In April 2020, the National Centre for the Performing Arts launched its first online concert, with string quartets and woodwind quintets carrying the melodies of St. Beethoven, played leisurely under the quiet dome of the theater. When this episode was broadcast, the famous host Bai Yansong, who served as a guiding guest, mentioned that the epidemic may help more people understand chamber music to some extent.
The small number of people is the most external distinctive feature of chamber music, it is flexible in form, but it does not mean simple. Now, two years later, has chamber music really found a breakthrough point for popularization?
In April 2020, the online performance of the National Centre for the Performing Arts started with chamber music
Chamber music isn't just about Castle in the Sky
Surrounded by the candlelight of the screen, several performers bowed their heads gracefully, and the warm and slightly sad "Castle in the Sky" poured out... In the past two years, the "candlelight concert" with chamber music performance as the core has become a new favorite of social media such as circle of friends and little red book. The romantic and elegant atmosphere, the beautiful melody adapted from anime film and television music and popular gold songs, quickly built up the good feelings of many classical music beginner audiences for chamber music.
"In terms of form of expression, any small combination of several instruments can be called chamber music." Music critic Gao Jian explained. Chamber music originated from the Western court aristocracy, originally referred to the "family-style" music played for a small number of people, at first relatively large religious music, and later extended to music played in relatively small places, different from symphony, opera and other performance types, "from the birth of the beginning, chamber music itself pays attention to social and private, the difficulty of playing is not too high, at this level, candlelight concerts play some popular songs or anime music, narrowing the distance between everyone, itself is very reasonable." ”
The audience's attempt to enter the pit classical music through the opportunity of candlelight concerts is understandable and worth encouraging, but it should be realized that performance forms with strong commercial attributes such as candlelight concerts are not enough to represent the full connotation of chamber music, and in addition to "City in the Sky", chamber music has a broader and deeper world.
The internal circulation promotes the emergence of domestic chamber music groups
"The early chamber music was not very difficult to play, but after entering the 19th century, especially marked by Beethoven, chamber music was raised to a whole new height." Gao Jian said. Chamber music requires a small number of people, but that doesn't mean it's less difficult to play, and in a relatively tight space, several instruments intertwine and change, sometimes more difficult to navigate than big bands.
"The big orchestra has a conductor, and the quartet can only rely on the height of the performer and the unity of musical literacy and cognition." Li Zhe, principal of the National Centre for the Performing Arts Orchestra, said. Although he and the string quartet composed of three colleagues in the orchestra have been around for some years and have a lot of experience and tacit understanding with each other, they still need a lot of thought when rehearsing. Everyone has their own ideas and habits, grinding their respective edges and corners into a round, and the process can even be said to be "painful", "to say it well is 'collision', to put it bluntly is to 'quarrel'." "Every look, breath, and movement has eaten through the skills of the performers.
According to Zhu Jing, deputy general manager of Beijing Poly Forbidden City Theater Management Co., Ltd., the development of chamber music in Beijing happens to have a fairly rich resource of performers, where orchestras and universities gather, "After the resumption of offline performances at the Zhongshan Park Music Hall in July 2020, we suddenly found a lot of chamber music groups. "During the period when the epidemic pressed the pause button for the performing arts industry, the musicians who have always been busy have more time to stop and settle, and a few friends often hit it off and "play" some music they want to make freely and flexibly," College teachers especially want to try chamber music works. ”
It is undeniable that for the imported art of classical music, some prejudices that emphasize the outside and the inside often exist, but the circulation in the industry that accompanies the epidemic has given the audience the opportunity to understand domestic musicians in depth. Not long ago, Four performers, Fan Lei, Gao Shan, Mo Mo and Jin Wenbin, performed Messian's famous "End of Time Quartet" at the Zhongshan Park Music Hall. "'End of Time Quartet' is a very special work, the number of domestic performances before is relatively small, the auditory sense is more challenging, but this time the on-site attendance rate is very high, the effect makes everyone shocked." Zhu Jing recalls.
Continued promotion still needs to break through the bottleneck
Nowadays, in addition to the shanghai quartet, Meijie trio, gene trio, amber quartet and other well-established chamber music groups, new forces such as the neoclassical chamber orchestra, the China Philharmonic Cello Ensemble, and the Beijing Concert Hall Orchestra have frequently emerged. But from a practical point of view, the audience of chamber music is still a relatively stable group.
"There is indeed a large part of the content in chamber music that requires a relatively high threshold of appreciation. Under the trend of 19th-century Romanticism, composers were more self-centered in their creations, hoping to express their philosophies freely. Compared with large works that have to consider the market reaction, chamber music has a strong exploratory nature. Gao Jian found that in the real performance market, whether it is an entry-level candlelight concert or a more professional "hall-level" concert, chamber music works in the mid-to-late 19th century are rarely touched, "these works are more difficult to understand, and the performer may need to study it painstakingly, but in the end it is found that there is actually no one listening." Overall, the current chamber music performances still focus on the early works left by composers such as Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and others.
In addition, chamber music also has certain requirements for performance and viewing conditions. "The different parts of chamber music are particularly complex and rich to appreciate." Zhu Jing said that this often requires the performance venue to have a good enough acoustic effect. Considering that several instruments have limited sound, chamber music is usually performed in a small space with limited seats. The beauty of the music's extremely intricate details and the subtle interaction between the performers are at the heart of chamber music, and it even emphasizes the sense of immersive presence more than the symphony. These qualities all show that the promotion of chamber music has its own difficulties.
At this level, the performance form represented by candlelight concerts does provide a novel circle-breaking idea for chamber music, and find a precise audience among young people who pay attention to fashion and sharing. However, if we only pay attention to the creation of atmosphere, deliberately develop the candlelight concert in the direction of the "out of the film" of the Internet celebrity punch point, "completely do not touch the core classics of chamber music, only play some simple adaptations, I personally believe that there will be a possibility that it is not conducive to the audience's correct understanding of the concept of 'chamber music'." Gao Jian said.
This is also linked to a bottleneck in the current development of chamber music. "Composers feel that their works are not performed; performers, especially ensembles, feel that there is nothing new to perform, and the two sides should actually communicate more." Gao Jian believes that the creation and performance of chamber music should be more closely linked. Small works have stronger operability, "convenient for everyone to continue to explore in rehearsals, and the cost of trial and error is relatively low." Let the composer write some big works, and honestly, what is the probability of being performed by the orchestra? If chamber music can be performed well, the level of domestic symphony orchestras will definitely improve qualitatively. ”
Gao Qian, a reporter of this newspaper
Figure 1: Sharing of the "Candlelight Concert" on the Little Red Book
Figure 2: In April 2020, the online performance of the National Centre for the Performing Arts started with chamber music