Eastern Musicians Excel in ‘Bravo, China!’

“Pleasant News From Beijing Arrives in Mountain Villages” was the title of the cheery concert overture by two composers, Lu Zheng and Hong-Ye Ma, and that was the news Beijing strove to bring to the hills of Hollywood Wednesday night in a gala concert at the Hollywood Bowl sponsored by the People’s Republic of China. Takeover euphoria having crossed the International Date Line, this concert, called “Bravo, China!” was also meant as pleasant news to the Chinese people. By the time you read this, some 1 billion people in China will have had the opportunity to watch the videotape of the concert.

There was much here to make them proud: Musicians, born and trained in mainland China, performing standard Western repertory with skill and distinction. They were also Westerners, namely the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, enthusiastically and, with virtuosity, performing music--the “Yellow River” Piano Concerto, the “Butterfly Lovers” Violin Concerto, a suite of themes of Chinese folk music--that resonates deeply in the modern-day Chinese culture, although it sounds suspiciously like skillful kitsch to clueless Westerners.

And, indeed, some of the news from Beijing really is pleasant. These are strong, often very forthright performers, beginning with the evening’s conductor, Yong-Yan Hu. (The names are listed as in the program, Western style, with family name second.) Trained in China and at Yale and Juilliard, Hu is now music director of orchestras in Lincoln, Neb., and in Duluth, Minn. We don’t know him well yet here, but he is a star in China, having made some 50 recordings.

Hu had a wide range of music to conduct, from the Chinese pieces to Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide” Overture, and he did so with impressive surety and vigor. The soloists were many. Ying Huang, the soprano who stars in Frederic Mitterand’s recent film of “Madama Butterfly,” sang an aria from Donizetti’s “Don Pasquale”; American cellist Bion Tsang played a movement from Lalo’s Cello Concerto; pianist Xiang-Dong Kong was soloist in the last movement of the “Yellow River” Concerto; violinist Si-Qing Lu, soloist in the “Butterfly Lover’s Concerto”; Bo Song sang “La donna e mobile.” Yuan-Yan Tan and Dong-Sheng Wei danced a pas de deux from “Swan Lake.”

If one thing can be said of all these performers, it is that they are superbly trained in Western techniques, and they exhibit an aggressive flair that should take them far.

Still, what this concert mirrored was the ceremony of the hand-over: a formal handshake between President Jiang Zemin and Prince Charles, but no sign of friendship.

Music, however, tells us a different story, especially in California. All century long, Chinese music has pervaded our own culture, beginning with Henry Cowell and carried through the present. Lou Harrison has just written a splendid concerto for the pipa, a plucked Chinese instrument, and string orchestra, not yet heard on the West Coast. Electronic music composer Carl Stone and the Kronos Quartet have each also lately been collaborating with pipa players.

There is “Nixon in China,” John Adams’ opera, which deals directly with the issue of communication between cultures and seems downright prescient in light of the morning news. Local director Peter Sellars is currently embarked on a new project with Peking Opera stars living in Los Angeles and with Tan Dun, the Chinese composer living in New York.

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But this is the pleasant news for the Chinese people from California that Beijing does not seem eager to broadcast. There is more, too, in that a number of composers who have emigrated to the U.S. from China over the past decade or so have begun to make a significant contribution to American music. China is not oblivious. Tan was commissioned to write a wild and, in places, wonderful hand-over symphony that will be premiered tonight in Hong Kong and repeated Saturday in Beijing.

But “Bravo, China!” would have none of it. The closest it came to acknowledging that something more than a handshake between the two cultures was possible was plain goofy--a Hungarian Csardas, written by an Italian composer, Vittorio Monti, transcribed for erhu, a Chinese bowed instrument, and orchestra and played with delicious flair by the soloist Karen Hwa-Chee Han.

A billion people deserve more and better news than that.