Playing Catch Up with Ozawa

By MarthaDuffy

The Boston Symphony Orchestra takes Shanghai by storm

Seiji Ozawa dreams big. "I am Japanese," he says. "But I was born in China. Somehow I became a Western musician. My dream has been to come to China, me and the Boston Symphony, to play and teach and learn." Last week a Pan Am 747 with 157 people and 35,000 Ibs. of baggage, musical instruments and equipment touched down in Shanghai. B.S.O. Conductor Ozawa hurled himself forward to meet the weary orchestra, which he had preceded into the country by a day.

The Boston Symphony's triumphal eight-day, four-concert trip to Shanghai and Peking did not come about as a dream. Ozawa, 43, who speaks some Chinese, and the symphony's general manager, Thomas W. Morris, 35, had been invited by Peking to visit next December, but when normalization came, they asked to push the tour date forward. The Chinese agreed. They were especially interested in Ozawa's offer to provide some coaching in the form of master classes.

Three years ago, such musical missionary work would have been unthinkable. Now, with the government's blessing, China's musicians are seeking guidance with a hunger and intensity that is daunting. Like everyone else whose work involved the intellect or the arts, the nation's musicians saw their spiritual life erased for ten years by the Gang of Four. From 1966 to 1976 Chinese orchestras were allowed to play only a few granitic compositions; conservatories became inactive.

Today the doors are wide open. The very teachers and scholars who were forced to make themselves invisible are revered. There is a great demand for classical ballet and a fresh, unsatisfied curiosity about modern dance, particularly the work of Martha Graham. But most of the boom is in music. Last year there were 6,000 applications for 150 places at the Shanghai Conservatory. Says Tang Xuchen, 72, deputy director of the conservatory: "There is something that foreigners do not understand. Children were taught in secret, and anyway, the more you suppress a people, the stronger they become." Tang would like to take in more students, but the shabby facilities will not yet allow it.

Welcoming banners festooned Shanghai, celebrating the Boston Symphony's first concert. The program included Verdi and Mozart, but it was Ozawa's showy reading of Berlioz's Symphonic Fantastique that drew an ovation from the normally reserved Chinese. At times the sheer commotion of the visit threatened to engulf any real musical results. The center of excitement was the conservatory. When Violinist Joseph Silverstein wandered into a studio where Situ Dahong, 18, was practicing, the room was quickly jammed by other students, teachers and members of the press, including a CBS camera crew in full armor. The young man kept playing a Bach adagio, but it was a feat of poise. The next day, 500 violinists came for Silverstein's master class, some from hundreds of miles away. Only the tuba (ten) and the harp (20) drew fewer than 50 people. In all the studios the air was thick with concentration. Oboist Ralph Gomberg counseled one jittery student: "You don't hear the notes if you play it too fast." Flutist Senwick Smith used one phrase in a piece called The Flute of Pan to try to loose some spontaneity in his cautious players. "Do you know who Pan is?" he asked. They did not; he explained.

When the classes were over, orchestra members were surrounded by people wanting their autographs. Clarinetist Harold Wright signed his name to a paper and then said, "My God, that's a passport." The Boston players were full of admiration for the students' ability, but shocked by their equipment. Most instruments are either bad or terrible. Strings on violins and cellos are steel--cheap, durable, but incapable, as Ozawa says, of making "a mild tone." The conservatory library is sparse and quirky. If the Chinese were brilliant and intense in their execution, they were also rigid. Said one Boston player, "They have been so isolated for so long. They have no concept of style or refinement of sound to go by."

For Ozawa the biggest task was trying to rehearse the Shanghai Philharmonic in Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 "Pathetique." As usual, time was limited. He seized the moment quickly, placing members of his own orchestra among local players so that Boston Symphony Orchestra musicians could demonstrate a point of technique rapidly. Then he plunged ahead, a riveting little figure dressed to silk-screen perfection in a mod-Mao white suit by Designer Hanae Mori. He virtually pummeled the unruly sound into order and expressiveness, right leg stamping the beat, arms punching deep into the recalcitrant horn section.

The tour was expensive ($650,000 put up by corporations, and a third of that by Coca-Cola), and pitifully brief. But last week it seemed as if the Chinese thought the Boston Symphony Orchestra had brought Western classical music intact off their jet. The musicians left behind sets of gut strings, pounds of musical scores and manuscript paper. They also promised to find a way to get some Chinese students to next summer's festival at Tanglewood. Ozawa was careful to point out that this would be a good bargain for both: "Americans need to see the intensity of Chinese playing."

Tang observed the musical shock troops benignly. He knows very well the problems of bad instruments and isolation. Says he: "We have just come out of a cultural straitjacket. Dance music, for instance, was not in favor even before the Gang of Four. But we study it now be cause people like to dance. We want to learn Western music but not just copy it.

The ultimate goal is the exploration of Chinese music, especially for our composers. But the important thing is that now each student can take the direction he wants." --Martha Duffy

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