I have seen the future, and it is China. I'm not talking about the Chinese stock market. I'm talking about classical music.
I was lucky enough to catch the world premiere of Tan Dun's Piano Concerto at Avery Fisher tonight. Tan Dun wrote the soundtrack for "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," and is my nominee for the model modern musician. He started out during the Cultural Revolution conducting peasants in pot-banging recitals, and proceeed to infiltrate Western music with a sensibility simply unknown before in history.
Nobody writes much serious music these days for piano, its history as a pre-record industry orchestra substitute and its redolence of bourgeois display having placed it outside screamy postmodern sensibility. Even in is heyday, the piano was sort of an industrial compromise; at its worst, it was a creature of the carnival, used in vulgar displays of fast fingers, sentimentality and feats of memorization that served to astonish the ignorant. The great expressive problem of the piano was and is inability to sustain notes, as other non-percussive instrument do, from violin to tuba. The piano survived in the 20th century as a percussion instrument, but with diminishing adulation.
Now Tan Dun has revived the piano in its grand matrix of soloist and orchestra, in a stunning new work that makes the most of the instrument's virtues. Mr. Dun says he was inspired by the "transparent, crystalline" timbre of the Chinese guqin, a sort of medieval lute. He found further inspiration in the martial arts, with its sharp gestures and vibrating silences.
Mr. Lang Lang, the 25-year-old Chinese superstar pianist who premiered the Tan Dun, is just as much of the future as is the composer. The proram notes said Lang Lang is "excited," "honored" and "proud," respectively, to be the brand representative of Sony, Audi and Montblanc. To hell with the starving artist! And yet Mr. Lang Lang is a very serious pianist, as witnessed by an exlusive contract with Deusche Grammophone, a Tchaikovsky Competition victory and appearances with all leading American orchestras. He gave his first public recital at age 5, played all 24 of the Chopin Etudes at age 13 at Beijing Concert Hall, and stepped in as a substitute at a Y2K celebration with a performance of the Tchaikovsky Concerto.
The reception of the piece was phenomenal in itself. The audience gave the work four standing ovations. The rehearsal was attended by hundreds of people.
The New York Philharmonic brilliantly, for once, paired the new work with an orchestral piece -- Stravinsky's Firebird Suite, a distillation of the ballet work premiered in 1910, almost 100 years ago now. The Firebird shocked and delighted contemporary audiences with its barbarian drive, its ultrasophiaticated take on old folk melodies. The Tan Dun represents a natural progression to the south, too long denied to the world and resultingly explosive.
