With the tradition of the Bosch Requiem, which the November Music festival and the Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ compose annually, we in the Netherlands are used to unorthodox, contemporary requiems. But the Chinese-American composer Tan Dun really defies all genre boundaries in his Requiem for nature, an hour and a half tour de force of imagination and vitality. Is this still a requiem? What does it matter? Tan Dun created something incredible and conducted the world premiere in Amsterdam’s Gashouder on Friday evening, as the closing performance of the Holland Festival. The work will be repeated on Saturday evening.
It Requiem for nature is a sort of remix of Tan Dun’s own Buddha Passion from 2018, those will be released on CD on August 4. From that grand oratory on the life of the Buddha, by analogy with Tan’s earlier Water Passion (2000) to the Gospel of Matthew, he kept the parts dealing with nature. He combined these with new parts, inspired by Buddhist art in the Mogoa Caves in Dun Huang. Scope: our relationship with nature is dangerous, even fatally disturbed.
Glorious hodgepodge
On paper the work looks like a hodgepodge: choral music with ‘Western’ harmonies and striking ‘Chinese’ slide notes, a danced solo for pipa (Chinese lute), theatrical scenes from Buddhist mythology, Mongolian throat singing, a piece of pseudo-Peking opera, quasi Gregorian chant, dripping water, glorious percussion, oh yes, and fragments of sultry orchestral music played with careless class by the Concertgebouw Orchestra. And yet it worked. Tan Dun’s ‘style’ or idiom is a mystery without vagueness, a real world music, in which you can also recognize all kinds of folk music such as Puccini, Rachmaninov and Tori Amos. Those orchestral fragments were sometimes quite a bit like ‘Within you, without you‘ by the Beatles, for example. And if the lyricism threatened to become very soggy, Tan subtly disrupted things with some atonal sound bursts.
Four soloists dressed in white took the lead in turn. The Mongolian throat singer Hasibagen, who dived effortlessly under the bourdon tone of a low C, produced mesmerizing overtones. These were later imitated by Wiecher Mandemaker’s excellent Laurens Symfonisch choir, which sang, hummed and buzzed. Singers Candice Chung (soprano) and Jiangfan Yong (Tibetan soprano) provided very different vocal raptures in stories about the mythical Nine-colored Deer and her incarnation as a woman. Pipa player Han Yan first danced with her instrument, with harp and pizzicato strings imitating the sound of the pipa: beautiful.
projections
Director Pierre Audi and his permanent lighting man Jean Kalman placed the unlikely succession of atmospheres, colors and genres in a beautiful chiaroscuro, against a background of organic projections by Gilbert Nouno. After half an hour, Tan Dun paused the performance because the sheet music lighting had gone out, but even that didn’t matter. With this requiem, which was almost bursting at the seams with wonder and zest for life, we can move forward.