Shanghaied by Asian Orchestras

November 5th, 2008

by Ken Smith

I’d just landed in Shanghai last Saturday, getting ready to compare the Shanghai Opera House’s production of Il trittico with the Il trittico I’d seen the night before in Macau, when I stumbled upon the Alliance of Asia/Pacific Region Orchestras, which was having its annual conference a few blocks away from where I was staying.

A conference session on orchestra development and fundraising normally wouldn’t generate many sparks, but given the recent “financial tsunami” it was the hot topic of the day. No matter the organization’s funding structure – and there was a tremendous array given the geographical and social-political range of the attendees, from New Zealand to Vietnam – people wanted to know how to keep those dollars – and yen, and won – flowing.

Interestingly enough, orchestras that are exclusively state-funded were talking the same language as those cultivating private donations. Both sides concluded that guanxi only gets your foot in the door; from there, organizations need to identify and evaluate their own goals and priorities.

As Hong Kong Philharmonic chief executive Timothy Calnin pointed out, it’s no longer enough that board members (or their spouses) personally like music and want to be a part of it. “Continued success depends on finding ways to make your objectives consistent with the goals of your funding partners,” Calnin said. “That’s the only way to maintain your alliances long term.”

It’s a valid point whether your money comes from an investment bank or from a line item in the public budget. It should go without saying in developed countries, although I can think of a rather prominent American orchestra whose recent sojourn in North Korea garnered absolutely no new business for its tour sponsor. In China, where the government has been itching to get out of the culture business, and where any calamity from blizzards to earthquakes has been used as an excuse to divert money away from the arts, this is a crucial strategy for the future.

*

Neither Deborah Borda nor Tan Dun, both of whom were on the preliminary schedule, spoke at last weekend’s Shanghai summit (Tan, for one, was in Amsterdam rehearsing a new production of Marco Polo) but Norman Lebrecht was on hand to rehash themes from his recent book The Life and Death of Classical Music, complete with a coda on its coming resurrection in the post-CD age.

The short answer? Youtube.

In researching a recent talk, Lebrecht had gone to the video-sharing website in search of the theme from Brahms’s First Symphony. All he could find, he lamented, was one posting by a regional orchestra in California. Why, he asked, didn’t more musicians and music lovers use the site?

Well, I’m not sure exactly when Lebrecht last logged on, but I went home and searched for Brahms’s First. After hearing Bernstein, Karajan, Giulini, De Sabata and Kleiber, I figured I’d had enough Brahms for the time being.  And these were only the commercial recordings.

Think of the time in the very near future – and this rate, probably tomorrow morning – when musicians of all talent levels won’t even have to show up to audition in person. Youtube, as Lebrecht indicated, may well replace the recording as the musician’s business card. 


Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Closed

Chinese lessons in San Francisco

October 1st, 2008

by Ken Smith

Although San Francisco is rather famously open to Asian influences, this season’s production of The Bonesetter’s Daughter has taught people at San Francisco Opera a few new expressions in Chinese. Take “huang niu” – literally, “yellow cow” – which is what the Chinese call scalpers for any public event or transportation requiring a ticket.

In China, this usually refers to organized gangs who buy tickets at the venue and sell them elsewhere for a profit. Sometimes they just sell counterfeit tickets, avoiding the initial outlay entirely.  No one – and there are a lot of people from China involved in this production – has been able to tell me exactly where the phrase comes from, but at the high end – getting a train ticket at holiday time, for example – the market value is about 40 percent more than the printed price.

The situation in San Francisco is not so structured. Rather, the small herd of yellow cows gathering at the opera – none of whom were Asian, by the way – has more to do with a run on tickets after a glowing review in the San Francisco Chronicle. Comments from national critics have been more mixed, but the hometown rave has turned the opera (based on the novel by local novelist Amy Tan) into a Bay Area block party. The final performance is Oct. 3, and there were a few tickets available on Craigslist and other e-sources. 

*

A few days ago, as I was giving a pre-concert talk for Bonesetter’s Daughter, I looked up to see a familiar face in the crowd: Liu Xuefeng, one of the most active and independent-minded music critics in Beijing.

Xuefeng is quite famous at home for regularly attending festivals like Bayreuth and Salzburg that most critics in China still treat as quasi-mythic entities. He’s reported from La Scala, Covent Garden and the Vienna State Opera, but never before from America. I made sure to catch up with him in San Francisco Opera’s pressroom at intermission.

“The dedication of the audience is so much greater here than in Europe,” he said. “The number of people attending a pre-concert talk, and their level of concentration, was remarkable. We’re just starting to present public lectures like this in China, but they are usually feature events in themselves. We should also implement talks before every performance. Many operas that are standard in the West are still new in China.”

I didn’t want to tell him that the attendance was due more to a particularly San Francisco subject matter and the celebrity of Amy Tan than to the regular opera audience, but he quickly moved on to discuss Simon Boccanegra and the final dress rehearsal of Die tote Stadt, which he’d seen earlier that week. After seeing three events on three afternoons, Xuefeng is now hooked on matinee performances, which rarely take place in China.

“There’s a huge level of acceptance in the audience here,” he said. “European audiences would be far more picky about seeing three such completely different operas in the same place.”

Since I had a pretty good idea by now how the Chinese press is treated, I asked him what he thought of the SFO press office and what China had to learn.  “First of all, there’s mutual respect here,” he said. “Respect breeds responsibility. The ultimate goal is to serve the art, not for individual gain. In China, there is too much bartering for mutual benefit, and this is false both to your readers and to the art.”

I know a bit about such bartering in China, where journalists get packets of money (the standard payment is about 200RMB [US$25] to attend a press conference, 1000 RMB [US$120] to write more than a few lines). But critics often have to temper their reviews, lest they be blacklisted by press departments and denied tickets or any media assistance for their publication.

“Also, they’re very good on program content  – the program book itself and the press materials, both of which are underdeveloped in China,” he continued. “There is attention to detail and a level of preparation here that is not the rushing around at the last minute we’re used to.”

I wanted to tell Xuefeng that there was plenty of last-minute rushing around at the SFO press office, especially this early in the season, but he did have a point. I did break down and tell him that the Chinese-language materials were prepared especially for Bonesetter and not to expect them for, say, Porgy and Bess later in the season.

“Promotion for arts organizations is very new in China,” he added. “Five years ago, you couldn’t even get production shots to run with a review. Now presenters and critics both have to think about how to sustain and develop that relationship, because that is also the way they can cultivate their audience.”

 


Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Closed

A Cloudy ‘Tea’

September 30th, 2008

by Ken Smith

Back before the Olympic madness in Beijing and my full immersion in The Bonesetter’s Daughter in San Francisco, I put out word for anyone to help explain what precisely was being premiered in the “global premiere” of Tan Dun’s Tea at Beijing’s National Centre for the Performing Arts. I’ve just recently noticed that the director Chiang Ching herself has addressed her production at length in the September issue of Ming Pao Monthly; her account of bringing Tea to China shows how ugly the performance climate there can still be.

In a five-page article, Chiang tells the highbrow Hong Kong journal that her frustrations with the production last July began when the Department of Commerce decided that her name – precisely the same characters as the infamous Madame Mao – was deemed too sensitive to use during the Olympic season. “In 1987 I was invited on an eight-city modern-dance tour of China,” the choreographer-turned-director writes. “No presenters told me I needed to change my name. But 21 years after [China’s] reform the right to use my own name was taken away.”

A few weeks later, she discovered that representatives from the Ministry of Culture had attended rehearsals unannounced. The Beijing production, which she admits was “largely based” on the version premiered in Stockholm in November 2007, was deemed “pornographic and unsuitable” for the public stage in China. Though nothing was put in writing, the Ministry did uncharacteristically explain its reasons: (1) “when the male and female characters are hugging in the second act, you cannot have light on them,” and (2) “they cannot be shown later rolling on the floor.”

Then came the projections. Chiang’s original concept in Stockholm featured a series of childlike sketches by the artist Ding Xiongquan portraying animals mating projected on bolts of white silk while dancers paraded around them. In Beijing, Chiang got a late-night phone call telling her that she had to “remove the mammals.” The next day the Ministry cleared the revised projections, but told her that the dancers and the silk were still “unclean.” The images ended up being projected on the back wall.

At each step of the way, Chiang kept asking to have the Ministry’s demands put in writing, or to speak to the leaders directly. Neither request was granted. “People would only say, ‘I understand your situation, but I can’t help you,’” she writes. “They would say, ‘The Olympics is a special time. We cannot have a single wrong.’”

From a safe distance at Sweden, Chiang ponders the past year in China: “Is this what is happening to the country? Is this the current climate?”

Tags: , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Closed

China Overseas

September 13th, 2008

by Ken Smith

Okay, now I have to come clean. For most of the last month I’ve been away from China. Mostly I’ve been in San Francisco for rehearsals of The Bonesetter’s Daughter opera by Stewart Wallace and Amy Tan. This is not exactly getting away from China, since most of the cast and several of the instrumentalists are Chinese, but more on that later. Mostly I’ve been awaiting the release of Fate! Luck! Chance!, my book about the opera and the creative process behind it.

On the way to San Francisco, though, I stopped in Manila for the local premiere of David Henry Hwang’s Golden Child. This was a bit of a homecoming for the playwright, who based his 1997 Obie Award-winning work on an oral history he conducted in his childhood with his grandmother in the Philippines. In the play, a Chinese trader converts to Christianity, inspired by the modernity of business associates in Manila; the key figure, though, is Second Wife, whose opportunistic power play disposes of his other two wives and abandons the family’s Chinese values.

Now for the local subplot: most of the relatives in Manila – including Doreen Yu, the Manila journalist and arts activist who was largely responsible for the Philippine production –were descendants of Second Wife, who comes off as a “royal bitch” (to quote the playwright). I love a good family squabble, so I’d booked ringside seats.

Alas, the relatives were good sports. Judging by the intermission chatter, Second Wife was just a feisty realist who did what she had to do in changing times. First Wife’s suicide by opium overdose, though, was judged a tad harsh.

What resonated more, though, was the play’s narrative technique, where the ghost of the DHH-surrogate’s mother appears and hauls him into the past, where she relives her youth and he assumes the role of his grandfather. It’s more or less the same technique being used in The Bonesetter’s Daughter.

I pulled David aside for a few moments at the opening night reception to ask him about that. He found it rather suspicious that Amy Tan had been writing her 2001 novel around the time that Golden Child was on Broadway, until I pointed out that ghost-ancestor thing was not in the original book but only in the stage production.

“Well, I guess it’s okay,” he said, smiling. “I mean, I got the bit about eating opium from The Joy Luck Club.”

*

Playing next door to Golden Child in the main theatre at the Cultural Center of the Philippines was Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella staring Lea Salonga. The event was rather appropriate, given that female domestic workers are the country’s principal export, and that the Philippine-born Tony Award-winner is something of a Cinderella story herself. Having the country’s most accomplished singer-actress back home in this production meant that thousands of local fans who know only her recordings finally got the chance to see her perform live.

What’s potentially more exciting, though, is what this might mean in the future. After Cinderella ends its run in Manila, Broadway Asia Entertainment plans to move the production to China, opening in Xian and moving later to at least a dozen other cities. Judging by bars and lounges throughout Asia, musicians are another major export of Philippines; given the growing Chinese addiction to Broadway musicals, this could well be a model for the future. China may draw fire from subcontracting in other industries, but as far as theatre is concerned, the country can now outsource its out-of-town tryouts.

 

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Closed

Classical music and media in China 4

August 11th, 2008

by Ken Smith

After my review in the Financial Times asked what exactly was new in the “global premiere” of “the Chinese version” of Tan Dun’s opera Tea at Beijing’s National Centre for the Performing Arts, I got an email from someone insisting that, based on the photo that ran in the print edition of the FT, the production is indeed the one that premiered last fall at the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic’s International Composer’s Festival. I’m still keen to know what was new here. Interestingly enough, the sole credit given to the Stockholm Philharmonic in the program (in the smallest type possible) concerned the most problematic element of the evening. During a love scene on stage between the main characters, a Japanese monk and a Chinese princess, the scene incorporates background projections of animals mating. The version created for Stockholm apparently went well beyond the birds and the bees, and Chinese censors balked. A shortened version was later approved, leaving the production team to interpret the censors’ silent ruling as “No mammals.”

*

One of the more remarkable things about the marketing for the Tea premiere last week was the absence of the director’s name in Chinese. Placed awkwardly on a vertical Chinese design were two words in English you had to turn your head to read: the name “Chiang Ching.” The problem for the Taiwan-born, American-based dancer-director – who is probably most famous in operatic circles for choreographing Franco Zeffirelli’s Turandot for the Met – is that she shares the exact given name of the most hated women in modern China. Not only did the Ministry of Culture refuse to print her Chinese name in public – it did appear in the program – but they acknowledged her only in the officially detested Wade-Giles method of Romanization (still the standard in Taiwan) rather than the mainland system of pinyin, where she would be “Jiang Qing,” the same as the infamous wife of Mao Zedong, who remains she-who-must-not-be-named in the Chinese media. In this regard, Tan could’ve learned a lesson from his Columbia University colleague Bright Sheng, whose opera “Madame Mao,” written for the Santa Fe Opera in 2003, is still unmentioned in the Chinese media. Sheng was widely assumed to have been blacklisted from China performances for several seasons after Santa Fe had announced the commission.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Closed

Classical music and media in China 3

August 11th, 2008

by Ken Smith

I was already committed to seeing opening night of the Chinese premiere of Tan Dun’s Tea last Wednesday when tickets were circulating for a “special preview” of the Olympic opening ceremony at the National Stadium. Nah, let’s be honest — I would’ve never gotten a ticket. “We didn’t invite any media guests,” an outraged Beijing Olympic spokeswoman insisted after a two-minute preview of the festivities appeared on South Korean television. But I did have plenty of spies there.

Forget the Paris-based composer Chen Qigang’s intentions to “create something original,” or the New York-based choreographer Shen Wei’s goals of “presenting Chinese culture in a modern way.” Despite having a few genuinely striking moments – two scenes, one with 2008 Chinese drummers and another with presumably the same number of martial artists, are apparently highly effective – the rest of the events unfold (according to a friend who emailed me immediately) in a bland musical wash of “Chinese elevator music” featuring a few traditional instruments and a “speck on stage” at the piano that may or may not have been Lang Lang (The pianist was in Beijing that day, incidentally, to promote the release of a new compilation CD for the Chinese market).

Any pretense to art at the opening ceremony was apparently thrown out the window after an earlier rehearsal on July 16, when uncomprehending senior officials ordered the more esoteric moments removed, leaving the musical team scrambling to re-record their portions of the program. (There is never live music on CCTV; nothing is ever left to chance in the Chinese media.) Apparently, very little of Shen Wei’s influence remains in the show (In this respect, he can commiserate with the Shanghai-based choreographer Duo Duo Huang, who suffered a similar fate at the hands of the same director, Zhang Yimou, with Tan Dun’s First Emperor at the Metropolitan Opera.)

Incidentally, without the athletes’ entrance or the fireworks display, the musical portion runs only about 75 minutes.

*

Getting back to that news leak on Korean television, the Chinese have been treating this literally as a violation of national security. From the beginning, any breach of confidentiality among those involved in the opening ceremony was punishable by up to seven years in jail. Since the leak, Chinese media have, in no uncertain terms, been ordered to “stop all speculation” about the opening ceremony. All mainland Chinese websites carrying footage of the event have been ordered to delete it.

The footage has also disappeared from Youtube, which cites “a copyright claim by a third party.” It reappeared briefly on Liveleak.com, with the heading “the video you weren’t supposed to see,” but has been removed there as well.

At least for the moment, you can still see the Korean footage here. The Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) has already threatened legal action against the broadcaster. They haven’t seemed to acknowledge postings that originated from thousands of invited guests, the vast majority of them carrying mobile phones capable of shooting video clips.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Closed

Classical music and media in China 2

August 11th, 2008

As promised, more on Alex’s New Yorker piece. I was heartened to see someone else seeking out some of the same people in China I find interesting (Alex and I have been the only Western journalists granted interviews with composer Chen Qigang, the music director of the Olympic opening ceremony, recently of Boosey & Hawkes) and picking up on the naked nexus of Culture, Politics and Money that is today’s China. Not that this intersection doesn’t occur elsewhere in the world, but other places have a bit more decorum. In China, the components scream out in capital letters.

Not only did I see items I’d first reported cropping up in The New Yorker (Alex graciously acknowledged me later on his blog), but also fresh stuff that Alex dug up reappearing a few days later in Mark Swed’s review of Lang Lang in the Los Angeles Times. At least the content was still valid. Usually, the second time someone quotes something about China it’s already out of date.

Which brings me to one particular phrase that keeps coming back to haunt me: that China is the sole remaining growth market for classical music. I’ve made that statement a handful of times and I’ve read it under dozens of other bylines, usually as part of some sweeping generalization. Alex, for his part, had “serious doubts about China’s putative lock on the musical future” but admired the “chaotically rich” soundscape of Beijing, which only goes to show how hard it is to make a sensible statement about China in a single paragraph. (At least Alex has enough space in the magazine to befit his optimistic ears and skeptical wits.)

I first used that line in the Financial Times, where explaining “growth market” would be like explaining “tonality” in Gramophone. I still stand that original assessment, but I realize it needs more clarification. Technically, “growth market” refers to an increase in demand for something over time, but most of us in the West have a rather domesticated concept of the term.

In the broader context, growth markets are where, instead of a measly 4 percent a year, you can double your investment (or, conversely, lose it all). Growth markets often don’t take American Express. Growth markets probably don’t even have flushing toilets. China is a growth market precisely because it has so much room to grow.

This is what makes reviewing concerts in China a challenge: How to be fair both to China and to readers in the West? The average performance level in Beijing or Shanghai – making allowances for a few truly outstanding events – is nowhere near as consistent as New York or London. And yet, people appear on stage night after night doing the very things that got many of their parents thrown in prison.

In China, a “growth market” means that a concert is often not just a concert; any given event can still be a pioneering model for other presenters to build on.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Closed

Classical music and media in China 1

August 10th, 2008

by Ken Smith

Let me take a moment to thank all my friends for sending me Alex Ross’s Symphony of Millions article a few weeks ago. I was seeing events for the Financial Times in Beijing and Shanghai, which meant there was probably no way I would’ve found it myself. If you try to log onto Alex’s blog in China, you get a web error. Try newyorker.com and it takes so long to load that your browser eventually times out. Either way, the result – or lack thereof – is the same.

For anyone interested in The Great Firewall of China, I highly recommend James Fallow’s article in The Atlantic, even though it was published six months ago. If you’ve been following the “free internet” debate about the Olympics in the past week, you realize even six days is ancient history as far as China concerned.

What no one’s mentioned, though, is the treatment of the local media. The Chinese media never posed a real threat, but those pesky expats simply can’t be trusted. A few days ago, Time Out Beijing just had its June issue finally released by the censors, who’d been holding it for no stated reason. (“Killing the chicken to scare the monkey” is a particularly apt Chinese aphorism this year.) Also in June, the publisher of Time Out‘s chief competitor, the similarly opinionated That’s Beijing, unilaterally cut loose its entire editorial staff and put out a highly substandard (but much tamer!) replacement magazine. (The editors, who clearly saw this coming, quickly found a new partner and published their July edition under their existing web name, The Beijinger.)

For those of us in China who don’t read the language (and that includes many people who speak it well), it just got much harder to find out what’s going on in Beijing. Not that ready access to the media would always help: two of the six July concerts I wanted to see after reading The Beijinger had been cancelled without notice by the time I tried to get tickets.

But I digress. I really wanted to talk more about Alex. Of all the parachutists who’ve been dropping in to survey the Chinese scene, he at least did his homework beforehand. More on this in my next missive, I promise – but first, a question of names for this blog. I came up with SinoFile mostly because I could never resist a really bad pun. But I’m open to suggestions.


Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Closed

Welcome to the New MusicalAmerica.com!

August 10th, 2008

We’ve redesigned MusicalAmerica.com around two primary goals: to share some new services and to better present our current services.

Beyond our exciting new look, we’ve improved MusicalAmerica.com to help you:

  • plan tours and travel easily with Travel Planner Pro—the 1st 200 subscribers by 1 October are eligible to win a Blackberry or iPhone!
  • interact directly with key members of the performing arts community on our new MA Blogs, a free service to all readers.

And this is just the beginning—we’ll continue to add new features in the coming weeks. In the meantime, we’re eager to know what you think! Let us know in the comments box below.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Closed

Newer Entries »