In China, Rivals Conduct a Feud

The white gloves are off in the rarefied world of classical music in China, where a nasty feud between two of the country’s top orchestras has the art scene here abuzz.

Mass defections by musicians, vitriolic published attacks, shadowy political intrigue--all are elements that have combined to make for a backstage drama full of as much sturm und drang as a Mahler symphony.

The source of the disharmony is a bitter battle between the venerable 45-year-old China National Symphony Orchestra and the recently formed China Philharmonic Orchestra, an upstart that has managed to upstage and almost upend its better-established rival within the space of a single year.

Time was when the National Symphony was the premier purveyor of both Western and Chinese classical music in China, a state-sponsored ensemble able to attract the nation’s most gifted instrumentalists. The orchestra backed internationally known performers, put on ambitious programs in Beijing’s best concert halls and went on world tours.

But all that changed in May of last year when another state-sponsored orchestra, the lesser-known China Broadcast Symphony Orchestra, was remade as the China Philharmonic, boasting better management, better connections and, most important, better funding than its older rival.

Where the National Symphony struggled to make ends meet on a paltry government subsidy from the Chinese Ministry of Culture, the China Philharmonic has been flush with cash. A Hong Kong billionaire pledged an annual donation of $1.3 million. And the Chinese Communist Party’s Propaganda Department, the remade orchestra’s government overseer, ordered another of its properties, the national TV network, to fork over $1.2 million a year to its sister organization--a hefty sum in China.

“They found a very rich boss,” Wu Zuqiang, honorary president of the Central Conservatory of Music, said of the reconfigured orchestra.

With money like that, the China Philharmonic was instantly a force to be reckoned with. It bought new instruments and set about filling out its complement of 120 musicians, a huge ensemble that makes it one of the largest orchestras, if not the largest, in Asia.

That’s when things got nasty.

Lured by offers of twice or even three times their current salaries, 30 players in the National Symphony decided to jump ship and join the new ensemble.

Their former orchestra was suddenly stripped of a third of its talent only a few months before the start of its new concert season.

“It’s an unbearable attack on any orchestra,” Chen Zuohuang, then the National Symphony’s artistic director, told a reporter at the time. “The China National Symphony Orchestra represented the top level of symphonic performance in China and has built up a good reputation in the world. It’s been destroyed.”

To make matters worse, a popular Beijing magazine, Golden Sword, then published a scathing assault on the older orchestra and on Chen himself.

Chen, a U.S.-trained conductor, was described as a tyrant who not only ran roughshod over his musicians but also sexually harassed some of them. The article accused the ensemble of becoming a “decadent” organization and a source of embarrassment to “Chinese around the world.”

The article’s origin remains murky. But such an excoriating broadside on the National Symphony, which is technically an organ of the state, could not have appeared in the government-controlled media without official approval from somewhere.

“That article definitely had political forces” behind it, said Wu, who calls the attack irresponsible and immoral.

Equally mysterious, members of the arts community say, a rebuttal that Chen had prepared for a Beijing newspaper was pulled from publication at the last minute, fueling further rumors of a larger battle being played out behind the scenes.

Internecine warfare is common in China’s bloated bureaucracy, and speculation immediately focused on a feud between the two sponsoring agencies, the Propaganda Department and the Culture Ministry.

One theory has it that propaganda officials were jealous of the prominence of the National Symphony and decided to pour their resources into developing a comparable ensemble. This meant not just money, but some well-placed advisors, including a daughter of China’s late leader Deng Xiaoping, and an arts official, Li Nan, who used to work at the National Symphony and reportedly vowed revenge on his former employer after leaving under a cloud in 1998. Li manages the Poly Theater, a posh new venue and one of Beijing’s best concert halls, where the China Philharmonic has given its training concerts during the past year.

But the Chinese government’s lack of transparency makes it hard to know the truth that lies beneath the clash of the musical titans.

“For sure there’s a lot of untold rivalry,” said Oliver Chou, a Hong Kong-based journalist who has followed the tempest closely. “Over what, I don’t know. Fame? Vanity?”

Last July, dispirited by the exodus of musicians and the attack on his credibility, Chen resigned from the National Symphony. He is now back in the U.S. and living in Kansas. He could not be reached for comment.

His successor, Tang Muhai, who once worked with the legendary Berlin Philharmonic leader, Herbert von Karajan, has hopes that his orchestra can recover its footing. The players poached by the China Philharmonic have been replaced, and the National Symphony is back to its full strength of about 90 musicians. Many of the hires are newly minted graduates of music academies.

Observers agree that the quality of the National Symphony’s playing has declined and that a lot more ensemble training is necessary for it to recapture its former unified sound.

“This will take time,” Yu Songlin, the orchestra’s chairman, acknowledged in an interview.

Yet critics say the same holds true for the China Philharmonic, which, for all its enthusiasm and waxing fortunes, is still a musical group in its infancy.

“There are 30 new musicians over at the National Symphony, but 60 veterans are left. At the China Philharmonic, basically everyone is new,” said Wu, the central conservatory’s honorary president. “They have a lot of power, but they need a lot more practice as an ensemble.”

Their artistic director and principal conductor is Yu Long, an ebullient 37-year-old. Yu, the grandson of a well-known composer in China, has conducted orchestras throughout Europe, including Berlin and London.

Yu is a major fixture in the classical music scene in China. He spearheaded the Beijing Music Festival, which is in its fourth year and has attracted world-famous performers such as Martha Argerich and Julian Lloyd Webber.

The audience for Western classical music in China is surprisingly deep given its foreign origins. Music by Bach and Beethoven didn’t even hit these shores until the 1920s, brought to China by returning exchange students, expatriates and Christian missionaries.

The country’s first Western-style orchestra was founded in the 1930s in Shanghai, but at the time, it had only foreign musicians and played only for foreign audiences. That ensemble was the precursor to today’s Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, China’s oldest and among the country’s top three.

The appetite for Western classical music grew during succeeding decades, even after the Communist takeover in 1949. In fact, China’s exposure to it increased in step with its close ties with the Soviet Union during the first years of the People’s Republic. The National Symphony was founded in Beijing in 1956. Now, most of China’s major cities have orchestras, and top leaders profess themselves fans. President Jiang Zemin says he loves Mozart.

Yu sees plenty of room for his ensemble and the older orchestra. “They have different audiences, different fans, different programming,” he said. “Competition is always good. You want to get to the audience; you want to do better.”

He denies deliberately trying to undermine the National Symphony or to steal its musicians. “We just announced auditions and people showed up,” he said. “If people are happy with the National Symphony, why would they leave? Nobody forced them.”

Yu harbors ambitions of turning his orchestra into an international artistic force. He recently announced the China Philharmonic’s demanding plan to perform all the symphonies by Beethoven, Mahler and Shostakovich in three years.

He concedes the need for improvement, which he feels his orchestra can achieve quickly.

But whether the classical music scene here can recover as fast from a year of dissonance and discord is not so clear.

“What we are now seeing is a transition,” Chou said. “What will come out of it is anybody’s guess. No one knows.”....It’s been destroyed.”