Hult audience hums along under the spell of composer

By Janos Gereben
From The Register-Guard

"SILENCE!", the conductor shouted. No, it was not my old fantasy come true, an admonition delivered forcefully to a noisy audience. Those in the Hult Center's Silva Concert Hall Sunday afternoon did not need to be hushed. This Oregon Bach Festival audience sat as one, enthralled, mesmerized, some just plain dumbfounded.

And that's how they stayed for two hours while composer Tan Dun presented three of his orchestral works.

On the podium, following the score, Sarah Ioannides yelled "silence" to the orchestra. The other conductor, the composer himself, cued brass players scattered in the auditorium, and they responded with random sounds from small, kazoo-like instruments.

Boom! went the brass, percussion and some big old gong somewhere. Orchestra players hummed and shouted, bass soloist Stephen Bryant declaimed, electronic fortissimos shook the hall, the players turned pages of the score in unison to make a whooshing sound, Tan's trademark amplified water bowls gurgled, and David Cossin played strange objects in a mind-blowing percussive orgy.

Was this a time warp or perhaps an homage to the decades-old experimental music/performance art/long-hair bad-boy inheritance of John Cage, Edgar Varèse, George Antheil, Luigi Russolo and his "art of noise," Nam June Paik or the entire Fluxus Group? Was Laurie Anderson lurking about with a fake mustache, singing bass?

Not so, because no one else has Tan's unbridled enthusiasm, fearlessly playing with the "medium" of music, as if for the first time. More importantly, none of those good people had Tan's awesome hold on the audience.

What were they all charmed by? "Orchestral Theatre I: XUN," "Orchestral Theatre II: RE," and the "Crouching Tiger Concerto." The last one, running 45 minutes, is a suite from the soundtrack to the Ang Lee film, accompanied by a video installation of images related to the movie (and not; for example, an incongruous shot of the World Trade Center).

In many years of attending new-music festivals, I have never seen anything like this; not the work, which is all too familiar and fast becoming tiresome, but Tan's power over his listeners.

Not only did he make them participate by humming and singing some nonsense words, a la Bobby McFerrin, but he also showed sustained star power, a keen sense of dramatic, entertaining, "interesting" presentations, no matter how old the genre.

The question is, what will he use the power for? He could yet create some remarkable and really good new music of old-fashioned values, beyond his current state of razzle-dazzle, mass hypnotism and commissions galore.

Signs of real talent are clearly evident in Tan's work. He writes skillfully for all kinds of instruments (although when faced with the orchestra, he constantly reverts to unison writing), and he certainly has flair, even if his structural attention span runs to about one-tenth of a 30-second TV commercial.

He uses long, "pregnant" silences, but they are not juxtaposed with something cohesive; silences between widely, illogically parsed phrases don't communicate much but do make listeners hold their breath. Effect on top of effect, constant attack on the listener's attention, nothing much from or to the heart.

Occasionally, beautiful phrases come up, both Western and Chinese, but they are fragmentary, not developed, not sustained. The Farewell section of the "Crouching Tiger Concerto" stands out as a comprehensive piece of music.

One of Tan's undeniable strengths is his selection of collaborators. Among them are Ioannides, a young, impressive conductor; the amazing cellist Maya Beiser, who makes everything sound important and gigantic (and so becomes somewhat monotonous, however impressive, quite without Yo-Yo Ma's humility and lyricism); Renyang Gao, a virtuoso player of bawu and dizi (Chinese flutes); and Cossin, playing a kind of electronic erhu, brilliantly.

Janos Gereben is arts editor of Post Newspapers and a reviewer and music news columnist for San Francisco Classical Voice (www.sfcv.org). He can be reached at janos451@earthlink.net.