Year of the Dragon - Songs from China

Good fortune awaits those born in the Year of the Dragon. The fifth cycle of the Chinese zodiac, which takes its turn every 12th year, is considered so auspicious that countries and communities attached to it routinely see a steep rise in their birthrates. Maternity units no doubt made contingency plans for a rush of new deliveries during the astrological dragon’s latest appearance in 2024. Lang Lang, meanwhile, seized the chance to celebrate its legendary powers with an all-encompassing compilation of his existing recordings of music from his homeland. Year of the Dragon – Songs from China, with its rich banquet of musical styles, crosses continents and connects cultures, activities close to the pianist’s heart. Lang Lang’s album combines haunting traditional pieces, two evocative scores by Tan Dun, a spectacular performance of The Yellow River Concerto, and Forever You and Me, a soaring showstopper featuring Andrea Bocelli, soprano Lei Jia, virtuoso piano licks, angelic chorus, and full orchestra. Its bountiful tracklist also includes two newly recorded works: Shuai Zhang’s Snowflakes, originally written for the opening ceremony of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, and Moon is Bright Lullaby, an exquisite cradle song from Lang’s home region in China’s northeast. “I grew up with some of these tunes,” Lang Lang tells Apple Music Classical. “I first heard them on traditional Chinese instruments, with my father playing them or my mom singing them for me. I thought about playing them on the piano, to see how the instrument captures these pieces from different parts of China and gets into the folk side of music making. And I wanted to see how piano goes with a certain Chinese style of playing, whether it’s possible on piano to imitate styles inspired by Chinese instruments or even the techniques of playing them.” While threads of nostalgia run through many of Lang Lang’s albums, they form a particularly alluring pattern in Year of the Dragon. Listen to the sequence of tracks, beginning with Xing Hwi and Li Qun’s galloping Horses, in which the modern concert grand piano shares the stage with ancient Chinese instruments, the pipa, a type of lute, the double-reed guanzi and the zither-like guzheng among them. “Chinese philosophy is related to nature,” Lang observes. “It says you can hear a mountain, a river floating; the music is also nature oriented. Some traditional pieces are so old we don’t know which dynasty they come from. They’ve just passed from generation to generation.” Nostalgia for the traditional tunes of his home in Hunan province shaped Tan Dun’s Eight Memories in Watercolor, an early product of his student years at Beijing’s Central Conservatory of Music. The composer forged a lasting friendship with Lang Lang after the pianist gave an impromptu performance of one of Tan’s Memories at a private party held on the last day of 2000. “We were waiting for the midnight chimes,” recalls Lang Lang. “Tan Dun walked into the apartment of my late friend, Shirley Young. She was an iconic figure in building cultural bridges between China and the West, and he had just won the Oscar for his soundtrack to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I was very pleased and proud to see him at the party. I had learned “Floating Clouds” from Eight Memories, so I started playing it. He had tears in his eyes. He was very emotional, and we became very good friends after that.” Lang Lang, eager to champion new music from China, decided to include Tan’s suite of miniatures in his debut recital at Carnegie Hall in 2003. “At that time, the beginning of the century, China was gradually opening to the world. As a Chinese kid, people always ask, ‘Do you have some Chinese music you can share with us?’ And so that leads to the idea of playing more Chinese music. And Tan Dun was such an iconic figure. It was ideal for me to play something not from China’s past at Carnegie Hall, but something from this new era.” The Year of the Dragon includes Tan Dun’s complete soundtrack score to Feng Xiaogang’s 2006 period drama The Banquet and the epic Yellow River Concerto. The latter, a rousing patriotic work created in 1970 during China’s Cultural Revolution, was built from an earlier composition by Xian Xinghai, who studied with Paul Dukas at the Paris Conservatoire in the early 1930s. “Many Chinese composers were inspired by western music, and some were influenced by Russian or East European styles,” notes Lang Lang. “You can hear the influence of Tchaikovsky and Liszt in The Yellow River Concerto, and there are times when it’s almost like Chopin’s ‘Heroic’ Polonaise! But the spirit of traditional Chinese music is always there.”