Cabrillo came up with another winner in last night’s concert, featuring works by Matthew Cmiel, Mark Anthony Turnage, John Corigliano, and John Adams. I was particularly taken with the Turnage and Adams works. Turnage’s concerto Riffs and Refrains featured spectacular clarinet playing by Cabrillo principal Bharat Chandra.
The closing work was the west coast premiere of John Adams’s Doctor Atomic Symphony, based on music from his recent opera about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Trinity test. The Doctor Atomic opera contains some of the best musical portrayals of the science and engineering process ever written. JoAnn and I saw the opera in its San Francisco premiere, so during this concert we had to turn off that annoying voice in our heads that was going “Where did this music come from in the opera? Oh, yes, that’s right. The opera was better, wasn’t it?” If you know music and think analytically, this type of inner commentary is pretty easy to fall into. But it distracts from listening to the symphony and appreciating it as-is.
The symphony concludes with the music that we and most people who saw the opera considered the musical high-point: the first act finale with Oppenheimer singing a deeply moving setting of “Batter my heart, three person’d God”. In the symphony, Oppenheimer’s music is set for solo trumpet; it was played brilliantly by Cabrillo principal Craig Morris. The brass gets a lot of the vocal lines in this symphony; earlier on, General Leslie Groves’s music was given over to the trombones, particularly the solo trombone of Cabrillo principal Ava Ordman. As a tenor I have been selfishly disappointed that Adams’s operatic writing tends to give the best men’s music to baritones. As an ex-trumpeter, I am delighted to see Adams give some of the best music in this symphony to the solo trumpet! It was fun to meet with Cabrillo trumpeter Mark Flegg after the concert and discuss the great brass playing in the concert.
August in Silicon Valley means that it’s time for the 
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.
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!
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.
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:
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.
During the Qing dynasty, restoration of the Summer Palace was funded by money intended for modernizing the Chinese Navy. This had 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: