-
Jiang Tcheng Tse
for solo voice, chorus and orchestra
-
The Guardian
Chen confronts his personal experience of loss in the setting of a text by Su Shi (1037-1101). A bereaved man imagines being reunited with his beloved wife and the atmosphere created had mystery and reverence, its most striking texture that of the single soloist, singing in Peking-opera style. Meng Meng’s high soprano was haunting: the inflections of her keening lament took on an otherworldly quality and the murmured responses of the double chorus on either side added to the music’s rarefied aura.
By Rian Evans, The Guardian, 14 May 2018 -
www.theartsdesk.com
A more obviously substantial achievement is Chen’s Jiang Tcheng Tse (For the Sake of Art), a co-commission of the festival and here given its European premiere. This is an ambitious choral-orchestral setting of a profoundly moving peom by the 11th century poet Su Shi, in which the poet mourns his long-dead wife, feeling her constant presence but unable “to converse with you and whisper my longing”. Writing for a choir，Chen transfers to it the richly textured close harmonies of his instrumental style, in search of a certain thickness or concentration of emotion, leavened with a kind of bravura mouth-music for solo soprano (the extraordinary Meng Meng), using a technique apparently borrowed from Chinese opera. ... Whether or not the singing, by the BBC National Chorus of Wales, was accurate I can’t say, but the total effect was exceptionally powerful, not least because Chen has a strong sense of large-scale form and a mastery of the art of transition. In both these works the interleaving of slow and quick music and the management of climax are handled with immense skill, while the dense textures never lose harmonic direction. How the music relates to the poem, line-by-line, is a mystery. But it’s irresistibly affecting as a whole.
By Stephen Walsh, www.theartsdesk.com, 12 May 2018
