The composer cum guest conductor, Kuan Nai Chung (关乃忠), shared this amusing anecdote about the encore piece played at an SCO concert I attended last year.

About 20 years ago, a government body in Hong Kong that dealt with cultural affairs realized that they had some budget surplus that had better be used up in what I recalled to be a few days’ time.  So the composer was commissioned to deliver a work before a tight deadline.  Naturally he became rather anxious for ideas.  Somehow or other, inspirations of writing a short piece depicting a harvest ritual in Taiwan came to him.  The piece was hastily composed in a matter of days, and became known as 丰年祭.

It then became a runaway success and was performed widely, especially in Taiwan — an implicit endorsement of the authenticity of theme on which the piece was based on.  It’s popularity survives even till recent days, when it was chosen as a set piece for a school-wide music competition.  One of the judges of the competition, who is a friend of the composer, remarked that he got really sick of listening the same piece tens of times.  Just when he was relieved that his adjudication duties were over and he was outside the performance venue, he heard it again, played on someone’s cell-phone as the ring-tone!

In reality, according to Kuan, he had never witnessed the harvest festival before the piece was composed.  So he couldn’t, of course, have been inspired by the music sung there.  He declared that it is a totally phoney piece (实实在在的假货)!

It’s funny how some popular compositions started out of modest, sometimes even disparaging, expectations (e.g. Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1).

The concert also featured a world premier — Kuan’s Erhu Rhapsody No. 4, played by SCO’s concert master.  For this piece, the soloist’s erhu had to be tuned to G-G, i.e. the two strings were tuned an octave apart, instead of the usual fifth!  The enlarged range comes at the price of fingering ease.  A whole octave’s worth of notes had to be played on one of the strings, and that would require much more hand position shifts.  For someone used to playing on strings tuned a fifth apart, getting used to a new mental map of notes and their positions on the strings poses another challenge.  The piece wasn’t memorable on first hearing, even though there was some folksy sounding bits.   I wouldn’t mind listening to it again, for it expressed the solo instrument’s niche while not succumbing to harmonic tendencies in modern Western music.

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