Two cultures, acting in concert

On a 45-mile drive Monday afternoon from the Times building in downtown Los Angeles to the Irvine Barclay Theatre, I passed through or very close to large Latino, Chinese, Indian and Vietnamese communities. Had I pulled off the freeway, I could easily have found myself in neighborhoods where I couldn’t read the store signs.

My destination was the first concert in the Pacific Symphony’s annual American Composers Festival. This year, it is called “Tradewinds From China,” and all the music is by Chinese-born composers.

Yet as my drive demonstrated, there is for an American -- and particularly an Angeleno -- little strange in that prospect. The pieces on Monday’s program by Tan Dun and Bright Sheng speak a language that most anyone who enjoys classical music should be able to understand. These composers have been part of the American musical landscape for the last 15 years.

Tan, indeed, is all but ubiquitous. He won an Academy Award for his score to “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and is working on a commission from the Metropolitan Opera. His Pipa Concerto, played Monday, was programmed by the Pasadena Symphony less than two months ago; his children’s piece, “Inventions for Paper Instruments and Orchestra,” was the first new music played in Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Sheng’s “Madame Mao,” meanwhile, was the big news at Santa Fe Opera last summer, and his “The Song and Dance of Tears,” premiered by the New York Philharmonic a year ago, was, I thought, of unforgettable sensual beauty. Even the orchestra’s ultraconservative and often culturally myopic audience clearly agreed.

These two composers -- along with several others who were born well-off and then forced as teenagers into the fields during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, before emigrating to America in the early ‘80s -- represent a profound meeting of cultures. This was surely evident during the opening concert, called “Diary of a Revolution,” which featured Sheng’s “H’un” (Lacerations) and Tan’s Pipa Concerto.

“H’un,” composed in 1988 when Sheng was 33 and just finishing his American training, is the music of an ambitious, angry composer whose wounds were still raw and for whom the American experience was still new. It is aggressive, harsh-sounding music that lashes out before ultimately seeking meditative peace. But there is also a curious under-layer of enthusiasm. Enraptured with the language of the Western orchestra, Sheng almost seems to be enjoying his outrage, and we certainly do. The deprivations of the Cultural Revolution may have forced him to grow up too quickly, but in “H’un” he recaptures the fervor of youth. Conducted fiercely but not ferociously by Carl St.Clair, the piece sounded as fresh here as it did 16 years ago at its premiere in New York.

In Tan’s recent Pipa Concerto, a giddy merging of traditions and a leapfrogging through music history, cultural integration is effortless. The pipa, a Chinese lute, may be exotic in Western music, but it is no longer alien. Lou Harrison wrote a glorious pipa concerto a few years ago, shortly before he died; Philip Glass gave the pipa a prominent role in his latest opera, “The Sound of a Voice.”

Monday’s soloist, Min Xiao-Fen, demonstrated the instrument’s (and her) versatility by introducing the pipa with a sassy, credible, improvised solo version of Thelonius Monk’s “Ask Me Now.” Were the festival a little more adventurous, it might have invited Min to perform with Carl Stone, the Bay Area master of sampling, as she sometimes does in rock clubs.

No single work exemplifies Tan’s range, which extends from uncompromising experimentalism to glad-handing populism. He can be outrageous at either extreme, or not. The Pipa Concerto adapts some of the music he wrote for the experimental “Ghost Opera” into a more traditional concerto format. The daring may be gone, but the concerto, with its theatrically virtuosic solo part, is winning nonetheless. At its heart is a slow movement in which Bach and Chinese melody seem to make elegant love to each other, and who could resist that?

Also on Monday’s program was a traditional Chinese melody, “Moon Reflected in the ErQuan Pool,” arranged for bass and orchestra and with DaXun Zhang as the eloquent soloist, and three songs from the Cultural Revolution arranged for chorus and piano by Sheng and sung by high school students.

“Tradewinds From China,” which continues through March 21, includes several other Chinese American composers and the participation of Yo-Yo Ma. It can only scratch the surface of a complex cultural phenomenon. But that surface is more than worth scratching.