Tan Dun’s Water Concerto enchants in Cleveland

United States ‘Tan Dun Conducts Tan Dun’: Marc Damoulakis (water percussion), Cleveland Orchestra / Tan Dun (conductor). Mandel Concert Hall at Severance Music Center, Cleveland, 31.10.2024. (MSJ)

Stravinsky – Fireworks’, Op.4
Tan Dun – Water Concerto; Concerto for Orchestra
Britten – ‘Four Sea Interludes’ from Peter Grimes, Op.33a

How far we have come from the days of High Modernism, when Pierre Boulez presided over avant-garde classical music, a veritable pope of ultra-serious serialism. Perhaps his ghost walked the halls of Severance Music Center tonight, wringing its hands over his fate as his music fades into niche obscurity, while a composer with one foot in Chinese folk music and the other foot in modern film soundtracks got cheering ovations for his evocative music. Tan Dun made his Cleveland debut, and it is one that will linger in the memory.

Raised in rural China and first acclaimed for his Oscar-winning score for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Tan Dun brought two works that amply demonstrated his creativity in effectively combining experimental strangeness with relatable comfort. His Water Concerto was inspired by childhood memories of a village shaman in China making music with whatever was at hand – water, rocks and so forth – as part of rituals. Here, the whole piece became a ritual. In a delightful atmospheric touch, the Mandel Hall house lights changed to blue, and the water percussionist’s large bowls were lit from below, casting shimmers on the top of the proscenium arch.

Tan began by turning on the podium and gesturing toward the back of the house, where Cleveland Orchestra percussionist Mark Damoulakis was waiting with a waterphone, a metal instrument that holds water in its base, while upward-projecting prongs are bowed by the player. As he began playing and approaching the stage, two assistant percussionists, Thomas Sherwood and Tanner Tanyeri, played waterphones on the edges of the stage. The effect was strange and mesmerizing. Once there, Damoulakis immersed his instrument in one of his large bowls of water, then soon set it aside to splash and drip drops of water with his hands, the sound picked up and amplified by contact microphones on the bowls. The reassuring familiarity of the simple sound of water was made emotional by its appearance in the wake of the trance-inducing waterphones.

And so, the piece unfolded, featuring breathtaking moments of strangeness with a parade of unusual instruments including water drums, water gongs, slaps and taps on water, falling trickles, partially submerged bells, inverted bowls and even a Slinky. The orchestral parts were equally intriguing, calling for great use of glissando and, in several places, for the mouthpieces of instruments to be played without the instruments. Moods shifted from mysterious to festive and dancing. The work is endlessly creative, turning pentatonic folk scales into cutting edge sonic adventures, and it managed to be challenging while giving listeners familiar ground from which to venture into the unknown. The hypnotic quiet moments cast a spell over the audience that erupted into cheers and applause at the end.

While perhaps less personal, Tan’s Concerto for Orchestra – inspired by the travels of Marco Polo – shared a similar vocabulary with the Water Concerto, making even further use of glissando and extended techniques. It included many star moments for the fearless Cleveland players, including some particularly epic woodwind solos for John Clouser (bassoon), Jeffrey Rathbun (oboe), Afendi Yusuf (clarinet) and Jessica Sindell (flute). Tan is particularly successful at evoking Eastern culture by moving past facile cliches and getting to the heart of folk styles, using them to transform passages in a very Western manner. The world’s politicians could learn a thing or three from Tan Dun about how to unite opposites.

One does not go to a Tan Dun concert primarily to hear him lead other composers’ works, but it makes for an effective view of what interests him. Not surprisingly, he relished the bright colors and unpredictable textures of Igor Stravinsky’s early Fireworks, an interesting piece even if it is audibly derivative of Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky’s teacher, and of Paul Dukas, the composer’s older colleague, whose The Sorcerer’s Apprentice seems unintentionally quoted.

Benjamin Britten’s ‘Four Sea Interludes’ from Peter Grimes allowed Tan to relish the meeting of nature and humanity as he does in his own works. While Tan is an expressive conductor, his technical polish is limited, leading to some awkward brass entrances in ‘Dawn’, while ‘Moonlight’ was too tense to achieve the lump-in-the-throat vulnerability it is capable of. ‘Sunday Morning’ was suitably bright, at the same quick tempo Britten himself favored, but the concluding ‘Storm’ seemed held at arm’s length, examined coolly instead of embraced. Still, they were great program choices, effectively giving the entire concert a four-elements theme, and contrasting effectively with the main events, Tan Dun’s original compositions.

Mark Sebastian Jordan

Featured Image: Mandel Hall bathed in blue light and Tan Dun conducting the Cleveland Orchestra © Roger Mastroianni/TCO