Increasingly in the West, the Players Are From the East

NYT
April 4, 2007
Increasingly in the West, the Players Are From the East
By DANIEL J. WAKIN

With stunning swiftness China’s surging ranks of classical musicians have found a home in Western concert halls, conservatories and opera houses, jolting a musical tradition born in the courts and churches of Europe.

Large solo fees, plush orchestra jobs, an established audience and the presence of teachers steeped in the tradition have lured them to American and European cities. The phenomenon, which has been building for at least a decade, has gathered steam in the last few years, injecting new vitality into the American classical music scene after historic influxes of Italians, Germans and Russian Jews, and more recently Japanese, Taiwanese and Koreans.

“I honestly think that in some real sense the future of classical music depends on developments in China in the next 20 years,” said Robert Sirota, the president of the Manhattan School of Music. “They represent a vast new audience as well as a classical-music-performing population that is much larger than anything we’ve had so far. You’re looking at a time when, maybe 20 to 40 years from now, Shanghai and Beijing are really going to be considered centers of world art music.”

Cultural generalizations are always perilous. But many Western musicians and educators interviewed cited similar qualities in Chinese virtuosos: passion and refinement, expressiveness and brilliance. Chinese players seem less bound by the culture of conformity sometimes found in Asia, those Westerners said.

“Mainland China has a tremendous sense of going for it,” said Paavo Jarvi, music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. “There is something open. They are reaching out rather than holding back.” And they have arrived.

Consider that the hottest artist on the classical music planet may well be the Chinese pianist Lang Lang, 24, the darling of fans worldwide. The biggest event in the opera world last year was a Metropolitan Opera premiere by Tan Dun, “The First Emperor,” which the Met hopes to take on tour to China next year.

In 2005, at the most recent Van Cliburn piano competition, a deeply Texan tradition in Fort Worth, 8 of the 35 participants were Chinese, up from 3 in 2001 and 1 in 1991; one of the six finalists, Chu-Fang Huang, went on to win the Cleveland International Piano Competition in 2005. Chinese violinists and pianists now regularly win prizes in the world’s other major competitions as well.

Along with Lang Lang and another highly praised Chinese pianist, Yundi Li, also 24, a new crop of stars in their teens or barely out of them are on the way up. They include Yuja Wang, 20, a pianist studying at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, already under major artists’ management, and Sa Chen, 17, another 2005 Cliburn finalist.

For several decades Japanese and Korean musicians have formed a major presence in the West. In particular they have long populated the string sections of professional orchestras. Chinese musicians have now joined them in force and are winning high-profile positions. Hae-Ye Ni, who was born in Shanghai in 1972, was appointed principal cellist of the Philadelphia Orchestra last fall. The Chicago and Pittsburgh symphony orchestras have assistant concertmasters born in China.

And not only string players: Liang Wang, 26, was recently named principal oboist of the New York Philharmonic, one of the most prestigious chairs in orchestral music.

Chinese talent has entered almost every area of the classical music world.

A diverse group of composers like Mr. Tan, Bright Sheng, Chen Yi and Zhou Long have opened up a new sound world of Chinese-inflected rhythms, melodies and harmonies for younger American and European composers. Chinese singers, whose culture has its own rich opera tradition, round out casts in major opera houses around the United States.

Chinese conductors have in the last five years made the leap to prominent podiums, shaping orchestras and opera companies in music’s most prominent role. Their arrival is felt especially in Europe, but the rising star Xian Zhang, 33, was recently named associate conductor of the New York Philharmonic.

It is in the elite Western conservatories that the presence of Chinese is perhaps most significant for the future. The talented Chinese have become a bonanza for music schools, where they are raising the technical bar and joining the already robust ranks of Koreans, Japanese and Taiwanese.

The wellspring is China’s almost limitless pool of young musicians, a mounting number driven by increasing prosperity and nurtured by Chinese society’s desire to compete with the West.

Music schools are sending administrators on recruitment trips to China or holding auditions there. Online applications from China to the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston have doubled in the last three years. The Eastman School of Music in Rochester sent its admissions director on a scouting mission in October, and the school has about 100 Chinese applicants for next year, twice what it had a decade ago.

“One goes where the talent is,” said Jamal Rossi, Eastman’s interim dean.

Ties between American and Chinese conservatories are growing. Teachers from the United States are increasingly traveling to China to give master classes and lessons. A youth symphony from the New England Conservatory plans to go in June; another, from the Juilliard School, hopes to go early next year.

But the West is where careers are made.

“America has everybody coming from the world,” said Lang Lang, who studied with Gary Graffman, the former president of the Curtis Institute. “You can find every style in New York. I wouldn’t have a career like this and artistic development like this if I stayed in China. China is great for fundamentals, for children. We are very disciplined. We have great traditions. But we don’t have this kind of tradition that we have in Juilliard and Curtis. Piano is not just talent. It’s also tradition.”

His success in the West has fueled his career in China. “In the last five years, it’s unbelievable,” he said. “I’ve basically become a household name.”

Whether a talent like Lang Lang or a humble back-bench string player, many Chinese musicians believe that absorbing Western classical music on its native soil is essential.

Lin Yaoji, a prominent violin teacher at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, makes every effort to have his brightest students study abroad at the earliest opportunity, he said, and he has placed many at top schools in Germany and the United States. “It is not our own music, so we cannot make them feel it is their own,” he added. “For that they have to go abroad.”

So, at Curtis, 7 of the 20 piano students are China-born. Mr. Graffman, the former president, who still teaches there, said that four of his five current students are Chinese, including Yuja Wang, who performs with major orchestras around the world. Another, Hao Chen Zhang, 16, learned the 10 Rachmaninoff Op. 23 preludes over Christmas break.

“That’s no joke,” said Mr. Graffman, a member of the generation of piano virtuosos who came of age in the 1950s, like Eugene Istomin, Byron Janis and Leon Fleisher. “These kids learn, frankly, in one week what it took me and my colleagues three months.”

There is a dark side to the bonanza. Many Chinese musicians fall prey to excessive competitiveness and grow obsessed with outward displays of success, like winning prizes.

Yoheved Kaplinsky, the chairwoman of the Juilliard piano department, also worries that there may simply not be enough room for so many great young soloists on the concert scene. “There’s bound to be conflict,” she said. “There’s bound to be friction.” Defying stereotypes, the talent does not stop at the piano and violin. One of the brightest young lights in the demanding precollege division at Juilliard is a 16-year-old clarinetist from Guangzhou, Weixiong Wang, an 11th-grader at the Professional Children’s School in New York.

Weixiong picked up the clarinet at 10, studied at a local conservatory and, at a clarinet festival in Shanghai, met a Juilliard clarinet teacher, who invited him to study in New York, at 13. Like many young Chinese students, he came with his mother and lives with her in Queens, in a two-bedroom apartment in Elmhurst. His mother sketches portraits in a mall; his father died five years ago in a car accident.

Weixiong’s current teacher, Alan R. Kay, called him a “tremendous talent,” a natural performer and one of the five best students he has had in 20 years of teaching. “It’s rare to find somebody that hot at his age,” Mr. Kay said. “He’s clearly a great musician.”

Already Weixiong has won four local competitions, including a Juilliard concerto contest. “When I was 11, my dream was to come to America,” he said. “I’m going to do my best to practice really hard, so I can be a soloist.”

On a Saturday in February, Weixiong gave a short recital at Juilliard. Only about 15 people attended. Weixiong’s mother, who was helping a pregnant friend move out of her home, could not make it.

He took the stage in a dark suit and open-necked shirt, a tall young man with shaggy hair that fell into his eyes. He performed Debussy’s “Première Rhapsodie,” a cool work of soft, high, floating tones that requires extreme control. Weixiong played with maturity, releasing a full, ringing sound and moving in sympathy with the music.

In the next piece, a sonata by Joseph Horovitz, he added glissandos and jazzy inflections. “My challenge is to calm him down,” Mr. Kay said later. “He’s a big showoff. I’m trying to teach him some dignity.”

Outside the recital hall the Juilliard lobby was abuzz with parents and students lugging their instruments.

One mother, Czrina Suen, stopped to chat with members of the parents association. A former flight attendant, she had moved from Hong Kong with her daughter Poony Poon, 10, to give her the chance to study piano at Juilliard, where she has a scholarship.

“They are the best in the world,” Ms. Suen said. “In Hong Kong she can’t find a suitable teacher.” Poony, a tiny girl in a fluffy white coat, plopped into a chair.

Ms. Suen used to travel 90 minutes each way between Flushing, Queens, and Manhattan, taking her daughter to lessons at Juilliard and to class at the Calhoun School, an exhausting routine. Matters improved when she and her daughter moved to West 150th Street.

Ms. Suen said that her husband had taken on extra work to send money. “We cannot survive for a long time here,” she added. “We are looking for a sponsor.”

But the will to overcome such difficulties among many families of musical Chinese children points at what the future may hold for classical music.

As Lang Lang put it: “Two hundred years ago it was Europe. A hundred years ago it was America. Fifty years ago it was Japan. And now it’s China.”

Joseph Kahn contributed reporting from Beijing.

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