Last month, China’s Got Talent, the most popular TV program in China and part of the Simon Cowell franchise, was won by the 23-year-old pianist Liu Wei (劉維). Quite apart from the small likelihood of a pianist ever winning that competition in the UK, the remarkable thing about Liu is that he is no ordinary pianist: his arms were amputated after an accident at the age of 10, and he plays the instrument fluently with his feet. This is just the latest demonstration of China’s extraordinary obsession with the piano: according to recent estimates, some 40 million Chinese children learn the instrument, inspired by the likes of crossover superstar Lang Lang (郎朗), whose millions of CD sales must be keeping a flagging industry alive. Lang Lang is a phenomenon; in his steps come Yundi Li (李雲迪), the young Sa Chen (陳薩) and other products of China’s remarkable piano renaissance.
Given the wealth of young talent now being trained there, China has the potential to lead the world in a new vision of classical music. But the story is not quite so simple. Last month I visited Beijing for a Sino-European summit during the Beijing Music Festival. It is clear that the devotion to the piano is partly the result of China’s family limitation to one child, and the intense desire of parents to see their single offspring succeed as Lang Lang’s parents did, sacrificing money and careers to set him on the path to stardom and riches. It’s a completely individualistic approach to music-making, requiring hours of isolation and limited interaction with other musicians. The violin is played widely, too. But pianos and violins don’t produce an orchestra, and there are constant comments about the unevenness of provision, China having often failed to achieve the balanced youth orchestras one might expect from such a vast pool of talent. There is nothing in China to match the Venezuelan orchestral revolution. That would require a massive act of social will such as Venezuela made, to empower students to work in orchestras and perfect their skills communally. It could yet happen, but it would require a seismic shift.
The Beijing Music Festival is one of the most adventurous and inclusive events to be created in China in the years after the appalling treatment of the arts in the Cultural Revolution, when so many suffered and the country’s long musical traditions were damaged. Its mixed diet of native and Western concerts and operas is curated by the charismatic conductor Yu Long (余隆), who leads some of China’s major orchestras. Those Chinese orchestras were heard accompanying new operas, and the obligatory Lang Lang concert was included.
MUSIC’s MASTER
The days when Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) wife, Jiang Qing (江青), dominated musical taste in the country, sanctioning “approved” operas, have disappeared. She exerted an iron hold on culture, preferring Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony to his triumphalist Fifth, disliking Respighi’s Pines of Rome when she found it was not just about pine trees. Yet, generally, politics still rules. Beijing has a vast new cultural center just next door to Tiananmen Square, the National Center for the Performing Arts, reached by an underground walkway under water, which houses in 217,000m2 a luxuriously appointed opera house, concert hall and theater all under one stunning glass dome. But because of local political tensions, the leading orchestra, the China Philharmonic, is not resident there, and the program is very limited.
Yu’s cultural exchanges in the Beijing Music Festival were much more adventurous. Three opera productions showed the different possibilities of interaction: one Western masterpiece, Handel’s Semele, designed, directed and reinterpreted by the Chinese artist Zhang Huan (張洹) in a coproduction with Brussels; one US-Chinese coproduction of the traditional Tale of the White Snake (白蛇傳), set to eclectic, accomplished music involving children’s choirs and a counter-tenor, by the Chinese American composer Zhou Long (周龍); and, finally, a lavish production of a new commission, Song of Farewell. This much more traditional opera was planned as a co-commission with the Deutsche Oper in Berlin, but that collaboration was abandoned when the composer, Xiaogang Ye (葉小綱), was late finishing; the musical style could be generously described as Puccini-like. The Shanghai Symphony played with full command of this traditional idiom, as did the China Philharmonic for Zhou’s opera.
SIEGE MENTALITY
The cosponsors of the summit, Phoenix TV, invited participants to take part in an online broadcast on cultural issues, with a potential audience of many millions. But there still seemed a tendency to regard new media as a potential threat to the classical arts. Addressing the summit, the UK scholar and broadcaster, and chairman of the creative industries group Made in China, Philip Dodd, pointed to the vast potential of the Internet to offer cultural experiences in a new way to a young generation spread across a vast country. In contrast, the Internet was seen by some Chinese as a distraction to the young, representing pop culture, games and trivia.
It would be a huge irony if, in trying to become more prosperous, democratic and open, China shirked the challenge of reinvigorating a new cultural renaissance by harnessing the potential of the new media. The energy, enthusiasm and commitment of its young people to music-making as a normal part of daily life is something that could be an inspiration here.
Sir Nicholas Kenyon is managing director of the Barbican Centre in London and was a guest of the KT Wong Foundation at the Second Sino-European Summit in Beijing.
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