At the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s “Stravinsky and Tan Dun” concert at Strathmore, Sheng player Zhang Meng performs in the audience. Photo by Michael Andor Brodeur/The Washington Post.
In Sunday’s (5/19) Washington Post, Michael Andor Brodeur writes, “The moment Chinese American composer Tan Dun took the stage on Saturday night at Strathmore with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, stray bits of artificial birdsong began leaking from all over the hall…. For this program—evenly split between Tan Dun’s own music and a pair of companion works by Igor Stravinsky—the composer/conductor provided a leaflet with a QR code that, when scanned, opened an audio file on your phone…. That recording—a simulation of birdsong as produced by a sextet of ancient Chinese instruments—was intended to be deployed during an ‘interactive’ passage of the evening’s closing piece, Tan’s ‘Passacaglia: Secret of Wind and Birds’ [premiered 2015], billed as a composition ‘for cellphone and orchestra.’… Tan who presided with visible joy over one of the most entertaining BSO concerts I’ve attended…. His music examines hidden relationships between Western and Eastern structures—both musical and cultural. This could mean an unexpected mix of instruments and timbres (as with Saturday’s U.S. premiere of his ‘Five Muses of Dunhuang’). Or it could implicate larger structures: classical music itself and, in Tan’s consideration, its relation to Chinese ritual…. It’s an approach that produces a sonically expansive musical tapestry.”
