(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-06-24 07:56 By Raymond Zhou
Fan Jingma’s latest album sets a milestone in the tenor’s career. After 15 years on the international opera stage, he has come back full-circle to his roots. But that’s just the surface, the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. What sets apart this collection of 16 Chinese songs is his treatment, rather than his choice of repertory, which is eclectic and does not break any boundary.
There are three songs composed for classic poems from the Tang (AD 618-907) and Song (960-1279) dynasties; seven folk songs from China’s vast ethnic minorities, and six art songs written in the past century.
As a bonus, four of the tracks are repeated with an English-language version.
We Chinese tend to group all classic Western styles of singing under the label “bel canto”, which, in the opera parlance, refers to only the period in the early 19th century and is associated with Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini.
Chinese “bel canto” singers have always tried their hands – or, should it be voices – at homegrown music.
But it sounds like someone using a knife and a fork to eat a bowl of fried rice. The incongruity is a big turn-off and sets television audiences into channel switching faster than a prompt of pomposity.
You can easily recognize Fan’s as a “bel canto” voice, but the distinction is, he has tempered his powerful voice to the need of each song.
Most of these songs are small in scale and do not call for the emotional flourish often required for operatic arias. For example, Tristesse at the Yangguan Pass is a farewell song written by Tang poet Wang Wei, and Fan uses only his rich middle register to convey the slightly sad mood of morning drizzle, newly blooming willows and two friends saying goodbye. The Chinese way of male bonding involves gestures so subtle and expressions so understated that it stands in sharp contrast with a typical Western-style friendship, such as the famous tenor-baritone duet in Bizet’s Pearl Fishers, which Fan Jingma has given brilliant and idiomatic readings in concerts.
The marriage of Western vocal technique and Chinese sentiments offers the biggest challenge and opportunity. In this album, Fan Jingma does not employ a one-size-fits-all methodology, but explores the rich texture of each number.
For the folk songs, he imbues his voice with colors of the ethnicities associated with these songs. You are transported to the Mongolian grassland in Mongolian Madrigal and to the river-festooned hamlet in Southwestern China’s Yunnan province in The Running Stream. What you get may not be the authenticity of a local folk singer, but something like Porgy and Bess, George Gershwin’s filtering of American black music, a new arena in musical fusion.
That is a world rarely explored in the Chinese music canon. In the first half of the 20th century, there was a repertory created by people versed in both Western and Chinese traditions – some of the songs on this album belong to this category – but the genre was sidestepped in later development. Nowadays, a Chinese “bel canto” song is more often a quasi-folk song warbled by trained songbirds, which forms the bedrock of today’s television variety shows.
In addition to eschewing the cut-and-dried approach, Fan Jingma gives special attention to diction. Not since 1983 when the iconic Teresa Teng released her album of Song Dynasty poems have I heard the Chinese language sung with such well-rounded beauty and lucidity. Every syllable is given the luxury treatment as if it were a pearl being held close to one’s heart.
The Chinese language falls somewhere between Italian with its open vowels and corresponding emotional richness and German with its many clipped consonants that end a vowel, which make it suitable for painting a word picture with a narrative.
Fan’s rendition may be as lyrical as a Neapolitan folk song, or as descriptive as a Shubert lieder, but never goes as far. He is constantly balancing expressiveness and restraint, a feat of Taoist harmony.
When an artist has seen and done it all, he may be able to rise above the school-indoctrinated confinement and achieve creative freedom. He still possesses self-discipline, but he imprints even old chestnuts with his own interpretation. That’s a sign of real maturity. And Chinese Lieder shows Fan Jingma in such an exalted state.
(China Daily 06/24/2008 page20)
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2008-06/24/content_6788618.htm