by Lee Baker

Pipa player Wu Man

Last Sunday’s concert at the Barbican of contemporary Chinese music performed by San Francisco’s Kronos Quartet and the Chinese lute-player Wu Man achieved the difficult feat of being both delicately ceremonial and earthily physical.

The star of the 10th May performance, part of the Barbican’s Beyond the Wall festival of new music from China, was the lute-like pipa. Virtuoso player Wun Man showed how versatile an instrument it can be: at times precious and precise; at others, powerful.

The evening started dramatically, with the five musicians suddenly appearing out of the dark, confronting the audience with demonic-looking masks traditionally worn by the mountain people of south-western China. They proceeded to play the insistent first movement of the world premiere of composer Yuanlin Chen’s Tribe Among Mountains, the firm strokes of the string instruments accompanied by startling guttural vocal sounds evoking a tribal celebration.

The music, rather than flowing came in bursts; and the bodies of the musicians, including the cello player, but particularly Wu Man, rocked and shook, at times quite violently. These displays of physicality underlined the muscular performances by the quartet and Wu Man – who strummed the pipa like a larger, richer, guitar – and created the feeling of a communal gathering of musicians around a fire, rather than a ‘civilised’ concert.

The largest interruption of this staccato performance was a large horn, which it took an effort for the quartet musician to lift, let alone play, the sounding of which heralded the third, gentler movement: the serenade.
Even when the piece was at its gentlest, as at this Edenic moment, the insistence of the music continued with a forceful whispering and singing, a forcefulness that was further underlined by the movement’s ending with a rising inflection.

A rhythmic and tribal fourth movement, ‘Bride Looting,’ symbolising “a rough love, one of the mountain people’s traditional games,” was followed by a fifth, a surprisingly plaintive ‘pyrrhic victory’. Here, I felt in more familiar territory as a Western classical concert goer, with the warm depths of the cello dominating, a delicate pleasure that prepared us for the triumphant ending of the six movement, ‘Apotheosize to Heaven’.

The quartet, rocking to and fro, played the polyphonic lusheng pipes – like a joyful ceremony of car horns – to evoke the celebration of a harvest. The final movement again proceeded in a forceful and staccato fashion until it unfortunately had to end. The careful ceremony of the occasion was even more apparent for composer Tan Dun’s Ghost Opera, a work for string quartet and pipa, with water, metal, stone and paper.

Dun, who was influenced by the music of John Cage and Philip Glass in New York, was also apparently inspired by the musical life of his village, which he experienced whilst working as a rice planter during the Cultural Revolution.
The five musicians moved, precisely, outwards from the stage, then moved together again. Members of the quartet slowly and deliberately drew bows across gongs placed in water, and, later on, Wu Man theatrically shook a large roll of paper draped from the ceiling.
Arrhythmic vocals including yelping sounds may have evoked shamanistic ritual, and the physicality of the performance continued. But the overall effect was of fastidious control, of expression being ordered and orchestrated, rather than let loose, as you might expect of an undirected, spontaneous village celebration.
More spontaneous was the first half of another, more intimate, Beyond the Wall concert at the LSO St Luke’s on the 12th May.
Wu Man gave us a solo performance of the pipa that was mesmerising, if unpolished – she apologised for being off-key at one point – before a return to careful ordering with composer Liu Sola’s The Afterlife of Li Jiantong, a very personal operatic work about her mother.
There were moments of great beauty in this performance by the Danish vocal group Theatre of Voices, but I found it too mannered and controlled rather than emotional.

Her grief has perhaps made Sola, a writer as well as a composer, speechless, only able to write uninspired lyrics that were delivered in a deadpan way, such as, when the soprano Else Torp, playing Sola, sang: “it all seems so strange to me”. Strange indeed.