Wenchen Qin: Orchestral Works

Album review

If the pure avant-garde has undergone some severe reversals in the West, it seems to have some great days ahead of it (albeit likely a bit less pure and less hardcore) on the other side of the world: in China, where a number of hyper-modern composers are melding the traditions and sounds of their country (which contains dozens and dozens of different traditions from Mongolia to Szechuan), with the traditions and modernisms from the West. Wenchen Qin (born 1966) is one of them, whose music is played all over the world by the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, the Bavarian Radio Orchestra, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, L’Itinéraire in France, the Vienna Radio Orchestra, the Tokyo Orchestra, the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic, the Helsinki Philharmonic and the Sinfonia Varsovia, an impressive success which takes work to achieve. On this album we discover four of his most recent works. Echoes from the other Shore of 2015, for zheng and orchestra (the zheng is a kind of Asian mouth organ), The Nature’s Dialogue from 2010 for orchestra and tape recorder, the recording containing the sounds of nature – note that this intriguing work involves the juxtaposition of Asian tradition with that of medieval Europe, in the form of Gregorian chant. Then Across the Skies from 2012, for pipa and orchestra, the pipa being a kind of Asian lute. The album closes on the very impressive Lonely Song for 42 strings, a phenomenal counter-punctual work. Lonely Song was written in 1990 but completely revised in 2015. © SM/Qobuz