Symphonies & Scorpions: Duck, duck…duck!
WELCOME TO THE 18TH DAILY INSTALLMENT OF SYMPHONIES & SCORPIONS: AN INTERNATIONAL CONCERT TOUR AS AN INSTRUMENT OF CITIZEN DIPLOMACY.
I INVITE YOU TO READ THE ENTIRE BOOK, ONE DAILY EPISODE AT A TIME, FOR FREE, OR YOU CAN PURCHASE THE BOOK IN ITS ENTIRETY (with photos not found here) IN PAPERBACK OR KINDLE, HERE.
ENJOY!
(P.S. If you FOLLOW me, you’ll be sent all future episodes automatically!)
Beijing, Friday, May 2
[image error]
10:30am-1:00pm REHEARSAL National Centre for the Performing Arts 7:30pm CONCERT National Centre for the Performing Arts CHARLES DUTOIT, conductor BEHZOD ABDURAIMOV, piano
Duck, Duck…Duck
Finally, a good night’s sleep. Six-and-a-half hours, but that’s all I need.
I awake to a cool morning and blue sky, the rain having cleansed the heavens of carbon emissions. As if transformed by the change in the weather, the guard at the second rehearsal is much more accommodating and we breeze right through security like a spring zephyr.
I can’t leave Beijing without eating world-famous Peking duck, but there being no more free nights, I have to make do with a pre-concert “early bird” dinner. With Ronan and Chan, we pay a visit to a nearby Peking duck restaurant called Sijiminfu that my hutong guide recommended. Six or seven courses of duck parts in different guises, along with soup and side dishes. Fantastic! I’m a sucker for crispy skin. The only course less than delectable is the duck broth soup, which Chan poetically likens to warm dishwater.
Restaurant service in this country has so far been peculiar. Waitresses walk up to the table, offer no words of acknowledgement let alone welcome, and take your order without a nod of recognition. You can’t even tell if they’ve understood your order. At first, I chalk this up to my Western bias of how things are done, but then Chan, as if reading my thoughts, says, “You know what they need in China? Customer service.”
The orchestra arrives en masse at the National Centre thinking we have the security routine down pat. Wrong. The new guard unaccountably decides we are once again a national security threat. He won’t let anyone through, even after getting into a brouhaha with three of our heavy hitters: Guido Frackers, President of Travtours; Jasper Parrot, Dutoit’s manager; and Ray Wellbaum, the BSO’s orchestra manager. The guard does his personal best imitation of the Great Wall, stalwartly holding his ground against the invading barbarian hordes, until Frackers takes it upon himself to order the musicians through. The guard frantically shouts and waves his arms. To help him save face, I suppose, Frackers consents to having our IDs inspected. An uneasy truce. It would have been interesting had we been denied access to our own performance.
I suggest that a less confrontational way of resolving the disagreement might have been to offer the guard our complete cooperation: Have the orchestra do an about-face, return to the buses, and invite the guard to announce to the audience, with the US ambassador in attendance, “Ladies and gentlemen, I regret to inform you that the concert tonight is cancelled because I couldn’t be certain this group of a hundred Americans carrying instruments was truly the Boston Symphony.”
At the same time, I feel for the guy. I’m sure he had regulations drummed into him, was just trying to do his job, and was scared to death he’d lose it if he did the wrong thing. He got caught in the middle of a bureaucratic snafu like I’d gotten stuck in the line at the Forbidden City, where it was almost impossible not to be carried along like a leaf on a river. In a country of 1½ billion people, plus or minus a few hundred million, maintaining order is serious business. What a frightening prospect if such a huge population decided to thumb its nose at authority and go its own way, or ways! Government would be incapable of exerting any control at all. So, government resorts to repression, or rather suppression, as the lesser of two evils; nipping in the bud any action that it perceives might trigger anarchy. Better to detain people, throw some in jail, or just basically harass them than let their message spread like wildfire. On one hand, human rights get trampled, but imagine the chaos of a country like this losing control! Not that I agree with it, but that’s why I felt for the security guard. A loss of control of the situation, even for something as inconsequential as whether to allow foreign musicians to enter a concert hall, might have repercussions, because once the cat’s out of the bag…
A Moving Performance
PROGRAM: Mozart: Symphony No.38 in D, K.504 (Prague) Mahler: Symphony No.5
A much more positive encounter takes place when we finally manage to make it to the backstage, where BSO violinist Xin Ding has an emotional reunion with her old violin professor, Zhenshan Wang.
Xin studied at the Beijing Conservatory from 1992-1995 and credits Wang, one of China’s preeminent violin teachers, for seeing her true potential and giving her the confidence to realize it. “He turned my life around,” she told me. Wang, himself, had an elite pedigree, having studied in Hungary with the great Jewish Polish violinist, Bronislaw Huberman, before returning to China. Wang’s performance career, however, was cut short by the Great Cultural Revolution, when forced manual labor permanently ruined his manual dexterity.
After Xin left China for Boston in 1996, the two stayed in touch by phone and Internet, where Xin shared photos of her baby son. Tonight’s concert will be the first opportunity for Prof. Wang to see his protégé perform with the Boston Symphony.
He has picked an ideal occasion. The Mozart/Mahler program concert goes beautifully, and I’m wide awake for this one. What a difference a day makes! Prof. Wang says he was impressed beyond all his expectations at the sound of the orchestra in the Mahler, and was deeply moved.
[image error]BSO violinist, Xin Ding reunited with her childhood, Beijing violin teacher, Prof. Zhenshan Wang.
[image error]
Audiences in China are so much different than in my more familiar stomping grounds of Japan. And why shouldn’t they be? In Japan, the more they like something the more the applause accelerates, but it never varies much in volume, only in duration. Here in Beijing they were hootin’, hollerin’, whistlin’, and stamping their feet. Harpist Jessica Zhou’s family, occupying two entire rows she had bought for them, led the chorus. At $140 per ticket, I’d say they had the right to express their enthusiasm however they wanted.
It’s traditional in many countries to present the conductor with flowers onstage at the end of a concert. The conductor will then typically offer the bouquet to one of the women in the orchestra, particularly one who might have had a big solo. Tonight, a lovely young lady presented Dutoit with the bouquet. He gave her a peck on the cheek, as is also customary, which he appeared to relish. But instead of handing the flowers to a female musician, Dutoit marched to the back of the orchestra and gave them to principal trumpet, Tom Rolfs, who, as usual, had played the immortal trumpet solo at the beginning of the Mahler magnificently. The crowd roared. Not to be outdone, though, when Dutoit went to shake Tom’s hand, Tom took it in his and kissed it, which provoked an even louder roar and created a fine segue into our encore.
***
Click on the title if you’d like to purchase Symphonies & Scorpions in its entirety. It’s available in two paperback editions, one chock-full of black-and-white photos, the other with color photos, and in Kindle.
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.
