Ravinia 2019, Issue 6, Week 12

14 RAVINIA MAGAZINE | AUGUST 12 – AUGUST 25, 2019 Left: Long Yu leads the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra in Tehran. Below: The suppression of the “bourgeois,” such as Western classical music, during the Cultural Revolution is one of the five settings of the Oscar-winning film The Red Violin . The music teacher Zhou Yuan (Liu Zifeng) is forced to destroy his instruments. The political officer Xiang Pei (Sylvia Chang) gives up the titular Red Violin to Zhou for safekeeping just before her own home is raided. Just as the legacy of the “Red Violin” was preserved by that defiance, so too did the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra endure the Cultural Revolution by its members’ care for the art. more than 25 years since in the country’s flourishing classical environment, Chi- nese orchestras have “amazingly devel- oped,” the conductor says, and some of the credit no doubt belongs to him. The Chinese maestro made his debut with the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra in 1993 and became that ensemble’s music director in 2003. In addition to his lead- ership post with the Shanghai Sympho- ny, he also serves as artistic director and chief conductor of the China Philhar- monic Orchestra in Beijing. In all, Yu says, mainland China has more than 80 professional orchestras, including five top-tier orchestras—the three he leads as well as ensembles in two cities with populations of more than 10 million people. They are Shenzhen, a city in the Guangdong Province that is bordered by Hong Kong to the south, and Hangzhou, the capital and most populous city in the Zhejiang Province in eastern China. Each of the five boasts extended concert seasons and regularly books international guest conductors and soloists. But while many of these orchestras were founded in recent decades, like the Hangzhou Philharmonic Orchestra in 2007, the Shanghai Symphony is a striking exception. Not only is it the oldest symphony orchestra in the Far East, but it is also one of the longest established such ensembles anywhere in the world. In comparison, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra marked only its 125th anniversary in 2016. “Even the Berlin Philharmonic was later than the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra,” Yu says. “Can you believe that? That’s amazing.” Perhaps even more amazing, Yu says, program books and other archival materials in the orchestra’s library make clear the orchestra performed consis- tently even during difficult times like the Chinese Communist Revolution, which resulted in the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and the Cultural Revolution. In the 1930s and ’40s, what the conductor called a “golden period” for the orchestra, it was a refuge for Jewish musicians fleeing Nazi Germany. When the Shanghai Symphony traveled to Austria some years ago, he met an elderly woman whose father served as concertmaster in the orchestra during the early 1940s and she recalled living in the city with her family as a child. Since 2009, when Yu became the orchestra’s music director, he believes the orchestra has taken a “big step for- ward.” That assertion jived with Slatkin’s impression of the orchestra, which came to his first rehearsal totally prepared, allowing him to focus on musical issues rather than technical concerns. “In the case of the three orchestras that I conducted,” he says, “it’s very clear that Shanghai is the one that has the most SHANGHAI SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA (YU); RHOMBUS MEDIA ( RED VIOLIN )