Chen Gang (b. 1935)/He Zhanhao (b. 1933)
Butterfly Lovers Violin concerto (1959)
Chen Gang (b. 1935)
Sunshine over Tashkurgan (1976, orch. Yang Li Qing)
Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840)
Violin concerto No 1 in D major, Op 6 (1815)
Chloe Chua (violin)
Singapore Symphony Orchestra/Rodolfo Barráez (Sunshine, Butterfly), Mario Venzago (Paganini)
rec. live, 2023, Victoria Concert Hall, Singapore (Sunshine, Butterfly); Esplanade Concert Hall, Singapore (Paganini)
Pentatone PTC5187230 [74]
At the most recent estimate, China is home to more than 17% of the world’s population. As such, it supplies a vast range of products to the rest of the world, while simultaneously offering itself as an immense market for other countries’ own goods and services. It is, therefore, of huge interest to those working in any field of commerce – including the classical music business.
The home-grown Chinese “products” in which Universal Music, Warner Music, Sony Music and all the rest are primarily interested are, of course, its musicians. Nowadays, we are regularly accustomed to seeing the arrival of the latest new young – and usually prize-winning – Chinese virtuoso pianist or violinist signed to a major label and trumpeted in the classical music media, even if he or she sometimes turns out to be something of a briefly shooting star.
At the same time, that population of 1.4 billion people offers a still largely untapped market for sales of Western-produced classical music product. Of course, it goes without saying that any thought of converting all those potential consumers into fans of Beethoven or Brahms overnight is a pipe dream. Nevertheless, if that remains, presumably, a long-term goal, one of the marketing men’s shorter-term projects has been to record and promote music that’s already popular in China itself and, at the same time, can be portrayed to the rest of the world’s consumers as vaguely “classical”. Two quite well-known examples are the Butterfly Lovers violin concerto (review ~ review ~ review) and the Yellow River piano concerto (review ~ review ~ review). Often bracketed together, they are, in reality, quite dissimilar. If you click on at those links to MusicWeb reviews, you will see that my esteemed colleague Jonathan Woolf has something of a soft spot for Butterfly lovers, dismissing accusations of kitsch and urging inquisitive readers to “put away your Boulez and step into the sunshine…”. On the other hand, he considers Yellow river little more than “a series of Chinese musical tags roped together through adept orchestration”, adding, with an almost audible sigh of despair, that “It’s all a long, long way from Chopin…”
Singaporean violinist Chloe Chua is just 17 years old and made the recordings on this disc when she was aged only 16. By that point, however, she already had an impressive history behind her, including winning the joint first prize at the Yehudi Menuhin International Competition for Young Violinists in 2018. She has, in the past few years, enjoyed a close relationship with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, occupying the post of artist-in-residence during their two most recent seasons and making her debut recording, Vivaldi’s The four seasons and Locatelli’s D major violin concerto op. 3, no. 12 Harmonic labyrinth (Pentatone PTC5187062), with them in 2023.
It is both a cliché and a truism in the classical music world to observe that, as some musicians grow older and thereby acquire greater experience of Life-with-an-upper-case-L, they gain unique emotional and, it’s sometimes claimed, spiritual insights into the canon of “great” music. If that’s the case, such perceptions are, of course, denied by definition to young artists, most of whom have yet to experience the buffeting of a lifetime’s worth of outrageous fortune and the vast range of emotions generated by tragedy, despair, love and loss. It might therefore be thought that Ms Chua has chosen well in so far restricting her recordings to repertoire that majors on showcasing her impressive technical skills and eschews anything other than a pretty superficial nod towards matters more profound. For the time being, perhaps, Beethoven can wait.
For her second foray into the recording studio, Ms Chua has set down performances of the Butterfly Lovers concerto, together with a shorter piece by one of its co-composers and a western European warhorse, in the form of Paganini’s first violin concerto. She explains in the CD booklet that each work appeals to her for a particular reason. Thus, the Butterfly Lovers concerto made a personal impression when “years ago I heard an excerpt played… at a family gathering”. Her attraction to Sunshine over Tashkurgan, on the other hand arises from the fact that it “fascinates me with its exotic harmonies, variety of melodic characters, catchy irregular rhythms with dance beats and the interesting pizzicato passage resembling the strumming of the dombra instrument”. Finally, Ms Chua expresses her admiration for the Paganini’s first concerto’s “technical challenges and beautiful melodies written in Italian bel canto style, which I have enjoyed immensely”.
A chef in a Chinese takeaway restaurant once explained to me that the so-called Chinese food served in the UK would be unrecognised in China itself because it eschews authentic Chinese ingredients and substitutes local ones more appealing to British customers’ palates. The way in which the dishes are then prepared is, however, the real thing. Butterfly Lovers, the piece that’s top-billed here, actually reverses that approach. It utilises genuinely Chinese components in the form of traditional melodies and themes, often derived from Yue opera. It then develops and presents them, however, in a form largely adapted from Western classical music models.
Composed of seven sections amounting to just short of half an hour in length overall, Butterfly Lovers is a piece of programme music. The story it tells, set in 3rd century China, is that of rich-girl Zhu and poor-boy Liang who fall in love but are unable to be together because Zhu’s family has already betrothed her to another suitor from her own social class. Liang passes away from grief but, as Zhu’s wedding procession passes his grave, his tomb miraculously opens up. Zhu willingly throws herself into it and, shortly afterwards and to general amazement, two beautiful butterflies emerge from Liang’s grave and fly off into the distance.
Ms Chua makes it plain that, for her, Butterfly lovers is not an abstract piece of music. Rather, the graphic depiction of the legend of the two lovers is absolutely central to her performance. “Not only”, she writes, “was I deeply moved by the steadfast love of the couple, and Zhu[‘s] courageous resistance against the customs of feudal society, [but] I was also touched by the heart-wrenching story…”. With the romance-cum-social-commentary narrative thus positioned front and central, she deploys all the considerable technique at her disposal in order to illustrate it as graphically as possible, as when, in the first section, marked andante cantabile, her cadenza ad lib effectively gives an impression of gossamer-thin, lightly and delicately fluttering butterfly wings. Throughout, Ms Chua wears her heart ostentatiously on her sleeve, playing to quite moving effect in the brief third section that depicts the lovers’ going their separate ways after childhood (adagio assai doloroso – bizarrely appearing as allegro assai doloroso (!) in the booklet essay). Her solo violin, representing Zhu, also interweaves movingly with a solo cello, depicting Liang, in the fifth section (lagrimoso). All in all, this is as fine an account of Butterfly lovers as I have heard.
Sunshine over Tashkurgan, a musical depiction of the Silk Road city of that name,incorporates genuine Tajik folk melodies and, as booklet writer Edward C. Yong usefully points out, would thus have sounded quite exotic to most Chinese audiences at the time of its very successful premiere. Whereas Butterfly lovers closely integrates the solo violin and the accompanying orchestra in deploying its melodic material, the violin part is clearly the primary focus in Sunrise with the orchestra playing a distinctly subsidiary role. Ms Chua sounds as if she’s enjoying the opportunity to show off a little more flamboyantly here, and the piece has been well chosen to demonstrate both the extent and the versatility of her talent.
While I’m not aware of any rivals on disc to this performance of Sunrise over Tashkurgan, there have, over the years, been plenty of recordings of Paganini’s first violin concerto. Runner-up among my own particular favourites accounts is the classic account recorded as long ago as 1934 by Yehudi Menuhin and the Orchestre Symphonique de Paris under Pierre Monteux (EMI Classics Références 7243 5 65959 2 7 or available as disc 39 of a large box set). Despite the 18 years old soloist’s exceptional fiddling, the recording will, though, be ruled out of court by many for its vintage sound – even though that has come up remarkably well after modern remastering. My top pick comes from Salvatore Accardo – though it is not his much-lauded performance with the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Charles Dutoit (Deutsche Grammophon 437 210-2) but an often overlooked one in which he himself takes both the soloist and conductor’s roles with the Orchestra da Camera Italiana (EMI Classics 5 57151 2). Apart from Accardo’s superlative playing, the appeal of that particular account is his decision to use the augmented orchestration that Paganini himself sometimes favoured in public performances. Extra wind and brass, along with the addition of timpani and a banda turca (crash and suspended cymbals and a bass drum, though sadly no Jingling Johnny) produce the quasi-Ottoman janissary musical effect that was so popular at the time. The need to allow space for those reverberating instruments to make their full sonic impact in orchestral tuttis means that, especially in the opening movement, Accardo slows his account down very slightly; thus, this performance of the opening movement adds about 1½ minutes to the timing in the earlier LPO/Dutoit version. That slower tempo only serves, however, to emphasise the overall grandiosity derived from the augmented orchestral forces and to give this account a unique frisson of excitement that I, for one, find quite irresistible. Goodness only knows why, at the time of the CD’s release, EMI’s marketing team inexplicably chose not even to mention such a distinctive musical feature – let alone to promote the performance on that basis.
My predilection for all that extra orchestral oomph may not, of course, be shared by everyone. Nevertheless, it still goes without saying that, even when he stuck to the plainer orchestration preserved in the sole surviving autograph score, the self-promoting showman Paganini is known to have favoured a big, bold approach that both buttressed his demonic reputation and hit his adoring audiences right between the eyes. When my colleague Jonathan Woolf recently reviewed what he considered a “stunning” vintage performance from René Benedetti, the soloist’s qualities he most admired and considered a perfect fit for the music were “effortless digital legerdemain… stylistic brilliance… sheer flair… [s]avoir faire, superb intonation, witty Gallic insouciance, magnificent bowing, legato refinement [and] subtle vibrato usage”. This, then, is music that isn’t primarily characterised by delicacy, refinement or even, necessarily, good taste. Paganini knew that his audiences appreciated daredevilry, technical trickery, excitement and bravura. His concertos were deliberately composed to offer opportunities for all of those characteristics and more, and more self-effacing modern interpreters still need to keep that in mind.
Ms Chua is clearly a very accomplished player and you will certainly admire her technique. But, at the end of the day, her performance of the Paganini comes across as a little cautious, comparatively small scale and – perhaps unsurprisingly in such a young artist – lacking in individual personality. Sunshine over Tashkurgan may have given her the opportunity to display occasional flashes of devil-may-care passion, but theyare sadly absent in a concerto performance that doesn’t ever really take wing. Overall, this is an account that, in quite a competitive field, doesn’t stand out from its rivals. You may well enjoy it, perhaps primarily for those “beautiful melodies written in Italian bel canto style” that Ms Chua loves so much, but, in the absence of much in the way of demonic elements, I suspect that you will not be thrilling, let alone swooning, to the music as its composer intended you should.
If the account of the Paganini is ultimately disappointing, no blame can be attributed to the Singapore Symphony Orchestra. Under two conductors, Rodolfo Barráez and Mario Venzago, it acquits itself well throughout the disc, its players switching apparently effortlessly between the Chinese and Western scores. The disc’s recording quality is up there with the best. Warm, transparent sound provides a flattering setting for the performances.
All in all, if your primary interest is the Chinese repertoire and you already have a performance of the Paganini in your collection, you need have no hesitation in acquiring this well-filled disc and acquainting yourself with a very talented young violinist.
Rob Maynard
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