Musical Destinations
Cristina Schreil heads to China to explore the Beijing Music Festival
For nearly 500 years, the Chinese called it ‘Zijin Cheng’. Translating roughly to ‘Forbidden City’, the name refers to a harrowing and severe rule: that anyone caught trespassing Beijing’s imperial complex, reserved strictly for the emperor and his court, was killed on the spot. These days the massive landmark – spanning hundreds of buildings and over 180 acres in Beijing’s centre – welcomes 16 million visitors a year. A place once barred to most of society is now a bustling public space. Throngs of tourists snap pictures, roam about once-hidden courtyards and crowd the palace’s museum and gift shops. Still, there’s a sense of peace. The neighbourhoods beyond the Forbidden City are hives of careering bicycles and cars, where pedestrian right-ofway is a distant concept; stepping inside the towering complex walls is a glimpse back in time. Present-day Beijingers simply call it ‘Gùg ng’ – ‘Old Palace’ – reflecting the City’s wealth of artefacts and ornate
Ming Dynasty architecture. The complex indeed feels ancient, especially as Beijing has transformed into a modern hub of global commerce. Across the capital, similar juxtapositions abound. Skyscrapers abut ancient buildings. Street signs are in both Mandarin and English. Beijing’s many paper lamp-lined hutongs – narrow, charming alleyways – sport internet cafés, chic boutiques, and craft breweries.
There’s also the Beijing
Music Festival, which has its own contrasts. The Forbidden City
Concert Hall, just southwest in Zhongshan Park, is one of several venues hosting the 22-day festival. Events include 29 concerts, educational seminars, masterclasses, open rehearsals and social gatherings. Over its two decades, it has become a lodestone for classical music in China, drawing in performers from around the globe and spring-boarding several new commissioned pieces. Like the Forbidden City, it supports and celebrates Chinese culture while opening doors to the world.
2017 was a landmark year, given that it was the 20th festival. The programming was notably diverse, with the concerts including those for children, comprising opera, symphonic and folk music performances from 17 groups, including a Welsh traditional group and London’s Silent Opera. Violinists Frank Peter Zimmermann, with son Serge Zimmermann, and Maxim Vengerov lent star power to the opening and closing concerts respectively. Over four nights, conductor Paavo Järvi and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen brought to Beijing their Beethoven Project – the city’s first Beethoven symphony cycle. There was also a co-production of Wagner’s
Die Walküre, a collaboration between the Beijing Music Festival and the Salzburg Easter Festival and a revival of a landmark 1967 production featuring the Hong Kong Philharmonic under Jaap van Zweden.
With the 21st season this autumn, one chapter ends and another begins. Festival founder and conductor Long Yu has recently announced he is passing over the role of artistic director to the assistant programming director Shuang Zou. It’s a good moment to reflect on how China’s classical scene has evolved since the inaugural 1998 performances. ‘You can see the development of the Chinese provincial orchestra,’ explains Long Yu. Twenty years is paltry in the grand scheme, he concedes, but in that time China has seen massive changes. At the festival’s inception, there were ten provincial orchestras in China. Now, there are 73. ‘I look back and the proudest thing we’ve established is Chinese classical platforms,’ says Yu, who celebrated this flourishing scene with an ambitious idea: a day-long ‘Orchestral Marathon’, where nine of China’s top orchestras and the nation’s most acclaimed conductors performed in succession. For the finale, the principals of each orchestra united for an all-star performance, with Long Yu at the helm. He asserts there is a healthy public interest – a claim backed up by huge audiences, including children – and that China’s professionalisation ‘all started from the Beijing festival’.
‘I look back and the proudest thing we’ve established is Chinese classical platforms’
Yet perhaps most important to Yu is how the festival sparks cross-cultural conversations. The closing gala mirrored that. In it, Vengerov performed the world premiere of a new violin concerto that married elements of East and West. Beijing Music Festival commissioned Shanghaiborn composer Qigang Chen, who studied with Messiaen and now lives in France. Chen was also the festival’s artist of the year in 2017. The piece, Chen explains, ruminates on the relationship between joy and suffering. The gala also featured 12-year-old wunderkind pianist Serena Wang, although most fascinating was a group from rural China: the Christian Xioshuijing Farmers’ Choir, who hail from a mountainous corner of Yunnan Province. Dressed in traditional costume, they lent plangent vocals to Yu and the China Philharmonic. It’s an enthralling glimpse of how Western influences trickle down to China’s far-flung corners.
Yu says he was most excited about the orchestral marathon and the closing gala for a key reason: they reveal what the future may hold. ‘Musicians should be ambassadors. Music is a universal language. The stage is not only for a great Wagner opera or a great Beethoven cycle – of course, they’re fantastic! But there’s another story. We can see also these Chinese young people. They’re coming to the stage, too.’