Symphonic Principles of Development in Chinese Piano Concertos of the 1980s - Early 2000s

Van Tszyasin' PhD in Art History Postgraduate, Department of Music Theory, Kazan State Conservatoire named after N.G. Zhiganova 420111, Russia, Republic of Tatarstan, Kazan, Bekhtereva str., 9a, sq. 139 abbey1113@gmail.com

Zagidullina Zalina Zakirovna PhD in Art History Senior Lecturer, Department of Music Theory, Kazan State Conservatory named after N. G. Zhiganov 38 Bolshaya Krasnaya str., Kazan, 420015, Russia, Republic of Tatarstan zalina-mityukova@mail.ru

Piano (clavier) concertos have existed for almost three centuries, and at different historical stages their varieties have crystallized, among which the symphonized type is crucial in the evolution of the genre, distinguished by increased attention to thematic work, unity of form and intensity of drama. In Chinese academic music, the introduction of symphonic principles into the concert purposefully began to be carried out in the 1980s - early 2000s. During this period, more than twenty piano concertos were written, but only the works of Huang Anlun (the First and Second Concertos) and Du Mingxin (the First and Third) were published and firmly entered the repertoire of pianists. Due to their achievements, the genre, which began to be mastered by Chinese composers only in the 1920s and almost disappeared during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), has received a second wind and currently occupies an important place in the culture of this state.

The music of Du Mingxin (born 1928) and Huang Anlun (born 1949) is distinguished by genre diversity. It is known not only in China, but also in other countries, including Russia. The creative paths of both composers began at the Central Music Conservatory of Beijing, but later developed in completely different ways. Huang Anlun studied at three universities in Canada — Toronto, Pittsburgh and Yale University. For many years, he was a member of the Canadian Association of Composers, was re-elected its chairman three times [See more: 1]. Du Mingxin graduated from the Moscow Conservatory (1958) and returned to China, where he worked at the composition faculty of the Central Music Conservatory and in 1976 became a professor and dean of the Composition Faculty [See about this: 2].

In Russian musicology at the moment, the degree of study of these composers is presented unevenly: although Huang Anlun appears in individual works ^{[3; 4]}, his music has rarely been the subject of special attention ^{[1; 5]}, unlike the work of Du Mingxin, whose research is gaining momentum every year. The focus is on the features of the creative portrait and the issues of figurative content, compositional and expressive features, performing tasks, the correlation of the national and Western European musical language in his piano compositions, including piano concertos with orchestra ^[6-8]. In 2022 alone, four articles were published ^{[7, 9-11]}!

The main feature of Huang Anlun and Du Mingxin's concerts is the saturation of symphonic development techniques, presented so vividly and fully for the first time in Chinese music. Currently, the first experiments of understanding this aspect of Chinese concerts have just begun, as evidenced by the appearance in 2022 of a Russian-language article by Dong Xijie ^[10]. Her work includes various compositions by Du Mingxin, including the First Piano Concerto, which highlights the presence of thematic links that contribute to the integrity of the work. However, the range of symphonic principles involved in this composition is broader and deserves a more detailed study. There are no studies on the symphonization of the piano concerto genre in Chinese.

In this article, the concerts of Huang Anlun and Du Mingxin are examined in the key of views on the embodiment of the symphonic method of Soviet and Russian musicologists who developed the ideas of B. Asafiev. He singled out and justified symphonism as a category of musical thinking and put forward its main property as a reflection of the processality of music, that is, the "continuity of musical consciousness" ^{[12, p. 238]}. Using the example of the works of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, he demonstrated how it is achieved in the presence of a distinct musical concept based on the idea of the connectedness of all elements of the composition and their purposeful development: "no element is thought of or perceived as independent among the multiplicity of the others" [Ibid.].

Later, the symphonic principles were considered by L. N. Raaben (1967), I. K. Kuznetsov (1980), M. E. Tarakanov (1988), N. Ya. Kravets (1999), E. B. Dolinskaya (2006), etc. — including in relation to piano concerts. In them, the manifestation of symphonism is expressed through an increase in the role of the first movement, enhanced development in the development sections and cadences, arched connections between the beginning and the end of the whole form, the compactness of the cycle, often — monothematism or intonational kinship of themes ^{[13, p. 33]}. By the twentieth century, the arsenal of symphonic means was even more detailed. For example, in Prokofiev's piano concertos, such principles as variation, derivative contrast, end-to-end carrying out of figurative-thematic material, qualitative transformation of themes, convergence of contrasting themes are noted (See more details: Kravets N. Ya. Prokofiev's Instrumental concertos. Dis. ... cand. isc. Moscow, 1999. 240 p.).

The appeal of Huang Anlun and Du Mingxin to this genre was natural, since both professionally mastered the performing arts on this instrument. However, the reasons for their creation of concerts are different.

For Huang Anlun, the basis was friendship with outstanding pianists. The first concert (Op. 25b, 1982) is dedicated to the brilliant American pianist Joseph Banovets, who later played an important role in turning scientific interest to the piano concertos of Huang Anlun. On his initiative, as a leading professor at the University of North Texas (Denton, USA), the dissertations of Yushu Pei and Lok Ny on the First and Second Concerts, respectively (Ng Lok. Modern Chinese Piano Composition and Its Role in Western Classical Music: A Study of Huang An-lun’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 57 // Doctor of Musical Arts (Performance), University of North Texas, December 2006, 35 p. Yushu Pei. An analysis of the attempted amalgamation of Western and Chinese musical elements in Huang Anlun's piano concerto in g minor, opus 25b, a lecture recital, together with three recitals of selected works by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Mozart, Schubert, and Schumann // Dissertation. Denton, Texas. 1997. 93 p.).

In China, Huang Anlun's first concert belongs to the peaks of the genre. Its outstanding importance is emphasized by the fact that — along with the concerts "Yellow" (1969) by Yin Chengzong (and a group of co—authors) and "Mountain Forest" (1979) by Liu Dunnan - it is included in the forty-volume sheet music edition of the twentieth century works "Collection of One Hundred Years of Chinese Music" (2012).

The second concert (Op. 57, 1985) is dedicated to the pianist Xu Feiping (it is noteworthy that in Moscow in 2001 a recording of this work was made, where he himself soloed). It was he who inspired the composer to create this composition. Huang Anlun composed it in Canada. He recalled the following about it: "Whenever I was thinking about how to write my essay on dark nights, I felt a sense of loneliness and helplessness. My close friend Xu Feiping often called me and urged me to compose. He told me: “Write! Over the past few decades, many works and popular concerts have appeared in China. You can't just sing "Yellow" and "Liang Zhu" forever!" [cit. po: 14, p. 109] (we are talking about the previously mentioned concert "Yellow" by Yin Chengzong, which is the most famous and performed piano concerto in China, and the equally popular violin concerto "Butterflies in Love" by He Zhanhao and Chen Gang).

In these works, Huang Anlun's compositional style with its colorful orchestration, polyphony and wide breathing was vividly manifested. Both concerts are distinguished by the depth of content and monumentality of form (the duration of the First is 52 minutes, the second is 48 minutes).

Du Mingxin is the author of four piano concertos with orchestra (1987, 1994, 2002, 2020). With the exception of the second, all of them were written to order: The first concert was from the Hong Kong Record Company; the third was from the Gulangyu Island District Government (which is reflected in the subtitle of the Concert); the fourth was from the Chinese Symphony Orchestra (in honor of the centenary of the Communist Party in 2021).

For the composer, this genre is a favorite, as he himself said in connection with the creation of the Fourth concert "Awakening" (2020) at a very advanced age (92 years!). According to Du Mingxin's wife, Zhang Ping, in two months of working on this composition, "he has never auditioned for the piano. He wrote all the scores in one fell swoop ..." ^{[15, p. 8]}, which testifies to the composer's excellent orchestral and piano hearing. Only his First and Third concerts have been published. They have gained great fame thanks to a wide palette of expressive and virtuosic means.

Du Mingxin's first piano concerto is included in the multi-volume sheet music edition "Classics of Chinese Music of the twentieth Century", which indicates its high importance in Chinese culture. The composer himself stopped at just such a designation. According to him, this essay is not programmatic [See about this: 19, p. 125]. However, despite this, even in modern foreign publications, the Concert continues to appear with the program title "The Spirit of Spring" (the name "The spirit of spring" was given by the manager of the recording company's department to make it easier for listeners to understand the music, and later "migrated" to the cover of the published score) or "The Beauty of Spring" — in Russian-speaking works, for example, in the dissertation of Guo Hao (Guo Hao. The evolution of the Piano Concerto in Chinese music. Dis. ... cand. isc. SPb., 2018. 158 p.).

Huang Anlun and Du Mingxin are characterized by the saturation of compositions with deep content, the disclosure of which requires, on the one hand, the scale of a full—fledged three-part cycle, and on the other - the application of symphonic principles of development.

The importance of the rich semantic content of the works has been repeatedly emphasized by Du Mingxin in his speeches and interviews and broadcast in his work. According to him, "musical ideas should be connected, connected in order to express the rich content in the most concise way" ^{[16, p. 12]}. At his lecture "Chinese School of Music" (delivered at the Chinese Music Conservatory on December 21, 2016), he explained the essence of his creative approach as follows: "with the help of the simplest techniques, deep content is expressed" ^{[17, pp. 19-24]}. This is how he shared his thoughts about the emotional context of creating the First Piano Concerto: "... my first wife was seriously ill, and life was very difficult. She was ill for more than ten years, and then died. In the work, the theme of the side party expresses my longing for a peaceful and peaceful creative life" ^{[18, p. 80]}.

The high artistic intent of the works is also inherent in Huang Anlun. For example, the creation of his First concert is connected with a tragic event in China — the assassination of Prime Minister Zhou Enlai in January 1976, which led to popular outrage, which subsequently led to the "Tiananmen Incident" - a critical moment in the history of the state. Three months after the assassination of the Prime Minister in the central Tiananmen Square (Beijing) during the spring national holiday of Chinming, hundreds of thousands of Pekingans gathered with his portraits and performed the "Internationale". As a result, mass detentions followed.

Being in mourning, the composer came to Tiananmen Square every day. At the same time, he decided to write a cycle of three major works in memory of what happened. It was called the "Great Symphony Concert". The central place in it is occupied by the First Piano Concerto.

In Chinese concerts, the main resource for the development of thematic material is usually variability, which manifests itself both at the micro level in the form of multiple performances of the theme and its fragments with accompanying changes, and on a larger scale, such as the finale in the form of variations in Yin Chengzong's "Yellow". However, in the works of Huang Anlun and Du Mingxin, this property is enhanced towards the general dynamization of themes, the musical fabric as a whole and figurative reincarnation — which corresponds to symphonic principles. Rethinking the original thematic material, the composers build a symphonic drama. Let's look at these processes in more detail.

To create a whole line of dynamic development in the piano part, textured, register and fret means come to the fore. The main themes of the first parts in the First Concerts of Huang Anlun and Du Mingxin are indicative in this regard. Huang Anlun's initially calm, contemplative theme, in several successive variant repetitions, degenerates into a sharp and aggressive one as a result of enriching the musical fabric with counterpoints, compacting the texture, moving the theme to a low register and weaving it with chromaticisms. Du Minxin's theme, based on an upward movement involving chromaticisms (example 1a), sounds three times and, in addition to turning from a one-voice melody into a chord melody, is aggravated by the addition of split tones (example 1b).

Example 1a

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Example 1b

The whole first part of Huang Anlun's First Concerto is permeated by the theme of the introduction, which is also undergoing qualitative transformations: originally set out by the soloist, at the beginning of the reprise it is completely conducted by the orchestra; it acquires a new, romantic appearance in the initial section of the coda.

All the works of the previously mentioned "Great Symphony Concert" by Huang Anlun are united by a leitteme, which first appears as the main part of the symphonic overture (example 2a, fragment), which opens this monumental cycle of works. For example, it permeates the entire third part of the First Concert (it sounds in the introduction, the main and connecting part in the exposition, development, reprise and code). Moreover, it is radically reinterpreted in the soloist's cadence from the first movement — it is embodied in the form of a three-voice fugato, in which, firstly, the sounds of the theme are scattered over different octaves, forming a jump-like movement instead of a smooth melody; secondly, they are altered — a twelve-tone fabric unfolds instead of the original pentatonic (example 2b).

Example 2a

Example 2b

Such an introduction of themes in the key moments of the composition (like "forces from outside") is close to Tchaikovsky's symphonic method. It should be noted that the Chinese researcher Song Yiyin was the first to draw attention to the connection of Huang Anlun's music with the works of Russian composers, but her argumentation is limited by general aesthetic characteristics: "majestic character and deep emotionality" ^{[14, p. 110]}.

In addition, the unifying function can be assigned to a special intonation-shaped layer, and not to a specific topic as such, which is vividly represented, for example, in Prokofiev's music. The same is found in Huang Anlun: in the Second Concerto, elements of the first motif of the main theme permeate the entire first part of the Concerto (its individual intonations, as well as a characteristic counterpoint in the bass in the form of a gradual descending stroke with the capture of the Phrygian stage); the orchestral introduction of the third movement is built on the same material, but now in chromatic tonality.

Russian and Soviet music greatly contributed to enriching the concerts of Chinese composers with symphonic principles. Huang Anlun studied it independently, while domestic musicians and teachers participated in Du Mingxin's professional formation (in addition to Chinese composers He Lyutin, Zheng Guang, etc.): during his studies in China, he took private lessons from pianist B. M. Lazarev, during his internship at the Moscow Conservatory, he studied, among others, with M. I. Chulaki, whose important role in his compositional formation Du Mingxin especially noted [See: 20, p. 6]. In addition, it is known about his great attention to the works of Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovich ^{[2, p. 273]}, whose concerts are the brightest examples of the implementation of symphonism in instrumental music.

Du Mingxin vividly presents such a sign of symphonization as the strengthening of the role of the first movement, especially in the First Concert, where the sonata allegro is longer than the second and third movements combined (the second part is a miniature rondo of the AVAS type with sections ranging from 13 to 20 bars; the third part is close to the rondo sonata, but extremely compressed: for example, the reprise is truncated to hold only a side theme). Thus, there is a rapprochement with the drama of a one—part concert, which is externally manifested in the duration of the works (The first concert is 23 minutes, the third is only 13 minutes). In addition, he uses the technique of convergence of contrasts. For example, by linking the themes of the main and side parts in the third part of the First Concerto with the toccata movement (motor movement of the sixteenth), the composer achieves the wholeness of the development of the sound stream.

The convergence of contrasts in Du Minxin's First Concerto is often achieved in the opposite way — with the help of fret work, to which the composer paid great attention. For a number of topics, he derived his own tetrachord g-c-a-d. The themes of the introduction, the side party of the first part, the theme of the main party of the third part and the last (third) section of the code are built on it.

It is also worth noting the arched connections between the extreme parts that contribute to the integrity of the concerts under consideration, for example, in the form of the return of the theme of the main part from the first part in the code of the First Concert of Juan Anlun; in the reprise of the third part of the Second Concert of Juan Anlun, the third theme from the second part (oboe theme) is placed instead of the connecting part. In the climactic section of the solo cadence from the third movement, a side theme from the second exposition of the first movement sounds. A close technique was used by Du Mingxin in the Third Concert, in the code of which the side theme of the first part and the main theme of the third part sound.

A distinctive feature of Huang Anlun's creativity is a kind of "endless" melodies, since they are not typical for Chinese music with a pentatonic basis. In the article of the Chinese researcher Wu Xinyan, it is indicated that he considered the words that "melodies seem inexhaustible" to be the highest praise for his work: according to the composer's memoirs, after the premiere of the Second Concert, the orchestra members expressed to him their surprise at how melodies, with all their length, can be "so Chinese" ^{[21, p. 132]}.

The influence of P. I. Tchaikovsky is revealed in Huang Anlun's desire to create broad lyrical melodies with a long extension. Noteworthy, for example, is the second part of the First Concert, which opens with the soloist with a detailed theme of an improvisational meditative nature with a virtuoso rhythm and an abundance of melisms (Example 3).

Example 3

By the way, technically, Huang Anlun's First Concert is the most difficult concert in Chinese music: from the very first notes he sets a high bar for the performer, starting with a virtuoso soloist's introduction, in which octave presentation in both hands prevails, various passages, including three-sound clusters, a rapid change of complex rhythmic patterns.

Tchaikovsky's influence can also be seen in Huang Anlun's Second Concert. Note the similarity of the theme of the main part of the exposition (example 4a) with the theme of the concert piece "Dumka. Russian Village painting", Op. 59 (example 4b) — except for a faster tempo. The pathetic character, the tonality (c-moll), the contour of the theme coincides with the intonations of the ascending thirds and quarts, the top of the melody on the fifth tone and the descent to it (an octave lower) by the sounds of natural minor.

Example 4a

Example 4b

Thus, it is not by chance that, in connection with the outstanding melodic gift, Huang Anlun is called the "national Tchaikovsky" ^{[21, p. 134]}.

In conclusion, we note that the main feature of the soloist's part in symphonized concerts — its orchestrality — is very vividly represented in the works of Du Mingxin and Huang Anlun under consideration. Among the piano concertos of Chinese composers, this quality was first embodied in the Piano Concerto "Yellow" by Yin Chengzong. Let it be timid, but there has already been a movement towards symphonism in it. All these concerts develop a romantic line and in relation to piano writing are close to Rachmaninov's style.

Also, the concerts of Huang Anlun and Du Mingxin are related by the developed dialogicity of the soloist with the orchestra — both with individual groups of instruments and the entire composition, as a result of which the timbre side of the compositions is enriched. Along with this, there is, for example, such a feature of symphonized concerts, highlighted by Dolinskaya, as the merging into a single sound fabric of the "motor-figurative element" ^{[13, p. 34]} and melodies in the piano part. Moreover, in Huang Anlun's concerts, not only the textured layers of the piano, but also the entire orchestra are often included in the overall sound stream. Such a high degree of their cohesion goes beyond the traditional dialogicity of the soloist and orchestra. This shows a direct connection with the work of Prokofiev.

Thus, Du Mingxin and Huang Anlun, one of the leading composers after the end of the Cultural Revolution, gave a strong impetus to the development of the piano concerto genre in China. The path of his transformation lay through the purposeful introduction of symphonic principles of the development of musical material, which is influenced by Russian music. They are presented in various combinations in the concerts considered. In general, if Du Mingxin tends to a more concise form of the concert and acts within the framework of a symphonized concert, then Huang Anlun creates monumental musical canvases and goes to the genre of concert-symphony. Their achievements were continued in the works of other composers, among whom the name of Wang Xilin stands out.