A26 2013 Program Notes, Book 1
Iris dévoilée
(“
Iris Unveiled
”)
for Soprano, Traditional Chinese Soprano,
Erhu, Pipa, Zheng and Orchestra (2001)
Qigang Chen (born in 1951)
Iris dévoliée is scored for three flutes, three oboes, three clarinets,
three bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones,
tuba, percussion, harp, piano and strings. Performance time is 35
minutes. This is the work’s first performance by the Grant Park
Orchestra and its Chicago debut.
“
His compositions display real inventiveness, very great talent and a total
assimilation of Chinese thinking to European musical concepts. He is endowed with
exceptional intelligence and an excellent internal ‘ear.’ I hold him in high esteem,
and wish him the greatest success, for he deserves it.” Olivier Messiaen offered this
encomium shortly before his death, in 1992, about his last student, the only one he
accepted after retiring from the faculty of the Paris Conservatoire in 1978 — composer
Qigang Chen. Chen’s entry into Western musical life was hard won. He was born in
1951
in Shanghai and raised in Beijing, where his father, a noted calligrapher and
painter, was administrator of the Academy of Fine Arts. When the Cultural Revolution
abruptly halted China’s educational, intellectual and artistic life in 1966, his father was
sent to a labor camp and Chen’s musical studies were interrupted while he was held
in confinement for the next three years to undergo “ideological re-education.” His
passion for music never wavered, however, and he continued to study composition
on his own. When the schools were reopened in 1977, Chen was one of just 26 of
some 2,000 applicants to be accepted at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing.
He graduated first in his class, a distinction that earned him a visa to continue his
training abroad; a grant from the French government in 1983 brought him to Paris to
study with Messiaen. Chen became a French citizen in 1992, and he has since divided
his career between France and China, where he has taught at the conservatories in
Shanghai and Beijing, and served as music director for the Opening Ceremony of the
2008
Beijing Olympics.
Iris dévoilée (“Iris Unveiled”) was composed in 2001 on a commission from the
Koussevitzky Music Foundation and premiered at the Presences Festival in Paris on
February 6, 2002 by the Orchestre National de France, conductor Muhai Tang and
soloists Wu Bixia, Ke Luwa and Ma Shuai (sopranos), Wang Nan (erhu), Li Jia (pipa)
and Chang Jing (zheng). The score calls for large orchestra, three soprano voices
—
one singing in the exotic style of Beijing Opera — and three traditional Chinese
instruments: erhu (a Chinese fiddle), pipa (a pear-shape lute brought to China from
Persia along the Silk Road) and zheng (a plucked-string, zither-like instrument with a
long, narrow, curved wooden body). Qigang Chen explained that the movements
of the sensuous Iris dévoilée portray “nine aspects, nine frames of mind, nine facets
of woman — changeable, elusive. They form a mosaic of impressions, tempers,
appearances and natures expressing her unfathomable richness.” Iris dévoilée is
Chen’s expression of the feminine archetype “unveiled,” a concept rooted in both
the mythological Iris — the personification of the rainbow (her name is a source of
the word “iridescence”) and a messenger of the gods who links humanity to a higher
consciousness — and the famous lines that close Goethe’s monumental Faust: Das
Ewig Weibliche zieht uns hinan — “The Eternal Feminine draws us onward.”
Friday, June 21 and Saturday, June 22, 2013
