NY Philharmonic shines under Shanghai sun

Judith LeClair, New York Philharmonic's principal bassoon, gives a class for students at the Shanghai Orchestra Academy. [Photo/China Daily]

The Music in the Summer Air festival in Shanghai has a new partner this year. The New York Philharmonic Orchestra has committed to a five-year program as the resident company at MISA starting from 2015.

The festival, organized by the Shanghai Symphony, kicked off on July 4, with an all-American concert New York Gala by the New York Philharmonic with famed violinist Joshua Bell as soloist. Altogether 28 concerts will be performed at two locations in downtown Shanghai during the festival that ends on July 18.

The residency program enables the New York orchestra to play four concerts at MISA this year, and participate in a series of other events. Musicians from New York will devote more than 100 hours to coaching and teaching Shanghai Orchestra Academy students.

The orchestra has brought to China for the first time its Young People's Concert. That series of educational concerts, dating as far as 1885, became established on TV in 1958, by then music director Leonard Bernstein. The program for July 9 was A Bite of the Apple, conducted by music director Alan Gilbert with both his New York musicians and seven outstanding instrumentalists from the Shanghai Orchestra Academy.

Besides pieces by legends such as Dvorak and Bernstein, the concert program also included two young composers' works: Shadow of the Wolf by Liao Shuwen from Shanghai, and New York: In Town and Out by Hawa Sakho from New York. Both are teenagers, and Gilbert found "distinctive character and voice" in their compositions "without studied language".

Bernstein's Young People's Concerts is part of the distinctive tradition of the New York Philharmonic, Gilbert says. The famous brand today continues to be "the standard" by which many orchestras measure their success.

Scientific studies show that children exposed to classical music do better in school, Gilbert says, though the beauty and benefit of music go beyond this. However, he has observed reduced support for music education in many parts of the world, and orchestras in these places have to "pick up the slack", and take over where the regular schools used to.

Despite the exceedingly high travel expense, Gilbert says the outreach to audiences like Chinese is a "blessing in disguise", as the philharmonic has created new residencies and relationships with cities around the world.

By staying longer, up to two weeks－as it does this year in Shanghai, and giving multiple concerts, they can show "a more realistic picture of what we are artistically", and take part in educational activities, meet young musicians and interested audiences. "It's a much more powerful experience," Gilbert says. This partnership is the model of what the orchestra is exploring everywhere, he adds.

MISA was founded in 2009 by Shanghai Symphony, aiming to draw the public closer to classical music, and this is the first time it takes place at the new Shanghai Symphony Hall.

The hall, which opened last year, has enabled unprecedented presentations of music, says Zhou Ping, director of the Shanghai Symphony. Cutting-edge technologies have been adopted in three multimedia concerts during the festival, particularly a 3-D concert featuring Stravinsky's Rite of Spring presented last week.

That concert was directed by Germany's Klaus Obermaier, whose works push the boundaries of music, choreography and new media. At the concert a dancer performed near a corner of the stage, in front of a dark background. Her motions were captured by six cameras, to create a digital silhouette as part of the computerized animation show projected in real time on a big screen.

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