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8.4.2010 The Yellow River Concerto: politics, culture and style
On April 10th, Saturday, the orchestral music series will present a unique artefact – The Yellow River Piano Concerto – that emerged in China at the height of the Cultural Revolution, as a manifestation of the official socialist policy of the People’s Republic of China. This collective composition is one of the best internationally known Chinese works that combine Western music traditions with the elements of Chinese source materials. Never heard in Lithuania before, this piano concerto will be performed at the National Philharmonic Hall by Claudia Yang, a Malaysian-born pianist now based in Beijing, and the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra under its second conductor Robertas Šervenikas.
The piano concerto is based on the Yellow River Cantata, written by composer Xian Xinghai in 1939, during the Sino-Japanese war (1937–1945). Since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Xian Xinghai, together with Nie Er (the author of the national anthem called the March of the Volunteers) have been regarded by Mao Zedong as the “people’s musicians” and the most prestigious composers of the PRC. This, however, did not prevent the Yellow River Cantata from being banned during the years of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), because the Central Philharmonic Orchestra was forbidden to perform any Western orchestral pieces or those, bearing obvious Western influences. Under such circumstances, the pianist Yin Chengzong loaded his piano onto a truck and drove it to the Tiananmen Square to accompany revolutionary songs. There he caught the eye of Jiang Qing (better known in the West as Madame Mao). Under her orders, a collective of musicians from the Central Philharmonic Society including Yin Chengzong, Liu Zhuang, Chu Wanghua, Sheng Lihong, Shi Shucheng and Xu Feixing rearranged the cantata into a four-movement piano concerto. This concerto, being a collective composition characteristic of Chinese socialist realism, is a politically loaded piece, following all musical conventions of the time, with the revolutionary anthems (such as “The East is Red” and Internationale) integrated in the finale and tunes found in traditional Chinese music.
With the death of Mao Zedong and the official end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, the Yellow River Concerto was banished from the Chinese concert stage, but retained certain popularity outside China among the patriotically-minded emigrants. Notwithstanding this popularity, the concerto was received with certain controversy by the musical professionals both in the East and in the West. After listening to the concerto during the Cultural Revolution, famous Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu remarked: “How could a nation as great as China come up with a composition as such!” The social realistic composition was also ridiculed on the record cover of the Philadelphia Orchestra recording, which said that it was written by various composers including Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Liszt and Rachmaninov. Yet the significance of the Yellow River Concerto remains undisputed in the 20th-century Chinese music history. Starting from the late 1980s, it was filtering back into the Chinese musical mainstream, in the form of new editions, recordings and live performances by Chinese and Western artists.
The concerto will be first performed in Vilnius by Malaysian born-pianist Claudia Yang (nee Teoh Gay Hoon), who studied with renowned pianist Paul Badura-Skoda at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, among many other distinguished European pianists. After performing the world over to great response, including before diplomats and high-ranking officials, and having collaborations with the Slovak Philharmonic, Dresden Philharmonic and Vienna Chamber Orchestra, Yang finally made her debut in China in 1999. “When I was 12, I listened to the Yellow River Piano Concerto,” said Yang. “I was very impressed by it, and wished that one day I would have the chance to perform it in China.” She now lives with her husband, Chinese businessman Yang Lingyang, and their twin daughters in Beijing.
Besides the Yellow River Concerto, the programme of April 10th at the National Philharmonic Hall in Vilnius will also include the fantasy for orchestra Capriccio Italien and Symphony No. 5 by Piotr Tchaikovsky.
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