Composers of Chinese orchestral music are better known today than they were even a few years ago, and names like that of Tan Dun (譚盾) are now familiar to the huge cinemagoing public following his success with the score for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (臥虎藏龍). Less widely known in the West, but if anything even more prolific and certainly as influential, is the composer Zhao Jiping (趙季平, also Chi-ping Chao), who composed the scores for many of Zhang Yimou’s (張藝謀) and Chen Kaige’s (陳凱歌) most successful films.
The quiet-spoken Zhao is in Taipei for a concert, in collaboration with the National Chinese Orchestra (台灣國家國樂團), of his work that includes both well-known pieces such as the hugely successful Suite From Raise the Red Lantern (大紅燈籠高高掛組曲), which blends Beijing opera elements with the requirements of an orchestral score, as well as the Taiwan premiere of a new work, Xinxiang, Concerto for Erhu and Orchestra (心香—胡琴協奏曲), featuring Taiwan-born Hong Kong-based huqin (胡琴) specialist Huo Shijie (霍世潔).
Apart from his music for the screen, Chao has been an active participant in another effort in East-West musical collaboration: Yo-yo Ma’s Silk Road Project, for which he has written a number of works. Tomorrow’s program includes Silk Road Fantasia (絲綢之路幻想曲), with the Singaporean guan (管子, a double reed wind instrument) specialist Han Lei (韓雷) on the bill.
Zhao has been widely acclaimed, to quote the Silk Road Project’s official Web site, “for his ability to combine traditional Chinese forms of expression and conventional Western orchestral forces.” Speaking to the press at a rehearsal on Tuesday, he told of his experience as a music student during China’s Cultural Revolution, when, unable to perform Western music, he taught himself orchestral composition by copying out and analyzing the scores of composers such as Beethoven. With the end of the Cultural Revolution and the slow revival of traditional arts, Zhao found himself posted to a regional opera school in Shaanxi, where he rose from graduate student to deputy director over a period of 20 years. “As a student of Western music, I was a little reluctant to be posted to such a school,” Zhao said. His father, a successful traditional musician, helped change his mind, and Zhao threw himself into the study of Chinese regional folk music. It was with the production of Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth (黃土地, 1984), a film about a Communist soldier sent into the badlands of Shaanxi to collect peasant folk songs, that Zhao broke into the movie industry. The film was a minor success, and was followed up with Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum (紅高粱, 1987). After that, there followed commissions for a whole string of movies, many of which continue to rank as some of the most internationally successful films, both critically and commercially, produced in China.
Zhao rose to prominence along with Zhang, Chen, and Chinese cinema diva Gong Li (鞏俐), who according to Zhao, was the first to recognize the potential of including Beijing opera elements throughout the score of Raise the Red Lantern.
Tomorrow’s concert is a rare opportunity to review the work of one of China’s foremost composers, and perhaps gain some insight into the delicate alchemical process of making gold out of a fusion of East and West.
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