In Sunday’s (5/27) Philadelphia Inquirer, David Patrick Stearns reports on the Philadelphia Orchestra’s ten-day China tour. “On the surface, the May 28-to-June 6 schedule looks like a lot of this and that: Five full-orchestra concerts under Charles Dutoit, photo opportunities nearly every step of the way, numerous outreach concerts, commercials from sponsors such as Hennessy and Drexel University—mostly in Beijing but later in Shanghai, Gwangzhou, Tianjin, and Macao. What could it add up to? Other concert visits, no doubt. Clearly, though, the orchestra is after much, much more: annual residencies. ‘Let’s do something historic,’ declared Chen Ping, president of Beijing’s National Centre for the Performing Arts, where the Philadelphia Orchestra will base its activities. … Historic is a big word when precedents include the Philadelphia Orchestra’s arriving in China in 1973—the first American orchestra to play there since 1949’s communist takeover. … But while early concerts there often were heard mostly by invited dignitaries, the 2012 residency is the conceptual opposite: It embraces the public more than ever, with 15 concerts outside the National Centre, some of them pop-up performances at historic sites. Have other foreign orchestras offered such street-level availability in Beijing? ‘Never,’ Jingmao Yang, the National Centre’s vice president, said in an interview Wednesday. ‘It means a lot for us. The Chinese government asks artists to meet our ordinary people and citizens.’ ”
Posted May 29, 2012
