Symphonies & Scorpions: Shanghai in the Rain
WELCOME TO THE 21st DAILY INSTALLMENT OF SYMPHONIES & SCORPIONS: AN INTERNATIONAL CONCERT TOUR AS AN INSTRUMENT OF CITIZEN DIPLOMACY.
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Shanghai: Sunday, May 4
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6:30-6:45 ACOUSTIC REHEARSAL Shanghai Oriental Art Center 7:30pm CONCERT Shanghai Oriental Art Center CHARLES DUTOIT, conductor BEHZOD ABDURAIMOV, piano
Shanghai in the Rain
Ronan, Chan, and I embark upon a morning excursion to Old Shanghai, which according to the concierge is a hop, skip, and jump from where we’re staying. After several hops, skips, and jumps, we’re totally confused. First, we can’t find the subway station two blocks from our hotel until circumnavigating a few monstrous skyscrapers. Then, once we exit the subway at Nanjing Road station, we can’t figure out what direction to walk. That wasn’t all our fault; the concierge threw us a curve when she said all we’d have to do is walk along Nanjing Road pedestrian street. Not true. What we needed was perpendicular.
When we finally figure out which end is up, the rain comes down. In a Family Mart we find cheapo umbrellas that have the store logo emblazoned all over them, but as long as we stay dry we’re amenable to being walking advertisements.
The situation improves markedly as we near our destination. We take refuge from the rain in the cozy Qing Yuan Tea shop on Fang Bang road in the Huangpu District. We’re the only customers and are treated to a half hour of tea samplings by a charming young lady who not only knows her tea, but her English as well. For such cordially personal service, of course we have to buy a whole bunch of stuff—tea, teacups, goji berries. The essentials.
[image error]Sampling tea in Old Shanghai
Entering the heart of the Old City—all for tourists now, but the evocative traditional Chinese architecture is still intact and wonderfully nostalgic—we browse shops and restaurants before entering Yuyuan Garden. Wow!
Yuyuan Garden was first conceived in 1559 during the Ming Dynasty by Pan Yunduan, governor of Sichuan, as a comfort for his father, the minister Pan En, in his old age, but it wasn’t completed until 1577. Pan Yunduan must’ve had quite the resources in his day. The garden not only boasts a maze of captivating land and waterscaping, but intricately ornate, wooden structures as well. The soft rain adds to the contemplative beauty of the place and also serves as an incentive for the tourist hordes to stay put in their dumpling restaurants, thereby providing us with improbable and welcome tranquility.
Exiting Yuyuan Garden we encounter the aforementioned hordes at the local food court, which puts to shame anything we call a food court back home. The walls of the sprawling two-story edifice are an unbroken line of booths where freshly fried, broiled, baked, roasted, and steamed goods are delivered faster than a Henry Ford assembly line and placed on counters for diners to choose from, cafeteria-style. The dishes are snatched up by diners as quickly as they’re churned out. Everything from chicken feet to pork dumplings (I don’t really know which part of the pig is the dumpling) and all for chump change. The three of us eat like there’s no tomorrow for ten bucks each.
There is rest for the weary because I have it in the late afternoon. No sightseeing, just vegetating in my room. And with a 7:30 concert preceded by a 15-minute acoustic rehearsal at 6:30 there’s no need to bother with dinner. But don’t cry for me, because my palatial hotel room could well have been a destination on anyone’s sightseeing list. A tour guide would come in handy because you could get lost in the bathroom alone, with all its mirrors, glistening marble, and walk-in closet.
Bruised but Victorious
PROGRAM: Glinka: Overture to Russlan and Ludmilla Rachmaninoff: Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op.43 Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique, Op.14 (encore) Bizet: Farandole from L’Arlesienne Suite No.2
As a conscientious stand partner, I never pass up an opportunity to get Caroline to laugh, if at all possible in the most inappropriate moments. Shortly before the downbeat, she maneuvers the top of our unwieldy music stand about ninety degrees in order to nudge it a couple of inches higher so that both the music and conductor will be in our line of vision. As Caroline rotates the stand, for a moment all I can see is its back. Before she has a chance to finish her task, I complain in my best Teamsters voice, and not unlike some stand partners who don’t get along, “Hey, what-a-ya doin’? I can’t see da f—— music!”
We have our first casualties of the tour tonight. Two violinists are out sick, one with a nagging head cold exacerbated by the flight from Beijing so she couldn’t hear anything. The other violinist has been rehabbing from an injury and only recently returned to working part-time. She has only been playing the first half of concerts, which is usually the easier half, and therefore the less rehearsed. When recently she completed her portion of a rehearsal that lasted about fifteen minutes, Dutoit sardonically quipped, “Good gig.” On this occasion she has flu-like symptoms. She made it to the hall, but it’s being reported she’s “flat on her back,” in the dressing room. A couple days later, after she had recovered, she told me, all smiles, that she had blood coming out one ear.
The Rachmaninoff is also the recipient of some ill treatment. Abduraimov started out edgy and every time there’s a quick tempo he makes it faster, rushing so far ahead on occasion that Dutoit and the orchestra can’t keep up, throwing things out of whack. The audience, on the other hand, is blinded by the razzle-dazzle. Unaware of, or unconcerned with the intermittent tug o’ war, they demand an encore. Abduraimov exhumes a melancholic vignette by Tchaikovsky, as maudlin as the Rachmaninoff had been manic.
Playing Well with Others
The Symphonie fantastique in the second half of the concert is another kettle of fish entirely, with excellent pacing and controlled passion. It’s amazing how well together the musicians of the BSO play, because if I were forced to describe one thing that makes it challenging to play with them, it would be their tradition of playing what we call “behind the beat” (i.e. after the conductor’s gesture rather than simultaneous with it). I’m not sure how this comes about, but every orchestra has its own signature, its own sound that develops over generations, and how it responds to a conductor’s beat is part of that signature. It’s neither good nor bad, it simply is, and with the BSO it seems to be as true today as when I was in the orchestra with Seiji Ozawa. When we play pizzicato, it sometimes leaves me guessing when the popcorn’s going to pop, so I just fix my sights on concertmaster Malcolm Lowe and pluck my string when he does. It used to exasperate Colin Davis, who, when he was the BSO’s principal guest conductor, repeatedly asked to hear the sound simultaneous with his beat. On the other hand, in one of my first years in the orchestra we played the Coriolanus Overture by Beethoven with Eugene Ormandy conducting. He seemed totally unfazed that he was a half measure ahead of the orchestra, but in that particular piece, which is something of a rhythmic jigsaw puzzle, I was not nearly as unperturbed as he was and felt a sense of extreme aural vertigo until the piece mercifully ended.
Remarkably, even though it sometimes feels as if everyone is waiting for the first person to dive in, the BSO almost always maintains its fine honed accuracy. Though from time to time Dutoit has explicitly requested that we play precisely with his beat, for the most part it doesn’t seem to bother him when we don’t. And at other times he drives the tempo forward, his beat is ahead of us by a second or two, and he has to wait until we catch up, though if you had your eyes closed you’d never know. In any event it keeps us on our toes and makes for a lot of excitement. The audience demands an encore from us after the Berlioz and, unlike the Rachmaninoff, in this case they’re justified.
Painful Lessons
After the concert, I join violinist Bo Hwang and cellist Jonathan Miller at the twenty-four-hour restaurant in the hotel for a late, light dinner.
The first time I auditioned for the BSO as a tenderfoot nineteen-year-old, it was Bo who won the job. The preliminary round took place on the stage of Symphony Hall in Boston. Though I’d had the thrill of performing at Carnegie Hall in a youth chamber orchestra as a teenager, I had never played alone in a hall with such wonderful acoustics, and simply placing my bow on the string seemed to get the most beautiful sound to soar into the balcony. When I was selected as one of the finalists—this being my first serious orchestra audition—I have to admit my head was a little swelled.
The final round took place at Avery Fisher Hall, the home of the New York Philharmonic, while the BSO was on tour. The reason for that odd arrangement was that it was the only available date left in the season when Seiji Ozawa and the orchestra were in the same place at the same time. I felt confident that I’d at least make a good showing, and who knows, maybe even grab the gold ring.
I walked out onto the stage, tuned my violin…and my stomach sank to my knees. The sound of my violin projected about 14½ inches, and then just stopped dead in its tracks. It was the deadest sound I had ever heard. I didn’t know what the hell to do. Should I just play as I normally did and hope the committee, which was seated in the audience behind a screen, didn’t think I had a namby-pamby sound? Or should I force the issue and try to muscle it out, risking some ugly, coarse playing? I couldn’t decide which was better or worse and ended up thrashing unsatisfactorily between the two extremes, whereas an experienced musician like Bo knew what to do; how to get the most out of the instrument while maintaining poise. But I was still a greenhorn and my audition went downhill from the get-go. Nevertheless, it was a valuable learning moment, and helped me understand that it takes more than just moving one’s fingers to be a good musician. I also took some solace with the knowledge that Fritz Kreisler, the early 20th-century virtuoso, was turned down for a job with the Vienna Philharmonic when he was a young man. That’s where the similarity ends.
Bo has always been as fine a gentleman as a violinist, and even though he has a teenage grandson he looks ten years younger than me. He and Jonathan have been friends even before I joined the BSO in ’75, and one would often find them backstage at Symphony Hall deeply absorbed in the ancient Chinese board game of Go. Jonathan, a very well read and philosophical sort, will soon be retiring after forty-three years in the orchestra. He’s a dedicated musician and the standup imitation he does of a caged baboon he once saw at the San Diego Zoo is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.
Our waitress, dangerously balancing a tray with one hand while serving us with her other, spills a couple bottles of beer. No harm is done and we tell her not to worry even as she apologizes profusely, but I think her boss is going to take it out on her because she’s replaced by another waitress and doesn’t return. When we leave, we tell her boss it was just an accident and she was a great waitress. Jon thought the boss replied, “I won’t give her any shit,” but I think he said, “I won’t shout at her.” In either case, I hope what he said was true.
***
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NEWS FLASH: MY FIRST POLITICAL THRILLER, THE BEETHOVEN SEQUENCE, IS SCHEDULED FOR RELEASE ON SEPTEMBER 8! A MENTALLY UNBALANCED MUSIC TEACHER BECOMES PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES! PREPOSTEROUS? STAY TUNED.
