 A Kiwi Cellist in China
The life & times, ups & downs, of a Kiwi / Australian cellist in Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra.
Saturday, January 06, 2007
The Pianists
6 months into my journey and I find China to be an extraordinary combination of beauty, wealth, poverty, stench, corruption, potential, intrigue and fun. The orchestra is changing fast. A few months ago I thought I was in some sort of local pops orchestra, but in the last three months we’ve covered more serious repertoire then I thought possible, played literally dozens of concerts, accompanied some fairly corrupt piano and conducting competitions, and recorded a staggeringly bland symphony inspired by Mao himself. The China Shenzhen International Piano Competition: There is a reason for the slightly odd grammatical structure of the official title of this competition. It transpires that the translator left out some important words when converting it from Chinese. How it should have read is as follows: If you are from CHINA, specifically SHENZHEN, you are eligible to win this INTERNATIONAL PIANO COMPETITION. On paper the competition looked very promising. There was a roughly 50/50 spread of international and Chinese judges. There were a good number of international competitors from all corners of the globe (even one from Tasmania) and every round was accompanied by the orchestra (which I believe is a world first for a major piano competition). Accompanying more than 20 different concertos in just 2 weeks requires a special rehearsal technique. This consists of management canceling all scheduled days off and constantly threatening the players with salary cuts. In China, where there are no musician’s unions, this seems to work rather well. For the first round of the competition the competitors were each required to play one of 3 Mozart concertos followed by two Chopin etudes. The concertos were accompanied by a string quintet playing a cut-down version of the orchestral score. This is how I got to perform Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 19 more than 30 times in 3 days (This was just the beginning of the week’s monotony). By day 3 the Russians in my quintet were quickly tiring of their steady diet of Mozart and cigarettes. It was at lunch time that one of them offered a diversion by recommending Cognac as a good remedy for performance nervousness, the theory being that a single shot would relax you just a little without any adverse effects. The others quickly decided that this was a technique which must be tested immediately. 10 minutes later we were at the local sushi bar with a very large bottle of Courvoisier cognac and a thick slab of dark Belgian chocolate. I took my shot of Cognac, felt great, and watched in awe as two of the Russians proceeded to finish the entire bottle in a little under 30 minutes, roughly half a liter of Cognac each. We performed the Mozart 5 more times that afternoon. The only sign that anyone had drunk anything was a slightly improved sense of optimism (the Russian’s use of the words “farrrking terrible” dropped from being every other sentence to about one in three). After so many Mozarts I was really looking forward to the final just to play some different music. The six finalists provided an interesting program indeed. The first would play Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto. This would be followed by Concerto no. 2 by Rachmaninov. The third contestant would be playing the Piano Concerto no. 2 by Sergei Rachnaninov. Following all this Rachmaninov it was refreshing to see that the fourth contestant was also going to play the Rachmaninov 2. To really stir things up the 5th contestant played the Rachmaninov 3 (just like the Rach 2 but 30 minutes longer) and the final contestant played Tchaikovsky. The standard of playing in the final was quite high. But one competitor really stood out, Maria Kim from the Ukraine (now based in Germany). Her Rachmaninov was flawless and had a level of confidence and musical depth far greater that any others. So when the judges announced that they were at loggerheads we smelled something fishy. The final result was Maria Kim 1st equal with a Chinese girl whom I won’t name. The Chinese girl had booked our orchestra a few weeks before the competition and had played a private concert of all the competition repertoire with the added bonus of a full week’s orchestral rehearsal that no-one else had had. Her teacher was also a major backer of the competition and a very powerful man in China. Coincidence? well who knows… By combining 1st and second prizes both Maria and the Chinese girl left with a good amount of money (about US$30’000) and the promise of a further paid concert with the Shenzhen Symphony. Maria was offered her concert just a couple of weeks after the competition. Believing that she was flying back to China to perform Chopin’s Second concerto as the guest soloist in a major concert she instead found herself performing it 8 times as part of the second round of the conductor’s competition which had no public audience. The whole experience left a rather bitter taste in my mouth (and it wasn’t just the Belgian chocolate!)
Posted By charlesbrooks at 7:10 PM
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