Chinese American composers triumph

Compelling recent music by Chinese American composers Chen Yi, Joan Huang and Zhou Long made up the backbone of the second concert in the Pacific Symphony’s monthlong 2004 American Composers Festival, Sunday night in Founders Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

Dramatic and urgent, these pieces represent the fusion of their writers’ cross-cultural training and environments.

The rest of the program became filler, a series of irrelevancies that added length and a certain soporific effect to the evening. This was a variety show with too much variety. Musicologist Joseph Horowitz was the host.

Zhou Long’s “Tales From the Cave” (1998), conducted by Michael Hall, is a thrilling, intriguing concerto for the erhu and banhu virtuoso Karen Han -- whose string instruments sound not unlike a theremin, or a viola with a cold -- and, aided by four crackerjack Pacific Symphony percussionists, she made it an exhilarating experience. Chen Yi’s violent and angry “Ning,” played by pipa soloist Min Xiao Fen with violinist Raymond Kobler and cellist Timothy Landauer, held the large audience in thrall. Joan Huang’s “Two Madrigals,” a premiere given expertly by double-bassist Da-Vun Zhang and pianist Tom Macfarlane, is haunting and poignant.

The remainder of the evening included performances by a pre-professional high school chorus, a slide show by a bumbling UC Irvine art historian and added points of small interest. The bass player’s rendition of “Zigeunerweisen,” for instance, by the 19th century Spanish composer Pablo de Sarasate, was enjoyable but unnecessary in this context.