another concert

My seat last night was bad. It's in the second row from the front, so the winds section, the zheng, and the harp were louder than usual for me. That's what you get for $10 and a last minute decision.

There were good passages in the erhu concerto "Nostalgia Dreams of Beijing" (aka 2nd Concerto for Erhu by Kuan Nai-Chung), but I find it hard to appreciate the piece in its entirety. It's not atonal, and it does not attempt to "break-from-tradition" just for its sake. It's also not the fault of the soloist --- he had the techniques and the individualism. I just didn't enjoy the concerto. It fared only slightly better than the composer's 1st concerto for the erhu. I was counting down to the end of the track when I was listening to a recording of the first concerto. Repeated listening didn't help either. Is it just me or the composer?

The other pieces could have been better if I had found a better seat. Guo Wen Jing's composition was written in a choral style that I found rather pantheistic (think Mahler's 2nd symphony) and novel. The pipa concerto that followed was conducted by the composer himself. It was definitely more interesting than the erhu piece. At the end of her performance, the soloist was piled with bouquets and teddy bears that were too much for her to carry. They've got to be from her students.

My suspicions were confirmed. The musicians in SCO are using staff notation scores --- at least that's true for the erhu, zheng and yangqin sections. I wonder if the switch (if there was one in the first place) from jianpu notation was painful. After all, most of the older musicians probably began playing their instruments using jianpu scores. There are three practical reasons I can think of, and I'm not sure if these are correct. First, the ease of producing instrumental scores from the main orchestral scores, which are written in staff notation. Second, the increasing tonal complexity in modern CO compositions. Jianpu notation becomes hard to read when tonality gets vague. Third, the facilitation of cross cultural musical exchange. I've always thought sight reading on the erhu and yangqin using the staff notation is extremely difficult and ill-adapted for the instruments. Now the SCO musicians have proven its feasibility. I shall try that one of these days...