San Francisco Classical Voice

The piece involving the morin khuur was B. Sharav's Legend of Herlen, a work for Mongolian "long song singer," morin khuur, three trombones, multiple percussionists, and piano. The Mongolian singer Ganbaatar Khongorzul was the focus of the piece, and indeed it's hard to imagine her voice taking anything but center stage in any music. It was bright, hard, penetrating, powerful, ornamented in a mysteriously fluent way that will suggest to European-Americans yodeling as much as anything else. It seemed a sound that should never have been indoors.

And indeed Ms. Khongorzul (who was in traditional garb, like some of the programs' other "ethnic" virtuosi but unlike the "Western" players) seemed a little uncomfortable standing in a huge building before a couple thousand Westerners who wanted to hear her sing but neither knew nor mostly cared what text she was singing.

At least for "Jacqueline" Jeeyoung (or Jihyun) Kim's Tryst we had texts, words exchanged (in legend) between a lover and a courtesan. And Kim (who sang and also played the kayagum, something rather like a koto) was as eloquent in her way as Khongorzul was in hers. The plaintive, sometimes piercing sound of the voice of the "courtly lover" was blended with the sound of an especially adaptable oboist, Jeannette Bittar.

Zhao Jiping's 2000 Moon Over Guan Mountains gave us one pipa player, one tabla, one sheng, and Ma. That is: a Chinese lute; a set of skin drums; a "mouth organ," and, well, a cello. To which needs to be added that all the instruments are, shall we say, susceptible of virtuosity; and the players here were incredible. The sheng in particular is a marvel, sort of a cross between a harmonica and a portativ organ, played with a mouthpiece and sounding sometimes like a harmonica, sometimes like an oboe, sometimes like nothing on earth. The piece itself spent more time conjuring up cadenzas for the four virtuosi than it did going anywhere, but there was some stunning playing in those twelve or so minutes.

An Azerbaijani piece, Habil-Sayagy by Franghiz Ali-Zadeh (1979), for cello and piano, attempted to imitate the sounds of various Central Asian instruments by "preparing" the piano a la Cage. And indeed when the sounds were demonstrated for the audience before the performance, they were marvelous — plucked piano strings like an oud, strings with glass beads strewn over them like a zither, low strings struck with a padded hammer like a drum, and so forth. Unfortunately for the composer, the better part of the piece was the cello part; there came a point when Ma was playing a furious cadenza and the danged beads were jangling in unison, and I wanted the piano, ethnic accoutrements and all, just to go away.

And then . . . Ravel's Piano Trio. Why? What the heck was it doing there? Well, it was sort of on the "Silk Road," in a very expansive, nay, Clintonian sense of "Silk Road." According to the program notes, Ravel attended the 1889 Paris Exposition, where he would have heard a gamelan, as Debussy did. He asked that the opening of the first movement be played "like a Hawai'ian guitar's glissando." And the second movement, "Pantoum," is "based on a Malayan poetic form." Okay, so we go to Java, then Hawai'i, then Malaysia. Seems a hell of a long way off the route from China to Italy. The "Silk Road" apparently encompasses the whole Third World.

Ma said in introducing the piece that the players had listened to Berkeley's gamelan the other day, and the experience had completely changed their interpretation. To which my immediate reaction is "horsepucky." It is not possible to alter an interpretation that finely-honed that quickly, and anyway, if the gamelan had made that kind of impression, the players could possibly have described it. As it was, we were told that the performers' interpretation was profoundly affected by hearing the gamelan; but not a word about how it was affected or how the gamelan fit in or indeed why the gamelan has anything at all to do with a piece written 25 years after the 14-year-old Ravel heard one, for the first and last time. It's a crock.

But who cares about ten thousand miles of fictitious travel when the performance is this good? It was a brilliant Ravel Trio, and moreover brilliant in a way you don't ordinarily expect from stars like Ma. The strings were extraordinarily slender of sound, the piano very clean and articulate, each player alert and limber and marvelously attentive. It was exhilarating.

But it did in the rest of the program. There was no way of avoiding the thought, "The rest of these pieces are going to disappear, but this Ravel was written in 1914." But it was worse than that. Most "new music," in any period, is going to disappear. But the commissions of the Silk Road Ensemble are almost designed to disappear. A piece for three Chinese instruments and Yo Yo Ma (or equivalent — as though there were one!) is doomed. The infrastructure that would make it possible to keep it in the repertoire isn't there.

The "Silk Road Project" is all about bringing musical communities together. I hope that its funders will see to the long-term nurturance of these ties, so that these pieces outlast the 2002 Tour. They deserve to.

(Michelle Dulak, editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, is a violinist and violist who has written about music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America, and the New York Times.)

©2002 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved