Review | In Sound River, Tan Dun at last has right scale and format for a Silk Road musical journey
Forces of four symphony orchestras perform beneath giant screen at Hong Kong Coliseum to open this year’s Greater Bay Area arts festival
Like other students admitted to Beijing’s Central Conservatory of Music when it reopened after the Cultural Revolution, Tan Dun was sent down to the provinces during school breaks to study “music of the people”.
Sound River, which opened the 4th Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area Culture and Arts Festival on October 19 at the Hong Kong Coliseum, is the latest of the composer’s fieldwork documentaries.
These stretch back two decades to The Map, a multimedia cello concerto for Yo-Yo Ma that hauled the provincial music of ethnic minorities in Tan’s native Hunan province in central China into the modern-day concert hall.
Subsequent works traced different streams in the vast torrent of China’s musical culture, although each outing seemed to beg for a format, scale and production quality that would elevate it beyond a few home movies projected behind a symphony orchestra seated according to a standard plan.
Subtitled “a symphonic poem for 16 films”, Sound River finally embraces that challenge. The evening’s massive musical forces – which combined players from the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra and Macao Orchestra with the symphony orchestras of Guangzhou and Shenzhen – were placed in a winding, reverse “S” formation from back to front of the stage.
