After months of reflection, Nicholas Savaras, a native-born New Yorker and cellist, decided to come to China. He then spent months convincing his wife that the two would relocate to Tianjin in September with their three children and luggage and musical instruments.
"For me, this decision took a big risk. But if we don't take risks, we don't see future success. For Savaras, the only American in the Shanghai Quartet, a veteran chamber orchestra, settled in China not only with language barriers and cultural differences, but also with the family's life changes.
When the four members of the Shanghai Quartet accepted an invitation from the Tianjin Juilliard School to serve as resident teachers and decided to shift their careers from the United States to China, it meant that the orchestra's four musicians and their four families had to move to Tianjin en masse.
Although the two founding members, Li Weigang, the first violinist and Li Honggang, were born and raised in China, the most important 30 years of their lives were spent in the United States, and overseas was also an important performance market for them.
After the epidemic, the Shanghai Quartet's international tour and teaching plan were all disrupted. Whether it is the spread of the epidemic in the United States, or the difficulties of round-trip flights and the troubles of isolated life, they must make trade-offs. Musicians who are more than half a hundred years old choose to return to China, just like when they first went to the United States, full of unknown excitement and anxiety.
On December 8, Li Honggang was unable to accompany his daughter, who was studying in the United States, for her 21st birthday, and he and his wife ordered flowers for the children in Tianjin. That night, the Shanghai Quartet held a special concert at the Tianjin Juilliard School, and 630,000 fans listened to the live broadcast of the concert online.
On December 22, the same set of tracks, Smetana's "String Quartet No. 1 "My Life", Zhou Long's "Piano Music – For the String Quartet", and Schubert's "String Quartet No. 14", "Death and the Girl", will take the stage at the Shanghai Symphony Concert Hall. The two performances announced the official return of this famous overseas chamber orchestra to China.
"We have always wanted to find a platform in China to pass on the chamber music experience accumulated over more than 30 years to the next generation." Violinist Li Weigang told CBN that the epidemic was one of the factors for the Shanghai Quartet to return home, but more importantly, they saw the rapid development trend of China's chamber music market.
Shanghai cultural business card
"When we went abroad in 1985, Chinese chamber music at that time was completely different from now." Li Weigang recalls that in the 1980s, there was no chamber music atmosphere in China, and even in the eyes of those of them, students of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, chamber music was just an elective course.
In 1983, Li Weigang and Li Honggang, who were still studying at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, decided to set up a quartet and go to Britain to participate in the Portsmouth International Quartet Competition. The two brothers, who were two years apart, found the same excellent cello and viola in the class and began to practice quartets.
This student orchestra, which represents Shanghai, first went to Beijing to participate in the national selection competition and won the first place. So in the name of the Shanghai Quartet, he went to England to compete. When they went abroad, they found that many of the orchestras participating in the competition at that time had been running together for many years, and each orchestra had at least 30 or more retained repertoire. They only have four tracks to perform in the competition.
Incredibly, the Shanghai Quartet finished second in the competition. In March 1985, the four young men returned home with honors. Li Weigang remembers that they appeared on the cover of "People's Music" and the Ministry of Culture awarded medals and bonuses, just like those Olympic athletes returned to China. But they know in their hearts that the foundation of Chamber Music in China is hugely different from that of foreign countries.
They chose to go to the United States, where they really began to learn quartet playing at Northern Illinois University.
No one expected that this would be 36 years. The brothers established a family in the United States and continued to form the Shanghai Quartet in the United States. In the past few decades, the Shanghai Quartet has traveled all over the world, performing nearly 3,000 concerts and recording 35 records in more than 30 countries around the world, which is not only known as "one of the world's most outstanding quartets", but also a cultural business card of Shanghai.
Chamber orchestras that can persist for more than 30 years are rare in the international arena. This is not unrelated to the fact that the two core members of Li Weigang and Li Honggang are brothers, in addition to the two of them, the members of the orchestra have changed several times. After Zavalas joined in 2000, several musicians toured the world together, together at The John F. Kennedy School of Montclair State University. J. Cali Conservatory of Music is a resident artist, taking care of teaching.
Chinese chamber music, from deserted to popular
In the past 20 years, the Shanghai Quartet has frequently returned to China to perform and teach, at least six or seven times a year. Savaras remembers his first trip to China in 2001, where he performed in Beijing and then served as a visiting chamber music professor at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and the Central Conservatory of Music. At its most, the Shanghai Quartet spends two or three months a year in China.
The increasingly frequent exchanges allowed Li Weigang to see the changes in the chinese chamber music environment. With the explosion of the number of piano children in China and the maturity of the classical music performance market, the number of symphony orchestras in China alone has reached more than 70. Over the years, the Shanghai Quartet has increasingly penetrated into China's second- and third-tier cities, and can perform some unpopular modern chamber music works in concerts.
They can clearly feel the audience's enthusiasm for chamber music. In 2018, the Shanghai Quartet brought a full set of Beethoven string quartets to the stage on the occasion of its 35th anniversary, and spent eight months touring several cities including Beijing, Tianjin, Wuhan, Changsha and Shanghai. Some fans lamented that it was fun to listen to six chamber music in one go, "such concerts are not too many, but too few."
In Europe and the United States, chamber music is regarded as the cornerstone of a symphony orchestra. The Berliner Philharmoniker dismantled a total of 34 chamber orchestras in various combinations. In China, many symphony orchestras have begun to cultivate chamber music "detachments", and chamber orchestras spontaneously formed by performers have become popular in the performance market for "small and beautiful".
Yu Xiang, the second violinist who joined the Shanghai Quartet last summer, dropped all his work in the United States and returned to China with his wife. He admitted that the development of chamber music in China is in a period of vigorous rise, and "the development momentum is far faster than that of any other country."
"China should have at least 20 professional quartets." Li Weigang said that the formation of a quartet does not require a lot of financial support, four musicians can play together, in the classical music library, the quartet has a large repertoire, such as Beethoven wrote 9 symphonies in his lifetime, but the quartet has 16 pieces.
After returning to China to teach, when Li Honggang listened to the students playing, he always thought of their ardent desire for music when they were young. Tianjin Juilliard's first fully scholarship string quartet, the MILA Quartet, showed rapid growth under their leadership. In July this year, the MILA Quartet won the Outstanding Gold Medal of the Singapore International Solo and Chamber Music Competition and began its annual tour.
The Shanghai Quartet, which signed a contract with a domestic brokerage company for the first time, will take China as the main front for performance and teaching in the future. Next June, they will embark on a new round of national tours. When the epidemic is over, this veteran chamber orchestra will still start from China and face the world stage.
Li Weigang believes that this is the best time to return to China. When they first arrived in the United States in 1985, there were only four or five quartets active in the American classical music market, but now that number has become more than 200. According to the current popularity of China's classical music market, the number of theaters and the size of the audience, it is only a matter of time before chamber music breaks out in China.
(Photo/ Tianjin Juilliard School)