Beijing - July 2008 - Forbidden City

After our first concert with Jin Xing, we had more sightseeing time in Beijing. The highlight were Tian'An Men Square and the Forbidden City:

This was the one day on the tour where we were outside a lot when it was really hot. Hats and sun umbrellas were essential:

After the last concert, we had one more sightseeing day on our own, without the tour guides. We used it to take the new Beijing subway line 5 up to the Lama Temple:

The temple buildings are beautiful, but it is the sculptures inside that are the most astonishing. But you are not allowed to take pictures there. We were surprised at how many people were there to use it as a temple. It seemed a much higher percentage than you will see at European cathedrals, for example. It really added to the whole experience.

Thus ended our first trip not only to China, but to mainland Asia - we had made one trip to Japan many years ago. Thanks to Jindong Cai, Stephen Sano, Peter and Helen Bing, Mario Champagne, Xiao Xiao, Kimberly Hsieh, and all the many other people who worked so hard to make this tour such a grand success!

Beijing - July 2008 - The Egg

Our first concert in Beijing on July 1 was in the Great Hall of the People. This is a huge space, so the combined orchestras and choruses were amplified. It was the opening concert of the pre-Olympics China International Youth Arts Festival. The chorus sang Zhou Long's Cosmic Flames and the finale to Beethoven's Ninth.

This was our largest but least attentive audience of the tour. However, our encore of Chinese song Mo Li Hua (used by Puccini in Turandot) was the biggest hit of the night. It got applause both when the sopranos started the melody and then when the tenors did the second entrance of the melody. I sing first tenor in the chorus, and the tenor section thought that any audience that would enthusiastically applaud a tenor entrance was all right with us!

However, the musical highlight of the Beijing part of the tour was our two nights of performing Carmina Burana with the Jin Xing Dance Theatre in the Opera Hall at the National Centre for the Performing Arts, commonly known as The Egg. We had collaborated with Jin Xing on the same program at Stanford's Memorial Auditorium in April for the company's United States debut. It was such a joy to do this again in such a fine, large theater.

The Egg looks like that - an egg surrounded by a moat (so it's sometimes a boiling egg). It is a stunning building. Here we are going into the performer's entrance in the back:

To enter the hall you pass under the moat. During the daytime this creates wonderful wave patterns on the walls and floor:

The inside is also beautiful. In this shot you can see that it is next door to the Great Hall of the People:

This was Jin Xing's first performance in such a large theater in Beijing. The first half of the program included two other popular dances from the Jin Xing repertoire. Half Dream had Chen Xi performing the Butterfly Lovers Concerto with the Stanford Symphony Orchestra. Red and Black was performed to a recording of drum music. The chorus was at the back of the opera theater stage, but we could still hear ourselves remarkably well.

Neither JoAnn nor I had been on a concert tour since our student days at MIT, where we both went on several week-long MIT Concert Band tours over the years. I also toured with the MIT Symphony Orchestra to Kennedy Center and Lincoln Center, and with the MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble to the Notre Dame Collegiate Jazz Festival. Besides being a lot of fun, those tours always made the ensemble perform so much better. You get to rehearse and perform with much more intensity than normal, away from the pressures of the rest of your student (or professional) life. The same thing happened with the orchestra and chorus: the quality of the performances rose dramatically during the course of the tour.

When I was an MIT student I had just missed the legendary European tours: the Festival Jazz Ensemble was one of the first three college bands from the USA to perform at the Montreux Jazz Festival, and the Symphony Orchestra also did a European tour. It was such a privilege to be able to participate in what I am sure will be become a legendary tour in Stanford music history.

Beijing - July 2008 - The Great Wall

We had one more big sightseeing day before getting back into our rehearsal and concert schedule in Beijing. During the morning we visited the Temple of Heaven:

In the afternoon, it was off to the Great Wall at JuYongguan. The plan was to have dinner on the Great Wall, but the forecast was for rain and thunderstorms, so plans were touch-and-go for a while. Fortunately the weather cooperated, as it did throughout the tour. It was raining lightly when we arrived, but soon the rain went away and it was just misty. We climbed up until the view disappeared in the fog, then back down again:

Cell phone use is not allowed on the Great Wall during thunderstorms. Here Joanne and Rick demonstrate that the weather indeed cooperated during our visit:

The tents show where we had dinner at JuYongguan. Before dinner, we had short performances by Stanford Taiko, the brass section of the Stanford Symphony Orchestra, and the Los Angeles Children's Chorus in different positions on the wall section curving out to the right:

Beijing - June 2008 - The Summer Palace

I try to avoid redeye flights whenever possible, but I got a wonderful night's sleep in the soft sleeper section of the night train from Shanghai to Beijing. We arrived at the Beijing railway station:

We then went to a rehearsal at Peking University, as our first concert at the Great Hall of the People combined with the Peking University Orchestra, the Tsinghua University Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, and the China Central Conservatory of Music Chorus.

After rehearsal it was off to the Summer Palace:

During the Qing dynasty, restoration of the Summer Palace was funded by money intended for modernizing the Chinese Navy. This has dire consequences later during conflict with Japan. The Marble Boat might be seen as a symbol of contentious engineering-management relationships over the centuries:

To keep 300 people organized and accounted for during the tour, we all stayed on the same buses throughout the two weeks. Bus 8 was a nice easy-going bus with great company and fantastic tour guides in Jessica (Shanghai) and June (Beijing). Here's a Bus 8 group photo from the Summer Palace:

Shanghai - June 2008

JoAnn and I sing in local symphonic and opera choruses in the Silicon Valley area, most regularly with the Stanford Symphonic Chorus and West Bay Opera. We were very fortunate to be able to participate in the Stanford China Music Tour in June and July. The various choruses at Stanford contributed to the Stanford Choral Union, which toured together with the Stanford Symphony Orchestra, the Stanford Chamber Chorale, Stanford Taiko, the Los Angeles Children's Chorus, the Silicon Valley Ai-Ye Chorus, the Taiwan University Alumni Chorus of Northern California, the St. Lawrence String Quartet, and featured soloist (and Stanford alum) Jon Nakamatsu.

Our part of the tour started in Shanghai. We had a pretty light schedule at first to get acclimated to China and recover from jet lag. JoAnn and I headed out to the Bund, where you can see the older colonial buildings on one side and the big new tours of Pudong on the other. Pudong really is something to see:

In the other direction, there are the older buildings of the Bund:

You may have heard that there's a lot of construction going on in Shanghai and Beijing these days, and you will have heard correctly. Here's some construction on the Bund to build a pedestrian area. It should be great when it's done:

One issue with touring with 300 of your closest friends is that for the big sights, you can't just pick and choose things based on the weather. Even though one of the themes of the tour was the "changeable plan", some things would not move in the schedule. So it wound up that we visited the Pearl Radio Tower (the big tower in the first picture) on the rainiest day of our stay in Shanghai. The viewing deck was totally fogged in, but the sign at the entrance attracted interest. Singers are necessarily concerned if they will be considered to be among the "ragamuffin people" denied entry.

Our two concerts were in the philharmonic orchestra hall at the Shanghai Oriental Arts Center on June 27 and 28. This is a fantastic performance space with outstanding acoustics both on stage and in the audience. It looks like this vineyard style of auditorium is indeed becoming a reliable architectural style for symphony halls that both look and sound good. This hall may not be as live as Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles. But it is still the best hall I have performed in since moving to California from the Boston area and its great spaces like Symphony Hall and Jordan Hall. Here are some interior shots from a rehearsal with pianist Jon Nakamatsu and conductor Jingdong Cai:

The hall is big so it was hard to get a good exterior shot, but here's one through the tour bus window:

We had two concerts in Shanghai. The first was conducted by Stephen Sano, director of choral studies at Stanford and conductor of the Stanford Symphonic Chorus and Stanford Chamber Chorale, where the chorus sang Carmina Burana. The second was conducted by Jindong Cai, where the chorus sang the finale to Beethoven's Ninth and a new piece by Zhou Long called Cosmic Flames. Both concerts featured Jon Nakamatsu playing Rhapsody in Blue. They both went well, with the second concert being better-attended. I even got to shake hands with the vice-mayor of Shanghai when she visited backstage at intermission.

Our last big sightseeing outing in Shanghai was the Yu Gardens and bazaar. This was our favorite sight in Shanghai but you can see pictures of that everywhere. Since we had over 300 people on this concert tour, a lot of meals were group banquets. But Yu Gardens gave me the opportunity to sample some street food. The supersize XLB were fun:

But the squid dumplings were even tastier:

After our last concert it Shanghai, we had a free day until we headed to the Shanghai Railway Station to take the night train to Beijing:

Welcome!

Welcome to my blog! My intention is to cover music, software, and combinations thereof. Currently I sing in symphony and opera choruses in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I am the inventor of the MusicXML format for music notation. Hence the songs and schemas of the blog title.

I recently returned from a concert tour to Shanghai and Beijing with the Stanford Chorus and Orchestra, so that should provide some good material to get things started.