Review: Chinese soloist Wu Wei stole the show in his performance with the Minnesota Orchestra

For the Minnesota Star Tribune
10/11/2024 By Rob Hubbard

 

Wu Wei plays a mean sheng.

 

What’s a sheng, you ask? It’s a Chinese mouth organ with an ancestry that dates back three millennia. At first glance, it looks something like the severed bottom of a contrabassoon, all dark varnished wood and metal levers. But a closer view shows that it’s actually something like a tiny reproduction of a pipe organ, its air coming from the mouth of the musician playing it. In its upper register, it sounds like a harmonica, at its low end closer to an English horn. In between, it has a reedy sound all its own.

 

Wei is the Chinese musician who has brought it to orchestral concert halls. And, this week, he’s playing it in the company of Finnish conductor Dima Slobodeniouk and the Minnesota Orchestra, soloing on a work by another Finn, Jukka Tiensuu. At Thursday’s midday concert, it proved a thrilling expedition to parts doubtless unknown to most of the almost-capacity crowd. And the virtuosity of the Grammy-winning Wei came through so clearly that he earned a lengthy standing ovation and provided an encore.

 

In fact, so exciting was the experience that it threw the main attraction into eclipse. That would be Gustav Holst’s very popular suite, “The Planets,” which received a pretty good interpretation from Slobodeniouk and the orchestra (and the offstage women of the Minnesota Chorale), but felt as if a nod to convention and familiarity after the intrepidly exotic Tiensuu piece.

 

And “Teoton” was indeed a world apart from the century-older “Planets.” Coming after another Finnish piece from the mid-2010s — Lotta Wennäkoski’s combination of chaos and contemplation, “Flounce” — Tiensuu’s “Teoton” proved a fascinating showcase for what the sheng can do. In the opening “Fever,” Wei exchanged darting phrases with various sections of the orchestra before percussively popping atop the strings’ long, slow glissandos.

 

The instrument is also capable of producing haunting sounds, as on the eerie “Adrift,” which bore echoes of Claude Debussy in its melancholy beauty. Like the work’s opening movement, “Game” offered a call and response between Wei and various musicians in the orchestra. But here the soloist bounded back and forth like a fencer thrusting and parrying with the cellos before launching into a cadenza that resonated with the kind of frantic anxiety associated with Philip Glass.

The concluding “Bliss” underlined not only Wei’s artistry, but how perfectly in sync the orchestra was with the work’s many twists and turns of mood and sound world. This was particularly true of a transporting section that evoked raindrops trickling down a window pane, Wei taking listeners on transporting melodic lines that suddenly became dense chords. The ensuing ovation earned a high-energy encore, Wei’s “Dragon Dance,” which had the feel of a jazz waltz.

 

As for “The Planets,” it was a fine showcase for the orchestra, particularly the dark thunder of the timpani and low brass on “Mars,” the ethereal solos of violinist Erin Keefe and principal French horn Michael Gast on “Venus,” and the sonorous seven-horn fanfares that orbit around “Jupiter.” But this was a day when a small, ancient Asian instrument managed to steal the show from a big, booming orchestra.  Read more >>

 

In conversation with Sibylle Kayser
07/05/2022 
SIBYLLE KAYSER: Mr. Wu, you interpret the solo part in Unsuk Chin's Concerto for Sheng and Orchestra from 2009. I read that there are many different shengs. What instrument do you use for this work and how exactly does it work?

 

WU WEI: I use a modified 37-pipe sheng. Modified means it is based on the traditional bamboo sheng but modified for modern use. ...Read more>>

 

Spectacular
05/02/2022 by Magnus Andersson 

 

Music rarely gets as beautiful as this.

Not least, Wei can sing on his instrument, so vividly that every classical wind musician has something to learn from him. Wallin has chosen to let much of the piece take place within these heavenly sounds, often in subtle colour dialogue with the orchestra. Within the orchestra, he constantly finds new instrument combinations to create expressivity. The colors undulate between different instrument groups, so that the orchestra can be heard in a multidimensional perspective, purely sonically in the room. Music rarely gets as beautiful as this.

 

Wallin says that the progression and development in the Concerto is made intuitively, like any classical work. However, the pitches are not random, because Wallin uses a principle he himself has created to generate the pitch material, namely so-called "crystal chords" (simplified: three interval "seeds" are stacked several times on top of each other). The dramatic form is based on the five Chinese elements: water, earth, wood, metal and fire. After an introduction, he addresses these elements, one by one, in a captivating epic tale....Read more>>

 

Liszt, Scriabin and a Fang Man world premiere deliver a feast of maximalist music

06/03/2022 by Harvey Steiman

 

....This phoenix is one scary bird. Fang Man embeds songs of seven American birds into a riot of pounding drums, cymbals, tuned percussion and an outsized brass section that at times calls to mind the third-stream jazz of Sun Ra or Gunther Schuller.

The piece opens quietly, a bass drum thumping against eerie chords. A gradual crescendo introduces growling and squawking figures that reach noisy climaxes in which the musicians of the whole orchestra play freely against each other until conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen waves them off – only for the bird to gradually rise again and again over the piece’s 25 minutes. That’s what the mythical phoenix does too...Read more >>

 

Esa-Pekka Salonen and S.F. Symphony raise the roof with a powerful program
03/04/2022 by Joshua Kosman 

 

....The roof might take a little while to settle back into place.

To be fair, there used to be a more concrete thematic profile to this program than “let’s get loud.” As originally announced, this was supposed to be part of the mini-festival Salonen had planned around the myth of Prometheus, beginning with last week’s account of Beethoven’s ballet “The Creatures of Prometheus” and continuing with Promethean works by, again, Liszt and Scriabin.

But plans change, and instead of thematic consistency we got to savor the exuberant clamor of “Song of the Flaming Phoenix,” Fang’s concerto for orchestra and the ancient Chinese mouth organ known as the sheng. This also connected in a vague way with the Prometheus story, because of the fire, but it stood marvelously well on its own... Read More >>

 

Double shengtido routes
by Paco Yanez

.....After the echoes of the oriental in Europe, filtered through Claude Debussy, the Austrian composer Bernd Richard Deutsch (Mödling, 1977) brought to our music and to our continent one of the oldest Asian instruments of all those still forming part of the musical heritage I live from, in this case, China: the sheng, an antecedent mouth organ of perhaps the best-known Japanese shō (an instrument, the latter, for which Western composers ranging from John Cage to Helmut Lachenmann have written). In its day, when in July 2013 the Atlas Ensemble visited Santiago de Compostela as part of the second Festival are [UT] opías, I had asked the shō interpreter of the Dutch group, Naomi Sato, about the way these composers write for their instrument, to which she told me that it had nothing to do with what the eastern tradition of shō was. Seven years later, I asked the same question to the sheng soloist that we listened to tonight in Porto, the impressive Wu Wei, and the Chinese musician confirmed to me that what Bernd Richard Deutsch composed was, once again, totally different from the traditional music of his native country, which results in the expansion of techniques and styles in the literature written specifically for this ancient instrument: an instrument that in the concert for sheng and Phaenomena orchestra (2018-19) is reinvented, therefore, by complete (as it did in the cageanaTwo 3 (1991), performed at the time by Wu Wei al sheng himself together with Stefan Hussong on the accordion, in a Wergo label reviewed in May 2016 on these same pages)....  Read more >>

 

Dude takes hit off Sheng
by John Marcher

The concert began with the U.S. premiere of Unsuk Chin's Su (pronounced shu), a joint commission by the LA Phil and and two other organizations. Su is a one-movement concerto for Sheng (a Chinese mouth organ) and Orchestra. The soloist was Wu Wei, known around the world as one of the foremost players of the Sheng, an instrument that looks kind of like a bong made at home by a Tolkien fanatic with a bicycle horn sticking out of it. It has 37 pipes in it and the range of sound Wei created on it was more than impressive- it can mimic many instruments and also sound unlike anything else, with some sounds approximating things usually created electronically- at least in my experience. The orchestra contained a phalanx of percussion, with a number of instruments I've never seen, including a tom that had three balls spinning around its inner perimeter and a piano whose strings were played but the keys of which I believe remained untouched through the performance. It was quite an interesting piece as the interplay between the sheng and the orchestra didn't follow the usual competition format of a standard concerto but instead became a conversation held in a number of musical languages. Wei's performance impressed me greatly, though having no prior experience with the instrument, I'm responding to it as one might view a talented magician's performance for the first time. The rest of the orchestra responded well to Dudamel's conducting, with the strings especially making a significant contribution to the success of the whole. -Labels LAPhil