The CPO is hardly the only Chinese ensemble touring the West. This year’s Budapest Spring Festival featured Puccini’s “Turandot”, about a cold-hearted Chinese princess, performed by musicians from the China National Opera House in Beijing.
In August the Shanghai Opera performed “Thunderstorm”, a newly adapted Western-style Chinese work, at London’s Coliseum. Next year the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra will tour prestigious European festivals. Once, classical music generally travelled from the West to the rest. Now China is reversing the exchange, not merely performing Western classical music in China, but exporting it.
“We have many good classical music groups in China, but people abroad don’t know about them,” says Jiatong Wu, who has organised many of these tours. “We’re trying to change that.” Mr Wu, who co-founded Wu Promotion in 1991, has become an accelerator of China’s growing classical-music exports. Last year he dispatched the Macao Orchestra on its first tour of Europe, and also organised a CPO tour ending in Greece. Under his auspices, the Beijing Symphony Orchestra has completed seven European tours.
Fifty years after Mao’s Cultural Revolution in effect banned Western music, a real cultural revolution is taking place. The government is setting up opera houses, concert halls and symphony orchestras at speed. Some 40m children now play the piano—once dismissed by Mao as bourgeois—and additional millions play the violin. The “Lang Lang effect” helps too: the country’s most famous pianist has inspired millions of eager young musicians.
But it is in bringing orchestras, opera performances and top individual performers to the West that China is showing its real clout. Jindong Cai of Stanford University, who conducts in both China and the United States, describes the push in soft-power terms: “A product manufactured in China is not as important for China’s international profile. Cultural power is much more important.” Next month Mr Wu is dispatching the CPO to Havana. Chinese orchestras and opera companies now tour the Far East, too—previously the domain of touring Western outfits.
According to Mr Cai, the government operates a $300m art-export fund. (Mr Wu says the government doesn’t fund Wu Promotion, but does help pay for Chinese orchestras’ foreign tours.)
Western governments, too, help underwrite ensembles’ foreign tours.
Measured in musical quality, the CPO is not yet the Berlin Philharmonic. “No Chinese orchestra I have heard comes close to beginning to match the world’s best in power, beauty and precision,” says Norman Lebrecht, a British music critic. And though Mr Wu is said to treat his Chinese performers well, Western artists’ agents are concerned that Chinese performers undercut Westerners, because their employers don’t have to match the West’s wages or labour laws. That very setup has, of course, helped China become the world’s leading manufacturing power.
Mr Wu acknowledges the quality gap. “We have a couple of good orchestras, but they’re not the Vienna Phil,” he admits. “But our tours are a way of showing our orchestras’ standards, to show our colleagues in Europe that we’re getting better and better.” Mr Lebrecht agrees: “Longer-established Chinese orchestras have improved beyond recognition.”
The question is if the Chinese government and promoters like Mr Wu will manage in classical music what China’sfactories have accomplished in manufacturing: beat the West at its own game. Not surprisingly, Mr Wu plans to expand his company to Europe. The question, he says, is whether to start from scratch or buy an existing European company. Some European artists’ managers don’t like the sound of either option.
Source: The Economist
