The China Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra’s eight-date UK tour brought them to Sheffield for this concert, witnessed by a very small but evidently appreciative audience. If we accept Mahler’s dictum that “a symphony must be like the world; it must embrace everything,” then having a Chinese orchestra and conductor playing archetypal late 19th-century Western music as impassioned as Mahler's First represented a fair stab at having the whole world packed into Sheffield’s City Hall.
The result was almost, if not entirely, a success. The orchestra contains some demonstrably impressive musicians – notably a secure horn section, some eloquent woodwind players and an array of theatrically precise percussionists. If there’s a ‘but’ waiting in the wings, it’s prompted by the fact that the performance of the symphony felt more fragmentary than usual and at crucial points we heard individual sections in slightly uneasy coexistence with each other, creating a sound that lacked a cohesive sonority. Some of the more ‘local colour’ aspects of the symphony – the sentimental klezmer music of the slow movement or the sardonic ‘oom-pah’ band passage that follows it – seemed too alien for these players to embrace convincingly. Still, for all that, the occasionally rickety structure of the symphony’s final movement swept us to a triumphant conclusion, and the point where the horn section (accompanied in this instance by an additional trombone) stood to play the final bars was, as Mahler intended, an emotional coup.
If the concert ended with a Viennese flourish, it began with something much more atmospherically oriental, extracts from the score to the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which its composer Tan Dun then reworked into the six-movement Crouching Tiger Concerto. Curiously, though, that wasn’t quite what we got to hear. Instead, the expressive and talented cellist Jiapeng Nie and the orchestra played three of its six movements, a decision which seemed a little baffling, like watching a random set of highlights of a sporting fixture instead of the whole match.
Nevertheless, it’s an attractive score, the music clearly shaped to suit a western audience’s perceptions of what ‘authentic’ Chinese music might sound like without degenerating into pastiche. It is scored for solo cello and strings, accompanied by harp, flute (imitating the bawu, a Chinese bamboo flute) and five occasionally very loud percussionists. Nie played the solo part with great charm, especially those quieter moments where his mournful glissandi echoed the erhu, the bowed string instrument for which the work was originally scored. Even Nie, however, could do little with the closing bars of the first movement, in which he could have been playing anything or nothing, against the barrage of five percussionists letting rip on their drums.
Between these two works, and featuring the exceptional British violinist Tamsin Waley-Cohen, we heard Chausson’s dreamy Poème for violin and orchestra. It’s not an easy work to pull off, being in danger of sounding rather formless, but Waley-Cohen made light work of its technical difficulties, notably tricky double-stopping, and shaped the result eloquently from the subdued introspection of the opening through to an impassioned climax then back to the sombre tones of the conclusion. Young conductor DaYe Lin coaxed impressionistically sensuous playing from his orchestra here, showing that they are capable of a richly blended sound. Overall, Waley-Cohen’s talents seemed a little under-used here (she’s playing Saint-Saëns alongside the Chausson elsewhere on this tour), but she contributed richly to a satisfying concert.
