Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

Tan Dan:
All Over the Map

Tan Dun is known for bringing together disparate forms and cultures in his works — most notably the traditions of Eastern and Western music. His new work The Map, a Concerto for Cello, Video, and Orchestra, which has its New York premiere by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the baton of the composer himself at Carnegie Hall on Monday night, is a continuation and expansion of that effort.

After the BSO commissioned a new work from Tan for the orchestra and Yo-Yo Ma in 1998, he decided to revisit the traditional music of the Hunan province of China, where he grew up. He returned to Hunan in 1999 and began searching for the musical customs and influences he remembered from childhood, capturing them on video. He was especially interested in finding a stone drummer who seemed to bridge past, present and future but he learned that the stone drummer was dead, and, with him, his art. Tan decided he wanted his new piece to be a map tracing a personal journey to encounter the drummer and what he represented.

Rather than simply use the video as visual notes, Tan decided to incorporate his own original music with video images from his research. There are 10 sections in the 45-minute piece, most of them centered on video material of performers of various ancient folk arts, including one called ''stone drumming,'' in which Tan evokes the lost art from memory.

The piece is less a map than a travelogue, but the ingenuity of it all, and the quality of the folk arts and performers, made it the most persuasive piece Tan has created in years, and it reminded us of why everyone got so excited about him in the first place. wrote Richard Dyer, in the Boston Globe where the work debuted last month.

A winner of the Grawemeyer Award, today's most prestigious prize for classical music, Tan began his musical career with the Peking Opera. He is a graduate of Beijing's Central Conservatory, and holds a doctoral degree in Music Arts from Columbia University in New York. Tan Dun's music is played throughout the world by the leading orchestras and ensembles of our time.

Among Tan's compositions are Ghost Opera, which has toured worldwide with the Kronos Quartet; the Orchestral Theatre series, a four-hour orchestral exploration of multi-cultural and multi-media; Crouching Tiger Concerto, based on his Oscar-winning film score for Ang Lee's "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"; and Symphony 1997 (Heaven Earth Mankind), premiered with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and broadcast around the world to commemorate the unification of Hong Kong with China. His Grawemeyer-winning opera, Marco Polo, set to a libretto by Paul Griffiths, was commissioned by the Edinburgh Festival and has been performed in Munich, Vienna, Amsterdam, Rome, Paris, Turin, London, New York, Tokyo, Zagrab, and Hong Kong. It was named "Opera of the Year" by the noted German magazine Oper.

Commissioned by the BBC, PBS Television, and Sony Classical, his 2000 Today: A World Symphony for the Millennium was broadcast on the first day of the new millennium by more than 55 major networks worldwide.

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