San Francisco Classical Voice

The Bay Area is home to a significant community of Chinese expatriate musicians of the highest performing and creative caliber. All too often they are eclipsed by visiting performers from China; for, as the Chinese proverb goes: Only monks from afar (are thought to) know the true sutras. Melody of China, a non-profit organization of professional musicians, presented four of its shining stars in an evening of Chinese and Western classical music at the Herbst Theater, Saturday. Actually the program comprised entirely Chinese music, excepting the last piece, Concerto for Erhu, Yangqin, and Orchestra, the world premier of a Western contemporary work by a resident Chinese composer, Gang Situ.

The first half of the concert featured seven items: modern arrangements of traditional folk music and modern programmatic compositions based on traditional idioms, titled Bestowing My Crops to My Nation, Water in the River, Sunshine on the Taxkorgan, The General's Command, Yellow River's Boatmen Song, Birds Singing in a Deserted Mountain, and Galloping Horses. The pieces were performed in duet and solo by Chen Jiebing on the erhu, and Zhao Yangqin on the yangqin. These prize-winning women are Chinese conservatory and American music school diplomates (more on the performers and instruments below).

So-called 'traditional' Chinese pieces tend to be long on technical virtuosity and short on musical substance. They are largely melodic, highly descriptive or imitative (in the case of birds or horses), and played in unison or organum. Modern arrangers add variations; repetition in different registers and speeds; heterophony and counterpoint; rhythmic or arpeggiated bridging sections; long difficult cadenzas; and, worst of all, triadic harmony. The pieces in this concert are essentially the same, but with some delightful touches.

First and most gratifying was the disappearance of 19th-century triadic harmony and arpeggios so beloved by arrangers in China. The program opened with Bestowing My Crops to My Nation a fast, joyous duet based on a peasant tune played in unison with some lower doubling. The spirit of rustic simplicity overlies the irony that farmers are not so joyous about "rendering onto Caesar" while going hungry themselves. In other pieces, Chinese melodies are interspersed with motifs using modernistic yet appropriate progression.

Zhang Zhenzhou's arrangement of Yellow River Boatmen has chromatic sections (the boatmen's struggle in a storm) clashing with the pentatonic theme but with a refreshing wake-up effect. Birds Singing in a Deserted Mountain still has the obligatory imitative bird calls, but with restrained elegance rather than the usual overblown raucousness. Clearly these performers have learned in their ten-year sojourn that what is innovative and exotic in China is old hat in the West and good old-fashioned simplicity is better than indiscriminate hybridization.

Certainly the soloists deserved the standing ovation they received. Chen plays the erhu, a two stringed viol, with the violinistic technique adopted by some Chinese musicians since the 1930's, drawing out sustained lyrical tones using a bow nearly two and half feet long. True traditional Chinese erhu is played with shorter strokes and biting articulation on both down and up bow, producing a strident timbre. It has two sonant strings stretched across the snake skin sound box from pegs protruding through the neck.

The erhus's sound box rests on one knee as the bow is sandwiched between the two strings (tuned a fifth apart) and drawn over the inside or outside string by pushing or pulling, which allows quick leaps of wide intervals. The bow is also continuously rosined as it passes over a dab of rosin melted onto the top of the cylinder. The modern instrument has a longer neck to extend the range and steel strings for a mellower sound. As the stopped section of the strings has no fingerboard, the player must employ precise position and tension for accurate pitch. Chen displays great virtuosity in both the slow, exposed passages and the very fast ones.

Zhao Yangqin has won numerous prizes as a yangqin player. Her musical parents had named all of their children after instruments they play. The yangqin is a hammer dulcimer with varying tunings and numbers of strings. Zhao used two varieties: one with 150 strings and, for the double concerto with, one with 180. The strings cover four octaves, closely spaced and stretched over a trapezoidal sound box. They may be tuned singly, in pairs, or even up to sets of five and are struck with two thin, springy bamboo rods with mallets at their ends, requiring great skill and long practice. Zhao's expressiveness and dynamic control are most impressive. In the duet pieces such as Sunshine of Taxkorgan, Chen and Zhao display such perfect ensemble that the music sounds as though played by one person. No scene stealing between these two virtuosi.