Thirty years ago this summer the violinist Isaac Stern created a sensation when he came to China for a series of concerts and master classes. His visit, richly documented in the Academy Award-winning film “From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China” (directed by Murray Lerner and supervised by Allan Miller), was credited with giving a boost to classical music here and helping foster cultural exchanges between China and the West.
回來! This October Beijing will commemorate that visit with a concert by the China Philharmonic to honor Mr. Stern, who died in 2001 at 81, and to pay tribute to the remarkable strides this country has made in music since then.
Among those expected to perform will be Wang Jian, whose performance as a 10-year-old in the film eventually led him to Yale University, the Julliard School, Carnegie Hall and an acclaimed career as an international recording and performing artist.
“We’ve come a long way since then,” Mr. Wang, now 40, said recently. Back then, when Stern came, “this was the only chance we had to hear a great master,” he said. “People were fighting to get into the rehearsals.”
Other young musicians like Li Weigang, Vera Tsu, Tang Yun and Ho Hongying who performed for Mr. Stern in 1979 have also gone on to perform in the world’s great concert halls.
Since the days of Stern’s historic visit, interest in and access to classical music has mushroomed in China. There are major orchestras in many cities, and an estimated 40 million students across the country study the violin or the piano. But there are not yet enough dedicated fans to support classical careers within the country, which is why, even today, Chinese musicians go abroad and now populate the world’s leading orchestras, opera houses and music schools.
The Chinese composer Tan Dun and pianist Lang Lang are international recording stars. And last month the 19-year-old Zhang Haochen, born in China, shared the top prize at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth.
Few could have imagined such triumphs in 1979, when Beijing was a sea of bicycles and Mao suits, and the tallest building in Shanghai was a mere 24 stories.
Stern arrived here at a critical moment in the country’s history, just as it was beginning to emerge from decades of self-imposed isolation, eager to turn the page.
The United States and China had just resumed diplomatic relations, and on his arrival with his family and the American pianist David Golub in June, Stern announced that the trip was less a concert tour than a “how do you do?” — using music as a kind of passport to meet the Chinese people.
And so over the next two weeks Stern — followed by a large film crew — played the gray-haired philosopher with an easy smile and a deft hand at the violin. In Beijing he performed with the Central Philharmonic and toured China’s top music academy, the Central Conservatory of Music. He played the César Franck Sonata in A before a full house at the Shanghai Concert Hall, but only after averting disaster. A day before the concert the piano prepared for Mr. Golub was deemed unplayable. At the last minute a suitable piano was found at a radio station.
Everywhere Stern went the reception was enormous. Music lovers traveled by train from distant provinces in China to catch a glimpse of one of the 20th century’s great instrumentalists. Even rehearsals were packed with standing-room-only crowds that seemed to hang on Stern’s every word.
One of the spectators in Beijing that summer was Zhao Pingguo, then an instructor at the Central Conservatory and later one of the earliest teachers of China’s piano master Lang Lang. Today, at 75, he is retired.
“I went to almost every rehearsal and performance Stern gave,” Professor Zhao said in a recent interview. “Friends and professors around me all talked about his visit. We were quite convinced that China was going to change dramatically.”
One highlight of the two-week visit was a series of performances by some of China’s best young musicians.
Mr. Wang, then a cello prodigy, played an Eccles sonata; Li Weigang, whose parents were both musicians, played Paganini’s “Witches Dance”; and the 12-year-old Ho Hongying, wearing a school uniform punctuated by a red scarf, played a Tartini sonata in G minor.
“That was my exam piece,” said Ms. Ho, now concertmaster of the City Chamber Orchestra in Hong Kong. “I was so nervous. There were 3,000 people in a hall that is supposed to hold 1,800. It was so packed.”
But Stern and Golub noticed something peculiar about the sessions. Younger students who were 8, 9, 10 or 11 were impressive. But those older than 17 lacked something. What, the Americans asked, happened in between?
More Arts NewsThe answer came from Tan Shuzhen, then 72 and the deputy director of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, who said that during the decade-long Cultural Revolution China had tried to wipe out traces of Western influence. Music schools closed, teachers of Western music were harshly criticized, beaten and even jailed. And the playing of Western music was outlawed.
Conditions were so psychologically brutal, Mr. Tan said, that 17 instructors at the Shanghai Conservatory committed suicide.
Mr. Tan, who taught violin, said he spent 14 months starting in 1968 largely confined to a tiny, dark closet under a stairwell at the Conservatory. He suffered regular beatings and denunciations before being released to work as a janitor charged with cleaning the school’s toilets.
In one of the most powerful scenes in the documentary, “From Mao to Mozart,” Mr. Tan described the time his daughter and 7-year-old granddaughter had come to see him and he was briefly allowed out of confinement. He broke into tears when the young girl called out to him, “Grandpa.”
“We were treated as criminals because we taught them Western music,” he said in the film.
When the Cultural Revolution came to an end with Mao’s death in 1976, music schools reopened, and the ban on playing Western music was lifted. Tens of thousands of young people applied to the top music schools, including many children who had had been playing Western music in secret.
One of those was Li Weigang, now a distinguished violinist who played for Stern in 1979 and later helped form the Shanghai Quartet.
“Like everyone else we played in secret,” he said recently. “Or we played scales. No one knew what we were doing.”
For Stern the biggest disappointment of the 1979 visit seemed to be the feeling that China’s musicians, while technically adept, were stiff and colorless. He pressed them to play with more passion and to feel the emotion of the music.
“You must always listen as if you are hearing something very beautiful, and then you must learn how to do it in here,” Stern said while instructing Ho Hongying. “Think in here,” he said gently tapping on her head, “and play here,” he said pointing to the violin.
Many musicians now say Stern’s visit had a profound impact on the teaching of classical music in China. In the years after his visit other maestros and virtuosos arrived for similar tours, including the conductor Kurt Masur and the violinist Yehudi Menuhin.
And many of the talented children who performed for Mr. Stern during that sultry summer of 1979 subsequently studied abroad.
Tang Yun trained with Dorothy DeLay at the Julliard School and is now a member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Vera Tsu also studied at Julliard and now performs in Beijing. And Pan Chun, who delighted Mr. Stern by performing Mozart’s “Variations on ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,’ ” later studied in Russia. He is now a professor at the Central Conservatory in Beijing.
Wang Jian’s journey out of China was particularly dramatic. An American businessman with roots in China named Sau Wing-Lam saw the film and a few years later arranged for the young Mr. Wang to travel to the United States and study music at Yale University.
“He wrote to my parents and said, ‘Your son can choose any school, I will give him a cello,’ ” Mr. Wang recalled in a recent interview. “It’s the same cello I have today.”
That rare cello was produced in Italy, in 1662, Mr. Wang said.
In 1999, three years before his death, Stern returned to China and marveled at the changes he found in the quality of the students and the instruction.
While hardly representative of the spirit of his trip, one comment that Stern made during the 1979 visit stands out. At an athletic center in Shanghai he expressed amazement at the sheer ability and concentration of the young people he saw, and then joked, “Well, they can’t play Mozart.”
Stern’s son Michael, now a conductor, said the comment was misconstrued. But whether it was or not, one thing is certain: The musicians in China today can play Mozart, and Brahms and Mendelssohn and Debussy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/arts/music/05barb.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&th&emc=th
