Napoleon Bonaparte is reputed to have once said: “China is a sleeping giant, when she wakes she will shake the world”. It occurred to me while listening to the Chinese-American Tan Dun in charge of London Philharmonic forces for one of his own creations, the UK premiere of Choral Concerto: Nine, that the musical establishment still has a rather Eurocentric view of classical music in general. Nevertheless, in the Old World we have long ceded any sovereignty in such matters, given that in Japan alone Beethoven’s Choral Symphony is a regular part of programming for all orchestras during the Christmas season. Music, after all, is regarded as the universal language, and the message in Beethoven’s final symphonic statement is addressed to humankind everywhere. However, we need to be reminded from time to time that there are different ways of approaching that fundamental truth.
In his new work, Tan (in Chinese the family name comes first, followed by the given name) makes use of texts by three poets writing centuries before the advent of the Common Era, juxtaposed with words from Schiller’s Ode to Joy. There are some obvious connections with the model of inspiration in Beethoven’s Ninth: the music emerges seemingly from the mists of time and ends majestically in a paean of choral celebration. Following on from a long opening movement (the entire piece is thirty-two minutes in duration) there comes a Scherzo with a prominent part for timpani leading without a break into the Finale, prefaced by a long melancholic cantilena for lower strings. Here, a direct quotation from the Ninth, with a horn entry and subsequent strings and woodwind before being interrupted by heavy orchestral chords, reminds the listener that the work was planned as Tan’s tribute in 2020 to mark the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth until a worldwide pandemic intervened.
There the basic similarities end, for Tan’s work is essentially different. There is no solo quartet of singers, but there is a songlike solo for alto flute in the first movement. Intriguingly, the three movements entitled Nine, Wine and Time all carry the same name in Chinese, jiu. By far the most innovatory writing for the chorus, present from the start, involves what Tan calls “empty words”. For him, empty means everything: “I find it very interesting to use the ‘emptiness’ to represent ‘everything’.” There are a lot of non-verbal utterances, wordless sighs and, especially in the Scherzo, repeated exhalations, quite hypnotic when produced by the combined forces of the London Philharmonic Choir and the London Chinese Philharmonic Choir. Collectively, they demonstrated considerable agility and flexibility, in switching from an extended legato to a short and snappy staccato on individual syllables, as well as maintaining poise and focus in longer instances of a cappella, which often involved negotiating a tricky high-lying soprano line. The eclectic qualities of the choral writing encompassed, to my ears at least, hints of the Humming Chorus from Puccini’s Madama Butterfly together with Henry Mancini’s Moon River, not so surprising given Tan’s interest in also writing film scores. At times the singers sounded like a high-energy wind machine delivering gusts, whines and gentle breezes.
Orchestrally, there was a mixture of the conventional and the revolutionary. Tan very much favours string pizzicatos and a solid underpinning from cellos and basses, the brilliance of trumpets and a kind of musical onomatopoeia from the percussion section. In the long opening movement there was much rustling, clicking and ticking, tapping and scraping to tantalise the ear; in the carnivalesque Scherzo with its infectious rhythms the hard-sticked timpani and variety of bongo drums added splashes of colour; in the Finale tubular bells and a xylophone underlined the festive qualities.
Tan identifies himself with the Taoist view of art as reverberations with all the vital forces in nature. He himself has stated: “Eventually we will all realise one day that there were never any boundaries, except those of man. All music is created by God.” Sound as the voice of nature is a perfectly legitimate aesthetic, but it is very much at odds with traditional western music. For all its experimental use of instrumental and choral voices, this piece is very much a collage, a melange which relies on mercurial shifts in mood, tempo and dynamics. I often waited in vain for an idea to be developed further, for some recurrence, if not exactly in sonata form, of recognisable patterns. That is the problem with structural coherence: it doesn’t allow for much thinking outside the box, an approach which certainly cannot be applied to Tan’s Nine.
After the interval, the transition from Tan’s sound-world to Beethoven’s seemed to diminish rather than enhance the latter’s revolutionary potential. There were no antiphonal violins for instance, and I found myself wondering why Tan had deployed quadruple woodwind, since they were hardly in evidence in the opening movement, a deficit which also applied to the horns, curiously held back for much of the work though the trumpets and trombones were given their head. Throughout this was a string-led performance, brisk, indeed a little brusque at times, coming in at just sixty-four minutes. Tan secured a great deal of lithe and muscular playing from his orchestra, so that the overall body of sound was impressive. Nor was there any lack of sensitivity, for despite the very flowing tempo he adopted for the slow movement – it was certainly cantabile though not at all Adagio molto – his shaping of the melodic lines with batonless hands demonstrated considerable feeling.
However, the one quality missing in that first movement was mystery. This is supposed to be a grand tonal universe emerging out of a harmonic void: Darkness over the Face of the Deep, rounded off in the coda by a journey through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, with much probing and searching in between. Though we had plenty of punchy rhythms, there was little sense of a musical exploration. In Beethoven’s original manuscript, he had scrawled the word “Verzweiflung” (despair). If progression is too glib and easily won, as was the case here, it leaves out of account the struggle that is such a key element in this composer’s vocabulary.
When the bass soloist intones “O Freunde, nicht diese Töne” at the start of the Finale, it only hits home properly if the preceding phrases, a recapitulation of earlier themes, have been treated in morose fashion. The injunction is, after all, to blow away any notion of enervating introspection. This was unfortunately underplayed by Tan. Though Matthew Rose’s delivery was suitably stentorian and indeed imperious, there were a few intonation wobbles, and I found his voice just a little too weighty in comparison with the other members of the solo quartet. He and the honey-coated lyrical tenor of John Findon did put the two female voices somewhat in the shade. Hogni Wu’s mezzo remained a little colourless and I was disappointed in Elizabeth Watts’s small-scale soprano, though in her final ascent she came through strongly triumphant.
The male choral forces would have benefited from an army of Matthew Roses. Though the sopranos were splendidly incisive and angelic sounding in their higher-lying passages, the men fell short. The embracing call “Seid umschlungen, Millionen” was little more than a limp hug and the key phrase “Ihr stürzt nieder, Millionen” had none of the necessary dramatic emphasis.
Beethoven, unlike his contemporary Schubert, for instance, is all about the resolution of conflict. Establishing peace in the world has always been a powerfully unifying cry, if not necessarily among every group of politicians, then certainly within the creative communities. In turn, harmony is an important element in mainstream musical thinking. Mavericks there will always be. Tan’s new work has a concluding movement subtitled Ode to Peace; Beethoven’s Ninth translates Schiller’s idea embodied in his Ode to Joy into something similar. Even if current signs are not exactly positive, the reaffirmation of such principles can only be welcomed.
Alexander Hall
From an ode to peace to an ode to joy
Tan Dun – Choral Concerto: Nine (UK premiere); Beethoven – Symphony No. 9 (Choral), Op. 125
Elizabeth Watts (soprano); Hongni Wu (mezzo-soprano); John Findon (tenor); Matthew Rose (bass); London Philharmonic Choir; London Philharmonic Chinese Choir; Tan Dun (conductor)
Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London, 28 March 2026
Top image: Tan Dun (photo © Julian Guidera)