Richard Freed’s note leads us by the hand through the
background to Shanghai-born composer Ge Gan-ru. His leading teacher at the
Conservatoire there was Chen Gang, composer of
The Butterfly Lovers
violin concerto. Ge’s music ploughs a completely different furrow, as
you will know if you are familiar with Bis’s other Ge disc issued in
2005 (
BIS-SACD-1509). It is no accident that this composer
participated in Alexander Goehr’s masterclasses when China opened its
artistic doors in 1980. After this he came within the orbits of influence of
contemporary composers such as Crumb, Cage, Ligeti, Boulez and Stockhausen.
This path was consolidated when he
continued his studies with Chou Wen-chung, a disciple of Varèse,
and Mario Davidovsky.
For all of the gently artistry on show in the four-movement work
that is
Fairy Lady Meng Jiang the music is
predominantly a vortex of the distraught and the anxious. You can hear this
undiluted in most of
Savage Land (I) and parts of
Abduction
(III). Bird song - real and flute-evoked - is at play in the second movement
(
Gourd Girl). Bezaly is called on to deliver - and delivers - with
extraordinary intensity the wailing and crying in the cataclysmic final
movement:
Crying Down the Great Wall. It’s unnerving -
disturbing even, yet ultimately bends and morphs into more sweetly
consolatory though hesitant paths. This large-scale fantasy flute concerto
was written as a commission from Robert von Bahr specifically for Sharon
Bezaly.
Almost as tragic as the flute concerto is
Lovers
Besieged. It too is concerned with a war-torn episode in
China’s ancient history. This three-movement suite (
Ambush;
Chu Song;
Sword Dance) derives from a 2006 trio for cello,
percussion and piano. It starts with a vinegary, propulsive, dissonant
kinetic power that is reminiscent of the Philip Glass symphonies. As we know
from
Fairy Lady Meng Jiang, Ge, for all his sharply defined
brutality, also has a deep and gentle vein of something close to
sentimentality. This can be experienced in the central
Chu Song with
its slowly coaxed quasi-Gallic Pavane. This rises at 3:03 to a gorgeous
slow-motion, long-breathed flourish from the strings which spreads to the
whole orchestra. The final ‘panel’ is witty and angular with a
faint flavour of Honegger’s
Pacific 231 and Mosolov’s
Iron Foundry.
This will broaden your horizons and introduce you to Ge, a composer
- well served by all the musicians and the technical team involved - who is
at ease working with the avant-garde and with the sentimentally eloquent.
I found the sound extremely impressive.
Rob Barnett
