WU MAN, SANUBAR TURSUN AND FRIENDS

GREYFRIARS KIRK

‘ONGOING challenges’ is how EIF director Jonathan Mills described the visa problems which meant that the other two musicians who were scheduled to appear as part of Wu Man, Sanubar Tursunand Friends were not on the Greyfriars Kirk platform last night. But much more than getting by without any help from their friends, Wu Man and Tursun presented an enlightening insight into Chinese traditional music originating from the Silk Route.

Playing the pipa, a version of lute that makes a sound just like its name, Wu Man is a virtuoso originally from China and now resident in the USA. With astonishing dexterity, her artistry on the instrument seems to know no bounds. Very fine detail and decoration, heard with beautiful clarity in the church’s ideal acoustic, illuminated pieces from her homeland or of her own composition. Some music was for drinking tea to, while other pieces were specially for meditation. Sitting alongside the traditional White Snowin

Spring, with its vast range of sound effects, the mystique of her Night Thoughts, which uses a 12th-century mode as its base, was haunting and other worldly.

Playing dutar, another stringed instrument but with a neck which must be at least a metre long, Tursun accompanied her own singing, again mainly in Chinese traditional music. In songs telling of love, nature, joy and grief, the moods conveyed were appropriately mournful and plaintive much of the time, but switched easily to cheerful optimism with dance-inducing rhythms.