos who came of age in the 1950s, like Eugene Istomin, Byron Janis, and Leon Fleisher. "These kids learn, frankly, in one week what it took me and my colleagues three months."

One of the brightest young lights in the demanding precollege division at the Juilliard School in New York is a 16-year-old clarinetist from Guangzhou, Wang Weixiong, an 11th-grader at the Professional Children's School in New York.

Wang picked up the clarinet at 10, studied at a local conservatory and, at a clarinet festival in Shanghai, met a Juilliard clarinet teacher, who invited him to study in New York, at 13. Like many young Chinese students, he came with his mother and lives with her in a two-bedroom apartment in the borough of Queens.

Wang's current teacher, Alan R. Kay, called him a "tremendous talent" and one of the five best students he has had in 20 years of teaching. "It's rare to find somebody that hot at his age," Kay said.

"My challenge is to calm him down," Kay added later. "He's a big showoff. I'm trying to teach him some dignity."