Tan Dun's New 'Water Passion': Redemption or Immersion?

By Paul Hertelend
From artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music

EUGENE, OR.---Will the real Tan Dun please stand up? Two such diametrically different aspects of his compositions were presented here, the listener comes away intrigued, baffled, bewildered.

As one of his colleagues explained, “He is still developing, still broadening out as a composer.”

Is the real Tan the hot property who created his award-winning film score for “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” now distilled into a rousing double concerto? Or the meandering experimentalist/mystic who did “Water Passion after St. Matthew” (2002), a theater piece given its much-publicized American premiere at the Oregon Bach Festival July 5?

In "Water Passion," Tan grapples with East-West blendings. So often the trouble with East-West amalgams is that the glue holding them together doesn’t. Many composers have worked at it: Colin McPhee and Toru Takemitsu in the past, and more recently Bright Cheng, Chen Yi and Tan Dun, to name a few.

We’ve had Christian passions from Bach to Penderecki. It took Tan, a Buddhist never brought up on Bach, to create an avant-garde, deconstructed passion focused on timeless Eastern meditation and contemplation. Here Tan has distilled that traditional baroque form down to the absolute minimum, taking out the orchestra and most of the text, and inserting ear-tingling sounds from both East and West.

Tan thereby produced a trans-Pacific-Ocean interplay with minimal content, but still taking up an entire concert evening. And the waters, ocean-salty or otherwise, play a focal role as the liquids in large illuminated plastic bowls are gently stirred, wrung, dripped and sloshed with sounds amplified, while reflections and images play upon the ceiling. These are the waters of the first baptism, the waters of Jesus’ “cup of suffering,” and the waters of tears at the Crucifixion, all poured out with brief choral fragments from the gospel sung in English.

The chorus is central, supplemented by three crucial percussionists striking everything within reach, ranging from timpani and tamtam to river-eroded stones. A sampler keyboard adds found sounds and Eastern instruments, both genteel and eerie, while all the music is supplemented by amplification and electronic enhancement. 
Two solo singers feature a bass narrator (Stephen Bryant) who must sing and speak and groan, plus the stunning young coloratura soprano Elizabeth Keusch, who is called on to shriek some of her lines in a sonic stratosphere above the staff, whether portraying Peter or the devil.

For this most orthodox of formats, Tan added imagination, Eastern mysticism and--- musical unorthodoxy.

The piece works only if the listener is drawn deeply into its slow-paced, contemplative mode. The critics were divided. I found it much too diffuse to make an impact, with many of the effects---the chorus’ “Barabbas!” outcry, or the bland roll of drums at Christ’s death---a distinct anticlimax.

Moral: Regardless of century, it’s tough to compete against Bach. Built around timbres rather than harmonies or melodic line, Tan’s aesthetic is distinctly and forbiddingly ascetic.

He also guided (rather than conducted) the ensemble from the podium with broad hand gestures that often left his soloists teetering off the beat.

“Water Passion” reaches high intensity toward the end of the second hour, with crowds derisively viewing Christ’s lashing, and later with the post-mortem thundersheets, calming for the serene close on a note of “time to love” consolation. 
The evening-length opus had gotten its world premiere in Stuttgart, Germany and is coming this fall to the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

The festival also offered another all-Tan concert with his ritualistic Orchestral Theatre I and II featuring audience participation, plus the superb “Crouching Tiger Concerto” based on the film music. The latter---actually a 45-minute double concerto---is his strongest symphonic piece ever, using dramatic and colorful music (of a more conventional genre) drawn from the film. The concerto takes on a new life in the concert hall, distinct from its supportive role in the movie.

What really works here is juxtaposing the major soloist on cello (Maya Beiser) with a Chinese bamboo flutist (Renyang Gao), then featuring the two women playing off each other in an extraordinary dialogue where East really does meet West, and they are on the best of terms. The Ang Lee video installation, mostly outtakes from the movie, seemed totally superfluous in the performance of July 7 by the festival orchestra at the 2,400-seat Silva Concert Hall.

The Oregon Bach Festival, which runs June 29-July 14 under founder Helmuth Rilling’s musical direction, presents choral-orchestral evenings of Bach, Penderecki, Tan and others, plus recitals and chamber. Ticket info: (541) 682-5000 or (800) 457-1486, or on line.

Paul Hertelendy has been covering the dance and modern-music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area with relish -- and a certain amount of salsa -- for years.

These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never weakly) will focus on dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into recordings by local artists, books (by authors of the region) and theater as well.

© Paul Hertelendy 2002