Juilliard Orchestra Evoke Chinese Poetry at Lincoln Center

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Wednesday, 30 October 2024 14:21

Written by Jack Angstreich

Photo by Claudio Papapietro

At Lincoln Center’s Peter Jay Sharp Theater on the night of Monday, October 7th, I had the great pleasure to attend a marvelous concert presented by the remarkable musicians of the Juilliard Orchestra under the accomplished direction of Ken Lam, who is Tianjin Juilliard's director of orchestral studies and resident conductor of the Tianjin Juilliard Orchestra.

The event began brilliantly with a dazzling rendering of Juilliard graduate Zhou Tian’s splendidly orchestrated, vivid and often exuberant Gift, from 2019. About it, the composer said, “I wanted to create a reminder of the joy of music-making, and along the way explore my own musical identity after 18 years of living abroad.” According to the useful commentary by program annotator Carys Sutherland, “The title comes from a fifth-century Chinese poem, Music as a Gift of Decency.” She also provides an accurate description of the work:

The piece’s main motif is introduced [ . . . ] by the horns, which set the tone for the big-band orchestral texture to follow. A brassy, bright fanfare is accompanied by sparkling xylophone and sweeping glissades in the strings [ . . . . ] An eerie, neo-Impressionist interlude in the middle of the piece leans into the composer’s Chinese background with pentatonic scales in the woodwinds before leading into a rousing con fuoco section. The buildup to the piece’s epic conclusion evokes a maximalist John Adams in its repetitive rhythms [ . . . . ]

A superb soloist, Jamie Yoojin Lee, then entered the stage for a masterly performance of the beautiful, underappreciated Oboe Concerto in D Minor, Op. 20, of English composer Ruth Gipps, from 1941. The initial movement, which opens somewhat dramatically but acquires a more reflective ethos, is astringent if not harshly dissonant and concludes gently. The ensuing, exquisite Andante—which is redolent of the English Romanticism of Ralph Vaughan Williams, Frederick Delius et alia—is quietly lyrical but builds in intensity before its subdued close. The finale is jaunty, playful and charming for most of its length—although its second theme has a solemn character—and ends abruptly and emphatically.

The second half of the evening was maybe even more memorable, starting with an enchanting account of Richard Strauss’s delightful tone-poem from 1894, Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, Op. 28., which is preponderantly ludic but acquires a certain gravity towards its finish even as it concludes humorously. The concert closed magnificently with a confident reading of Benjamin Britten’s wonderful The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, Op. 34, from 1946, narrated by actor Luk Rosario. The artists deservedly were enthusiastically applauded.

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