Media file:
mus. 1.3
Title:
A 2007 performance of the Yellow River Concerto (Yellow River Boatsmen Song)
Source:
Heidelberg catalogue entry, DACHS Archive
Keywords:
Yellow River Cantata, Xian Xinghai, contemporary China, traditional Chinese music, transculturality, music
A 2007 performance of the Yellow River Concerto (Yellow River Boatsmen Song)
The Yellow River Piano Concerto was made available to millions of peasants, soldiers, and workers, most of whom had never heard, much less seen, a piano or a grand symphony orchestra before (Chen 1995, 26). The concerto served, therefore, to disseminate the virtuoso tradition of classico-romantic solo concertos as far as the Chinese countryside. Although this tradition contrasts rather drastically with the humility and introspection of traditional Chinese musical practice, the Yellow River Piano Concerto may be seen as the apotheosis of a new Chinese style of music: that of pentatonic romanticism.
By borrowing from the Yellow River Cantata, the piece incorporates many elements from Chinese traditional music in order to fulfill Mao’s dictum that foreign things must serve China: pentatonicism enters this piece through the use of Chinese melodic material, for example, borrowed from the boatmen’s work songs (号子 haozi), which are used to accompany certain routine movements in physical labor (Yin 1969, 90, starting with b. 6; and again Yin 1969, 92ff., starting with fig. 1). The composition also features dialogic structures taken from Shanxi folk songs (Yin 1969, 92ff., fig. 1); it contains repetitive and intricate folk rhythms and melodies and applies to the piano the instrumental techniques of Chinese instruments such as bamboo flute (at the beginning of the second movement) or guzheng (古筝), especially in the extensive arpeggios in the second movement, and pipa.
The example presented here is a multimedia rendition of the 1969 Yellow River Piano Concerto as performed by China’s star pianist Lang Lang 郎朗 (1982–) in Hong Kong in 2007. It is staged in a huge concert hall with multiple stages and video screens (DACHS 2007 Yellow River). Two of the stages feature some one hundred concert grand pianos with as many female players posing in long white concert dress all throughout the piece. Shown on the huge video screens throughout the auditorium are majestic views of the Yellow River. The entire performance is focused on the grandeur and the virtuoso spirit of the piece. Lang Lang is the central—and certainly a most fitting—protagonist in this extravagant rendition of the concerto which borrows heavily from the musical rhetoric of the Western classico-romantic tradition.