Renowned French pianists appear at 2024 Beijing Music Festival

The 27th edition of the Beijing Music Festival, the most important international classical music festival based in China, took place between October 5-13, 2024. It was a momentous celebration of culture and music, full of a diversity that authentically represented the different faces of classical music today. It presented a platform for renowned artists from China, France, the United States, Austria, South Africa, and Germany, among other countries.

Besides the Chinese premiere of the classic American opera Porgy and Bess, and the Asian premiere of Andy Akiho’s virtuosic piece for percussion quartet Seven Pillars, the 2024 Beijing Music Festival, whose theme for the year was ‘Voices From Afar,’ featured two of the preeminent pianists of our time: Hélène Grimaud and Jean-Yves Thibaudet, both from France, who were the soloists in performances with the Salzburger Camerata and the Guangzhou Symphony, respectively.

Grimaud and orchestra bond with Beethoven

Grimaud (pictured below), the celebrated wildlife conservationist, human rights activist and author, took to the stage of the Poly Theatre on October 7 for Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 4. It was her second visit to China, following a tour in 2017. Her calculated, yet dazzling take on this beloved concerto matched the deliberate phrasing of the Salzburger Camerata, one of the world’s leading chamber orchestras, whose history spans more than 70 years. Since 2016, the orchestra has performed under the direction of its own leadership team, including principal violinists Gregory Ahss and Giovanni Guzzo.

Grimaud and the Salzburger Camerata took the audience back to the golden age of classicism. In the first movement, and particularly in her stunning cadenza, the pianist displayed a character that fluctuated between the mood of the free-flowing runs in the high register of the keyboard and the more introspective turns that foreshadowed the captivating slow second movement. Grimaud captured both the subtle emotions of the score and its architectural grandeur. Beijing witnessed a rich, colorful and pristine rendition by Grimaud, a clear-eyed, multifaceted and individualistic performer who, fascinatingly, is also the founder of the Wolf Conservation Center in New York. Grimaud returned for four encores — the gorgeous second movement from Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No 2, accompanied by the orchestra, and three pieces for solo piano by the Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov. The program for the evening also included Beethoven’s Symphony No 7 and Mozart’s Overture from Idomeneo.

Thibaudet the perfectionist

At the following evening’s concert, also at Poly Theatre, Thibaudet (pictured below) was joined by the cellist Gautier Capuçon for the Chinese premiere of Richard Dubugnon’s Eros Athanatos, a Beijing Music Festival co-commission. Inspired by the Greek goddess of love, the piece is a double concerto, or ‘fantasy concertante’, for cello and piano. In the exultant 24-minute piece, the contemporary French-Swiss composer ponders on the mystery of existence. The piece is structured in 11 sections, each with its own unique rhythm and atmosphere. The music unfolds slowly, with soft and graceful percussion. It is full of French colors, harmonic clarity, and captivating rhythms, with a love theme running through.

Capuçon infused the piece with a singing cantabile that was contrasted and augmented by brash interjections from the orchestra and rhythmic musings from the fleet hands of Thibaudet, a perfectionist through and through. The Beijing-born conductor Huang Yi — he has served as the music director of the Guangzhou Symphony since 2023 and is one of the brightest young conductors in China — handled the thick textures of Dubugnon’s demanding score with poise, eliciting a rich sound from the orchestra that blended well with the two busy soloists. It was a stellar performance of a piece that has enjoyed a relatively long life since its world premiere in Australia in 2018.

The concert was rounded out by Jiu Ge, a concerto for erhu and orchestra by Zhou Long, a Beijing-born composer who won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for music for his vivid opera Madame White Snake. The Beijing Music Festival, the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, and the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra jointly commissioned Jiu Ge. The concerto is framed by the 11 chapters of the symphonic epic Nine Songs, with the erhu — a two-stringed Chinese fiddle whose sound is essential in traditional Chinese music — as the protagonist. Zhou Long skilfully integrates the words from the original song into the melody for the erhu. Lu Yiwen, from the Jiangsu province, was the inspired erhu soloist; her instrument played the role of a narrator that can travel through time and space, telling the story of the Nine Songs with its unique timbre and expressiveness.

The performance of Porgy and Bess: 

The festival, a cultural dialogue between East and West, also included performances by the composer and conductor Tan Dun, famous for his soundtrack for the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; the acclaimed New York-based new-music percussion group Sandbox Percussion; the world-renowned bandleader Wynton Marsalis, leading the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra; and the percussionist Shengnan Hu.

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