COURTESY PHOTO Melodies to
search the soulTan Dun tries to touch
emotions in his music
He's been heralded as one of the foremost and compelling contemporary classical composers of our time, and he'll be in Honolulu this weekend.
Two sides of the multifaceted Tan Dun will be on display when he conducts the Honolulu Symphony orchestra this weekend. One will be the formal experimentalist, melding sounds of specially designed water percussion instruments in a piece written in memory of one of his mentors, and the other, in his more recognizable guise as a film composer, specifically a concerto inspired by his Grammy-winning score for "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."
Both will be presented as multimedia pieces, with video projecting first the liquid images created in performance by accompanying New York experimental musician David Cossin, then special footage from the film created by director Ang Lee and producer James Schamus especially for the "Crouching Tiger Concerto."
Tan Dun with the Honolulu Symphony
Where: Blaisdell Concert HallWhen: 8 p.m. today and 4 p.m. Sunday
Tickets: $17 to $59
Call: 792-2000
"My goal, through the use of multimedia, is to have the symphony experience embraced by a larger and younger audience," he said.
While Tan had scored one other movie beforehand -- the 1998 Denzel Washington thriller "Fallen" -- his forays into film have been only through careful choice. Like "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," Tan said by phone during his Big Island vacation earlier this week, "the films I normally do music for are tragic love stories."
"I just did Zhang Yimou's 'Hero,' which was one of this year's Oscar nominees for Best Foreign Film, and that also is a tragic love story. The music features koto drummers from Japan and violinist Itzhak Perlman."
Tan's musical interests are wide-ranging to the extent that "it's important that I balance out my writing to not only film, but also opera, symphonic and chamber groups. I don't want to limit myself to one particular kind of writing. Music is the link for the soul to discover the world. It's good for me to write in different styles -- I like music in particular that has a haunting quality in the quest of discovery.
"When I'm working on a film, I always tell the director that I want to bring out emotional contrasts in the film through my music, where there are extremes between expressing both the powerful and the tender," he said.
Besides being the current music director of the multimedia and mulitculture festival for Orchestre de la Radio Flamande, Tan Dun's current list of commissions he's working on makes for a short if formidable list -- writing a new opera for New York's Metropolitan Opera House and conductor James Levine for the 2005 season, a symphony for 12 cellos and orchestra for the Berlin Philharmonic, and a paper instruments concerto for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, to be premiered for the opening of Walt Disney Concert Hall.
TAN DUN said he took six parts from his "Crouching Tiger" film score and "retouched it a little bit" to create a concerto for erhu (a fiddle-like Chinese instrument to be played by guest Xiang-Hua Ma), chamber orchestra and film. Ma will play cadenzas in each of the six movements, accompanied by the Honolulu Symphony and projected video footage.
The concerto was originally written for and inspired by world famous cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who also performed on the film's original score. It premiered in late September of 2000 at London's Barbican Centre Festival, of which Tan was the artistic director. (In fact, the cello melody in the third cadenza comes from a folk song from Xinjiang province in China.)
This weekend's program will open with his "Concerto for Water Percussion and Orchestra," originally commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and world-premiered at Lincoln Center in June of 1999. Tan wrote it in memory of pioneering Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, whom Tan described as "a good mentor. Both he and John Cage, although entirely different in their approach, are philosophically similar. Both approach their compositions in a conceptual manner, using different formats and sounds, both organic -- the sounds of nature -- and multimedia. Their influence has been more important to me over the last 10 years."
The use of organic materials -- whether it be water, paper or earth in the form of ceramics -- in Tan Dun's music evokes childhood memories of his own life, spent with his grandmother in a rural village in the early 1960s.
Commenting on his first time here in the islands, Tan feels that we're "a water capital, filled with water spirit, the element most associated with resurrection, revolution and the restart of life. During my research for my piece, water and the sound it makes rules our life, whether in villages in Japan or Africa, and here in Hawaii.
"I've lived in New York for the past 18 years, and the urban city life makes one hungry, longing for nature. I wrote an opera about Marco Polo several years ago, and I identify with the kind of journey he made -- except I went from the East to the West in my travels."
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