Bright Sheng

Even the best-behaved toddler is bound to grow fidgety during an evening-length classical music concert. But the composer Bright Sheng remembers a time when, in the midst of a concerto, the violin soloist intervened, turning to serenade Sheng’s two-year-old daughter, Fayfay, and delighting her with her favorite tune. 

It was the 2014 premiere of Sheng’s Let Fly, a violin concerto whose main theme is derived from a nursery rhyme that Sheng wrote for her. The soloist and dedicatee, Gil Shaham, knew the melody had a special meaning. “We were sitting in the box, she was sitting on my lap, and whenever the tune came in, Gil would turn around to the box and kind of serenade Fayfay,” Sheng recalls.  

“When she recognized the tune, she would turn around and kiss me. It was a really touching moment.”  

Let Fly is one of three works by Sheng gathered on a new Naxos recording, along with his Zodiac Tales and Suzhou Overture. Performed by the Suzhou Symphony Orchestra and violinist Dan Zhu, under Sheng's direction, Let Fly offers a melding of Western forms and Chinese sonorities. Its melodic substance takes after a "flying song,” a folk style rooted in the mountainous southern China and sometimes likened to yodeling (not coincidentally, Fayfay is a homonym for “fly” in Chinese). 

The concerto offers some distinctly Western touches too. At the end of the second movement, the violinist is called on to write their own original cadenza, just as Mozart or Paganini would have done. Zhu says he heartily embraced the task. “Sometimes I’d preview the theme for Bright backstage, while other times I’d surprise him on-stage,” he says, calling the concerto a “soul-searching journey.”  

Melding Cultures 

A professor of composition at the University of Michigan, Sheng is among the most successful of a generation of Chinese composers who immigrated to the United States some 30 years ago. With encouragement from mentors including Leonard Bernstein and George Perle, he found a way to convey the potent and complex emotions he feels about his homeland.  

Among his early breakthroughs was the 1988 H'un (Lacerations): In Memoriam 1966-76, a searing orchestral evocation of the Mao’s Cultural Revolution, a brutal time that the composer and his family lived through. He’s since gone on to write operas on Chinese epics (Dream of the Red Chamber), tone poems on Tibetan folk culture (Tibetan Swing), and even a chamber piece about the spicy cuisine of the Si Chuan province (Hot Pepper). 

Zodiac Tales, recorded with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, brims with the strangeness and wonder of a graphic novel, portraying six of the 12 animals signified in Chinese astrology. “I read about the myths that go with each of these animals,” he explains. “So I chose the ones that I found most vivid and easier to get into musically.” Brash, chomping outbursts mark “The Elephant-Eating Serpent” while sly, scurrying strings characterize “Of Mice and Cats.” In the impressionistic fifth movement, “Tomb of the Soulful Dog,” Sheng evokes a ruminative Buddhist chant sung by three nuns at the deathbed of his mother in 2005. 

“It's like when the priest arrives in Western Catholic religion,” Sheng says, recalling how the nuns arrived in the hospital where she had been taken ill. “It was a very powerful moment. They just sing over and over the same thing so I remembered that tune and used it as a passacaglia.” 

Apart from eight years during the Cultural Revolution, when Sheng and his family were sent to live among peasants in remote Qinghai (and he played piano in a provincial band), he spent most of his childhood in Shanghai, eventually attending the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. But if there’s another city close to his heart, it’s Suzhou, where his grandparents lived and today is a metropolis where wooden pagodas and classical gardens meet the glassy skyscrapers.  

In 2019, Sheng wrote the score for a short promotional film commissioned by the Suzhou government, titled simply as Suzhou Overture. “There’s a kind of folk ballade tradition in Suzhou,” he says. “It's very beautiful and quite well known. It makes Suzhou the traditional folk music capital of China.” The music has an ancient-meets-modern character, with sumptuous strings and splashes of gong. “Since this music is for a commercial film I didn't try to write something too hard for the orchestra,” he says. “I know that we only have one shot to release it and to record it quickly.” 

A New Year’s Release 

Pandemic-era travel restrictions have prevented Sheng from traveling back to China this past year but he is optimistic about the country’s musical life. The Suzhou Symphony is a particular discovery, an ensemble founded in 2016 with a distinctly international membership (representing more than 20 countries) and a fresh, joyful approach to music-making. 

The new recording arrives on Chinese New Year, a time when the composer would normally gather for a large celebration with his father and siblings in New York. While 2021 promises to be more low-key, he anticipates a big family meal at his home in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “Nowadays we stay home and just cook every day,” he said. “Maybe we'll do a hot pot or make dumplings. That's considered pretty elaborate.” 

- Written by Brian Wise 

Brian Wise writes about classical music for BBC Music Magazine, Musical America, and is the producer of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s national radio broadcasts.