Katy ABBOTT (b. 1971)
The Peasant Prince: A Symphonic Tale – two performances, with narration in English [34:01] and Mandarin Chinese [33:43]
Li Cunxin (narrator)
Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra/Benjamin Northey
rec. 2016-19, Federation Concert Hall, Hobart; Studio 420, ABC Southbank Centre, Brisbane, Australia
ABC CLASSICS 4817928 [67:44]
The Australian composer Katy Abbott’s Peasant Prince, dedicated to her children, is not a new work: commissioned by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, it was premiered in May 2009, and – according to Abbott’s website – has received some fifteen further performances since. It is based on the children’s book of the same name by Li Cunxin (born 1961), which was in turn based on its author’s best-selling memoir Mao’s Last Dancer – A Portrait of Li Cunxin (2003). The Peasant Prince tells Li’s own heart-warming story. From extreme poverty in Northern China, he is chosen to train as a ballet dancer in Beijing, where he is discovered by an American ballet-master. So he goes to work in the US, and develops a glittering international career. For all his success, however, Li never forgets where he comes from, and desperately misses his parents. The “symphonic tale” ends happily, when they are at length able to witness him performing live in the Nutcracker, and are movingly reunited with their son. The ‘real’ Li Cunxin, meanwhile, continued dancing until his retirement in 1999, since when he has been both a successful stockbroker and the Artistic Director of Queensland Ballet.
Woven in with its compelling ‘fairy-tale’ narrative, The Peasant Prince has two important recurring themes: hope, and the importance of stories. The young Li has high aspirations and longs to escape the hardships of his origins, so he flies a kite (a present from his father) and attaches to it some “paper wishes”. These, of course, eventually come true; and he is greatly assisted during his long and arduous wait for them to do so by two stories. One, told by his beloved father, is about a frog living in a “deep, dark well”, who is determined to live a better life, but cannot initially see how to do so. The other, told later by a friend at the Beijing Dance Academy, concerns a struggling “bow shooter”, whose courage and persistence provide the young Li with an object lesson in the timeless truth that practice makes perfect. For its part Li’s own story is of course also designed to inspire particularly young people, as Katy Abbott puts it, “to know their dreams and have the courage to follow them”.
Her “symphonic tale” lasts a little over half an hour, and – with the exception perhaps of an overlong, four-minute interlude just before the end – maintains a judicious balance between narration and music. One suspects that Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf is a model; but even if it’s not, the relative weighting of words and music is similar. Li Cunxin himself is the storyteller, and does the job most sympathetically – he comes across as natural, warm and sincere, and his mainly Chinese- but partly Australian-accented English will charm far more listeners than it disconcerts (I am in no position to judge his delivery of the Mandarin narration).
Abbott’s music, with its well-crafted, refreshingly unpretentious accessibility, also gives a great deal of pleasure. There is, as you might expect, no shortage of apposite word-painting: for example opening music conjuring up the cold bleakness of Li’s home province, some appropriately jumpy, hoppy figures for the trapped frog, and some animated train and big-city music as Li’s career progresses. I also believe Abbott, though, when she says in the booklet that “in my music I am trying to capture the little things that make us human”. Accordingly we get music that doesn’t just describe the events and details of the story, but also invites us to enter into, to empathize with the full gamut of human emotions that Li experiences in the course of it. Often, indeed, there is an effective interconnection and interplay between the story’s external and internal worlds: the chugging of the train that carries Li to Beijing, for example, develops seamlessly into music expressive of the fear, loneliness and bewilderment he feels during his early days at the Academy. Similarly, Abbott’s musical portrayal of weeping willows is redolent both of actual trees and of the sad tears that Li cries whilst sheltering amongst them.
Such an approach means also that her description of the tale as a “symphonic” one seems more justified than the term sometimes does when applied to contemporary compositions. The music is certainly influenced by minimalist processes, but is centred around four main themes – depicting the kite (freedom), the frog, hope and family love – that are readily identifiable and undergo a basically symphonic development using contemporary language (you can listen to some samples on
Soundcloud). The work is of course “symphonic” also in the very general sense that it is written for a symphony orchestra, albeit one of modest size (single woodwind and brass, harp, timpani, percussion and strings). The orchestration for woodwind and percussion is to my ear particularly effective.
Overall, The Peasant Prince is a stylish and appealing piece that will appeal to children of all ages, but not only to them. One can well imagine it, in time, becoming a well-loved staple of family concerts in particular. I am not sure how many people will want to buy a CD containing two musically identical performances of the same work, one with English and the other with Chinese narration; but, fortunately, either performance can be downloaded separately. That, for most collectors, will no doubt be the way forward.
Nigel Harris
