‘A factory for future stars’: East meets West at the Beijing Music Festival

Founded in 1998 by the conductor Long Yu, the Beijing Music Festival (BMF to its friends) has become a vibrant annual event. It is a place where East meets West, in both musical and human terms, in the most stimulating fashion, with concerts spread across the city. During my visit to the Chinese capital earlier this month, I caught performances at a broad range of venues including the Forbidden City Concert Hall, the Beijing Comedy Theatre – an interesting choice for Bartók's Duke Bluebeard’s Castle! – and the Poly Theatre.

In June 2018, Long Yu stepped down as BMF’s artistic director, although he remains closely linked to the festival as chairman of the artistic committee. It was the young Shuang Zou, a talented filmmaker and stage director specialising in multi-disciplinary forms, who stepped into his shoes. Under her stewardship, the festival has gone from strength to strength.

The Beijing Comedy Theatre was an unexpected setting for Theatre of Sound's heartbreaking reinterpretation of Bartók's Duke Bluebeard’s Castle

For the festival’s 25^th and 26^th editions (tethered together due to Covid) there is a particular emphasis on youth – the four keywords for the programme this year are ‘Music; Youth; Future; Attitude’. The music part is obvious; but it is ‘youth’ that provides the most fertile ground for programming, feeling umbilically linked to the festival’s emphasis on ‘future’. The two Mahler symphonies I heard were coupled with a fascinating array of either young Chinese composers or, in the case of Messiaen’s Oiseaux exotiques (which appropriately includes a musical interpretation of the call of a Chinese bird alongside 47 other examples of birdsong), a 20th-century classic performed by Chinese soloist, the superb pianist Xiaofu Ju.

The Mahler concerts are symbolic of the festival as a whole, linking Mahler’s music and ideas to concepts of the environment and human kindness. ‘John Warner has a deep philosophical understanding of Mahler, and that’s why we came up with the programmes for the week, connecting culture,’ Zou told me. Das Lied von der Erde, performed on 13 October, offered an obvious East/West crossroads in Mahler’s use of Chinese poetry as text. Beijing audiences heard Mahler’s symphonies in chamber arrangements, No. 4 was arranged by John Warner, conductor of the Mahler Foundation Festival Orchestra – an ensemble founded by Mahler’s granddaughter, Marina Mahler. Regarding his own arrangement, Warner pointed out that ‘Mahler’s orchestration, especially in the Fourth, is so chamber-like and so classical that it really lends itself to a smaller ensemble’. He describes the act of making the arrangement (including a revision especially for their tour) as ‘exhilarating,’ and one can certainly hear that in his interpretation.

Pianist Xiaofu Ju perfectly embodied the festival's East-meets-West ethos with his performance of Messiaen’s Oiseaux exotiques

Warner’s exhilarating interpretation of Mahler’s Fourth symphony was presented on 10 October as part of a concert at Beijing’s Poly Theatre entitled ‘Childhood Memories’. In programming emblematic of the festival’s ethos, Mahler’s symphony (with soprano Gabriella Noble a pure-toned soloist) was coupled with world premieres of two new commissions: Orisons by Chinese composer Zhenyan Li and Anglo-Caribbean composer Sasha Scott’s Utopia Twists. London-based Li’s Orisons, or ‘prayers,’ responds to the finale of Mahler’s Fourth through the lens of childhood contemplations of Paradise, with birds (angelic messengers) providing the link. Counter-tenor soloist Andy Shen Liu was sure and superb, while a tsunami of percussion gestures fuelled Orison’s climax; language ceded to morpheme, ceded to phoneme. Scott’s piece contrasted innocence with an adult’s darker worldview, haunted by a post-Boulez beauty. Warner’s direction was typically precise, as it was in the almost uniformly convincing arrangement of the Fourth.

The following day, Mahler’s First Symphony, in an arrangement by Iain Farrington, was the trigger for a concert of ‘Nature and Birds’. Messiaen’s Oiseaux exotiques and Mahler were preceded by another premiere: Beijing-raised, Brooklyn-based Fay Kueen Wang’s Quantum Oceanarium, which offers an examination of quantum entanglement and its relationship to ancient Chinese philosophy while meditating on the dangers of environmental pollution. A collage of colours and textures, it included some avian links to the Messiaen.

The Orient, and perhaps China in particular (with Japan a close runner) has always foregrounded the beauty of nature, as have the West’s Romantic composers in particular. In Beijing, stunning greenery, either around the Liangma River or in the Chaoyang Park, both conveniently near my hotel, nestle right next to shiny metallic super-structures while seemingly suicidally-inclined car drivers happily skip lanes next to shady, tree-lined pedestrian avenues.

Gabriella Noble joined the Mahler Foundation Festival Orchestra and conductor John Warner for the festival's concert focused around Mahler's Fourth Symphony

While Mahler holds a special place in BMF history - the festival offered the Chinese premiere of the Eighth Symphony in 2002 - linking works from the Western musical canon with contemporary Chinese works or presenting Western works with Chinese soloists is at the core of the festival’s ethos. BMF was the first Classical music festival in China, and the ‘China Concept’ (the symbiotic East/West relationship) remains at its core. Musically, Zou quotes Zhou Long’s Pulitzer-winning opera Madame White Snake, with its Western orchestra and its Orientalist subject, as an ideal example of the ‘China Concept’. Zou is clear that the festival ‘shows a vision rather than a collection of performances,’ and even after just a few days in China, one can feel the truth of this.

Spanning 22 September to 15 October, with a plethora of diverse events, the festival is unique in China in how East and West rub shoulders. In the pandemic years, streaming was a vital part of the festival. This year, no streaming – ‘connecting the audience to the idea of appreciating the communal experience of being there physically,’ as Shuang put it. Audiences were healthy in number, if somewhat restless by Western standards – a laser beam system designed to stop the filming of concerts on phones was an innovation I for one would like to see in London.

Education is another strand of the festival, linked to the foregrounding of young performers. The opening concert, entitled ‘A century of heritage,’ commemorated the 101^st anniversary of the founding of the Peking University Music Training Institute with music by Qigang Chen, Xian Youmei, Yuen Ren Chao and Zou Ye performed by the China Philharmonic under the baton of Yang Yang. The festival has links with Beijing’s Central Conservatory and this filters down to the operas presented. ‘Now we have more inventive opera productions,’ says Zuo. ‘We really try to target the students in the conservatory, to have another angle. That’s what the education is here, another point of view’.

Members of the London Sinfonietta gave a chamber concert of ‘Contemporary Classics’ by Debussy, Tansy Davies, Adès, Chou Wen Chung, Penderecki and Messiaen with some surprise Kreisler, while Stephen Hough (pictured above) performed his own music (Partita) alongside Chopin, Debussy, Scriabin and Liszt in the Poly Theatre. Meeting him afterwards, his sense of gratitude, of curiosity and his generosity of spirit was immense.

This is a festival where Symphonic Jazz jostles with Telemann and JCF Bach; where the environmental concerns of Pastoral for the Planet were only a couple of days away from Hao Weiya’s AI’s Variation, an ‘opera of the future’. Where, this year, Haydn’s opera Il mondo della luna, like Bluebeard, also received its Chinese premiere.

The long-term plans of the festival are both exciting and eminently laudable. Zou sums it up as no-one else could: ‘I hope BMF is recognised as a friendly platform for all the world to celebrate up-and-coming musicians. A factory for the future stars. I try to convince people that what you see today is the future. With this year’s and next year’s programme, I will plant this in peoples’ minds; as an audience, to be proud to see the future here’.

With optimism and hope as bright as the warm Beijing October sun over the Great Wall, Shuang Zou, Long Yu, and the BMF seem unstoppable, bringing the future to us, now.