China opens its ears

At 66, Zhou Yude is an elder statesman of Chinese culture.

As the recently retired director of the Institute of Chinese Traditional Opera, he can draw on more than 20 years of study to lecture at length about the nuances of a regionalized performance art that dates back 1,000 years.

Yet he’d never seen a Western opera live -- until late last month, when with a mixture of excitement and embarrassment he attended the Chinese premiere of Monteverdi’s “Orfeo,” one of the many works featured at this year’s Beijing Music Festival.

“It really broadens my horizon, because for Chinese like us, there have been very few opportunities to watch Western operas, especially early operas like this,” Zhou said, adding that he was aware of the festival organizers’ intent to expose Chinese ears to classical music.

“In me, they have achieved their purpose.”

Score one more for a musical event that, after considerable effort, appears to be gaining traction here with its crusade to use the strains of Beethoven, Debussy and Mozart as a bridge between East and West.

Now in its seventh season, the festival will wind up Friday having presented 26 performances over 23 days. This year’s offerings have included such marquee names as pianist Emanuel Ax and a mix of standard works such as Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” with more contemporary, offbeat orchestral pieces by contemporary Chinese composers.

Backed by corporate sponsors and the Communist government, the $3.5-million annual event is “already becoming one of the best festivals in the world,” says Lin Zhaoyang, a professor at Beijing’s Central Conservatory of Music.

“The musicians they invite are already the top musicians in the world,” says Lin, himself a concert violinist who played Schubert in a string quartet at the inaugural festival in 1998. “Everything’s going well.”

But although the festival has made a solid connection with music cognoscenti as well as a growing class of business professionals, it is still having trouble filling seats.

Despite a drastic ticket price cut of up to 80%, a number of the early concerts this year went begging for patrons in a land where classical music is still a novelty and annual per capita income hovers at just more than $1,000.

For instance, the audience for “Orfeo” filled barely more than half of Beijing’s cavernous Poly Theatre, giving the performance the feel of a midweek church service. The Forbidden City Concert Hall was only a third full for the Eroica Trio’s performance of Beethoven’s Triple Concerto.

The crowd was even smaller at the Poly Theatre to see the Shanghai Opera House production of “The Wager,” a modern Chinese opera that includes elements of Western music.

Those who sat through that performance seemed to be either related to or friends of the performers. Other die-hards, such as retired computer programmer Zhang Ming, stuck it out despite a growing exasperation.

“Going to concerts is very important to me as entertainment,” said Zhang. “But today, after seeing this play, the only feeling I have is that I’m utterly lost!

“Why? Why? The music has no tone. I can hardly hear what they are singing about,” she said, adding that she just didn’t get it. “Putting the Chinese and West together, it’s so strange.”

Not to Long Yu, who founded the festival with exactly that in mind.

An energetic 40-year-old with a bearlike presence, Long says his desire to bridge two cultures evolved from a childhood shaped by his family’s musical heritage and the last, harsh days of Mao Tse-tung.

As a youngster, he watched Red Guards force his grandfather, Chinese composer Ding Shande, to burn his collection of musical scores during the 1967-77 Cultural Revolution. The young Long learned piano by playing “revolutionary songs.”

Those cultural blinders came off, however, when, as a 15-year-old high school student, he attended a Shanghai concert by violin great Isaac Stern. He says he resolved then and there to seek his musical fortunes in the West. From 1988 to 1992, he studied at the Hochschule der Kunst in Berlin, then for the next few years conducted orchestras in Germany, Hungary, Switzerland and France before returning home with a mission.

“When I came back to China, I really felt that the Chinese people needed to know about the outside,” says Long, who believes his country’s insularity “is always a problem in our history. That makes the Chinese people pay a big price.”

Long says he started the festival as a “bridge” to close that cultural gap and give Chinese music students exposure to Western masters. The goal, he says, was not only to bring masterworks such as Mahler’s Eighth Symphony to Chinese ears but to debut lesser-known -- and sometimes controversial -- works in his homeland.

Thus, he raised eyebrows two years ago with his selection of the sexually charged opera “Lulu.” In 2006, there will be operatic gore as well: “Salome,” the bloody biblical tale of the dancing seductress who forced the beheading of John the Baptist.

Also in 2006, Mozart’s 250th birthday, Long has scheduled some of the composer’s “unknown chamber operas” as a tribute. Up next year: all 17 hours of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle.

For this year’s festival, Long chose as the festival’s core pieces two operas intended to underscore an almost eerie psychic commonality between East and West.

One was “Orfeo,” Monteverdi’s 1607 work depicting the ill-fated love story of Orpheus and Eurydice. With their marriage crushed by Eurydice’s death, Orpheus makes a bargain with Pluto to bring his wife back from the underworld, only to lose her again when he violates the deal by looking back as he leaves.

The other was “The Peony Pavilion,” written nine years earlier and a world away by Chinese great Tang Xianzu.

A massive and intricate work presented over three days, it tells the story of a woman so smitten by lovesickness that she dies, only to be brought back to life when her ghost convinces her future husband to dig up her grave.

Although “Orfeo” ends in tragedy and “Pavilion” in a wedding, they bear a striking similarity with their themes of true love transcending death. They also have markedly contrasting styles, something that was not lost on patron Fu Yiqing.

“Western music, especially symphony, is often more of a spectacle,” said Fu, a Beijing auction house employee who attended one of the three “Pavilion” concerts. “It’s not as subtle as Chinese opera like this, which goes into detail about the most subtle of human emotions.”

In recent years, Long, who is also founder and artistic director of Beijing’s Chinese Philharmonic Orchestra, has tried to make his cultural bridge a two-way street.

He’s added more pieces to the festival by Chinese composers and performers. Two years ago, the festival theme was “Chinese-ness,” the mixture of peculiarity and pride that distinguishes a society with a 6,000-year history.

Now, Long is working to bring in the Chinese. After running the festival on the largesse of corporate donors such as Nestle, Volkswagen, American Express and Sony, he persuaded the national government two years ago to begin underwriting the event for $2 million a year, or more than half the annual budget.

Meanwhile, he’s tackling the issue of lagging attendance. A thorny problem facing classical music in many places without a new concert hall, it has become almost a fact of life in China, where Beethoven and Brahms are not household names.

“It’s a growing market,” says Zhou Yue, granddaughter of former Chinese Premier Deng Xiaoping, who succeeded Mao and reversed China’s isolation with his policies of “opening up” the country to market economics and Western influences.

Zhou says that when she was 7 her grandfather took her to what she describes as the first concert of Western classical music ever held in Communist China, a performance by Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the Great Hall of the People in 1979.

Twenty-five years later, at a reception Friday after a sold-out recital by cellist Yo-Yo Ma, Wu looked around a room buzzing with such VIPs as the president of Sony, the head of the Chinese computer giant Lenovo and foreign investors from Monaco and Hong Kong. She predicted that, just as these wealthy backers had, more average Chinese citizens would eventually show up for classical music.

“The Chinese people have different music. We’re just learning,” she said. The festival “will fill up little by little.”

Long isn’t waiting around. Determined to get audience numbers up, he slashed ticket prices by 50% to 80% this year. The middle-tier seats dropped from $78 to $36, the least expensive from $6 to $1.50. VIP seating remained at $120 -- quite a stretch for the average Beijinger, but still far less than the $350 top for a recent concert here by Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli.

Asking Chinese patrons to pay that much is like telling New York socialites they have to fork over $20,000 for a night at the Metropolitan Opera, Long says.

“People will laugh at that. It’s crazy,” he says. “From the market side, it’s not good. For the audience, it’s not good. For the country, it’s not good.”

Festival organizers have credited the move for a number of sold-out concerts, including all three nights of “The Peony Pavilion” and the series opener, Gounod’s opera “Romeo et Juliette.”

Overall, the organizers say, this year’s performances have sold 80% of their available seats, compared with last year’s 65%. Those numbers don’t include the up to 300 seats per concert that are reserved for the sponsors and government but often go unused.

The seemingly indefatigable Long acknowledges that it is becoming “harder and harder to sell” classical music and fill the remaining seats with the Chinese masses, whose interest in Western musical compositions, such as it is, is tempered by grim economics.

Qu Zhe, a 17-year-old law student, said as much one night from the almost-cheap seats.

Sitting in a 60%-full auditorium to hear Italy’s Arturo Toscanini Philharmonic play the “William Tell Overture,” Qu described the yin-and-yang feelings he had crossing Long’s cultural bridge, even with its newly lowered toll.

“I think Western classical music is very good in terms of cultivating people,” he said. “I think if a lot of the common people can listen to this more often, then it can bring up the people’s quality.

“But now, it seems only the rich can come,” said Qu, whose $7.50 ticket would have been enough to keep a family in eggs and vegetables for three weeks. “It feels like this is a yearly event for the rich.”

Times researchers Yin Lijin and Bu Yang contributed to this report.