Jade Buddha & Titan

On Sept. 24 evening, the tree-lined square in front of the Shenzhen Symphony Hall in Futian has just darkened and emptied, the floors still wet and lucid for the last couple of rainy days. In anticipation of a concert of mysterious beauty, where the name of composer Xiaogang Ye is listed with those of Ravel and Mahler, titled Jade Buddha & Titan, the mixture of Romantic intensity and vague Impressionism aligns to the volatile reflections of Futian’s lights on the wet surfaces.

The Hall’s entrance, majestic in its geometrical fugues and fancies, hides a tiny strings’ shop in a corner. The stage and the galleries welcome with the intellectual scent of the overall covering wooden panels, a scent that recalls literacy, cultivation, memories, wood instruments and a road of encountering traditions. As the musicians and the conductor of the Hangzhou Philharmonic Orchestra are about to start, the place is still pervaded with the pleasant atmosphere of respect that the audience has for them, for the renown soloists, when the first tender intervals of Jade Buddha call for our attention followed by the heart-opening harmonic ambience of the arrangement. It is impossible not to visualize ancestral breeze-stricken plains of grasses and fresh dew, with the strings’ arrangement somehow reminding of sweet-and-sad balanced wisdom, and the harp, the flute, the piano accompanying the more personal, dramatic and psychological virtuosities of the violin soloist. Those are strong compositions, carrying along millennial traditions of East and West, and the most dreamy, magic and fantastic compositional devices of European classical music of the last 150 years. Thus, it almost feels that the concert’s program is a backward journey along the works of those masters who would let us better understand, feel and-resonate with the Capriccio of Jade Buddha.

The joyful and festive colours and subjects of Ravel’s composition, rigorously devoid of clear contours and definitions, therefore always dynamic, bring back to a sophisticated Europe of an intellectual golden age. One can but wonder how must it have felt to listen to Ravel at his time, to his jazz extravagances and folk music echoes. But for sure, as a modern experience, it enforces the oneiric feeling of looking inward to oneself, of finding our personal fairy tale in our contemporary time, maybe this way our own path to awakening through music. Perhaps more poetic, yet rigorous and at times heroic, intense, is Mahler’s Titan. Triumphant and glorious composition, moving from open natural atmospheres to an epic ending, with a loud, encouraging and positive message. Without even having the chance to think carefully about how masterfully presented the program is, the main gift of the concert is a long-lasting treasure: a pervading feeling of adequacy between the inner and outer world, a unity of past and present, and the magical legitimacy of an aesthetic East-West journey.

CAPRICCIO OF JADE BUDDHA - A poem by Simon Chiatante

On movements of aethereal jade

Opens a path to echoes

In the wind

But there’s an enigma, cornered

Visible but to the keen eye

A glow, translucent across

The shady southern ponds

Volatile in its whole essence

Soft in the impressions of narcissuses

Those left behind

Outlined only by their voices

Because of movement

Like a horizon that’s appearing cyclical

With the profiles of the distant hills

Nebulous verdigris and gold

It’s like a moment

Of repose in an internal cave

Where everything and eternity converge,

The themes and revelations

Fluid harmonizations

Thoughts, harp strings,

Verses, destiny,

The lineaments of mercy in the jade

Transcending in delicacy