By Kelley Tice
The International Chamber Ensemble of Queens Library celebrated its inception Saturday afternoon with a 90-minute concert displaying the breadth of its vision.
Held at the Flushing branch of the Queens Borough Public Library, the concert drew more than 200 people to hear the works of such renowned classical composers as Mozart, Chopin, Bizet, and Gershwin as well as renditions of Chinese traditional and Argentine classical music.
Gary Strong, head of the Queens Borough Public Library, kicked off the inaugural concert by describing the mission of the resident chamber ensemble.
“The International Chamber Ensemble would like to expand the traditional classical repertoire,” he said. “Most folks know music from the Western classical tradition, but classical music comes from all over the world. The chamber ensemble would like to showcase this world classical music.”
One of the major supporters of this relationship between the library and the chamber ensemble, Strong said “this is just one more way to bring cultures together.”
The centerpiece of this effort to recognize Queens' international character is the new $30 million Flushing branch library building and its third floor International Resource Center. Described as “the largest concentration of multicultural resources available to the general public in Queens with hundreds of items unique to the International Resource Center,” the center actually helped to create the chamber ensemble.
“Alan Wagner, the manager of the IRC, was impressed with the chamber music program I did as the musical director of the Chinese-American Arts Council,” Soong Fu-Yuan, a Queens-based composer, recalled. “Based on this previous work, we generated some ideas and then Alan Wagner contacted me to be artistic director of the International Chamber Ensemble and to produce four concerts.”
As the creative mind behind the International Chamber Ensemble of Queens, Soong has made a name for himself both as a classical composer and as a music theorist.
“The audience of classical music is alienated from new music composed in the last 50 years,” Soong said. “The question becomes how to keep classical music vibrant. In the last decade, new music has been supported by foundations and institutions as experiments. This thinking has led to new music chosen by academically oriented judges and rejected by audiences.
“More recently, this thinking has started to change with the recognition that audiences must not be alienated from the creative branch of classical music,” he said. “I advocate a system where performers select new music to be judged by an audience.”
Soong's theory of “performer-selected and audience-judged” new music caught the attention of Gerard Schwartz, the renowned conductor of The New York Chamber Symphony. As the director of The New York Chamber Symphony's “Audience Empowerment,” the Chinese-born musician is now working with Schwartz to sponsor a performer-selected and audience-judged competition in spring 2000.
As an extension of this theory, Soong declined to list academic credits, saying that his works and the critics' response speak for themselves. But to his credit, the composer has four critically acclaimed CDs and has drawn to him and Queens such renowned musicians as Hai-Ye Ni, the associate principal cellist for the New York Philharmonic; Ming-Feng Hsin, a violinist prodigy who joined the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra as a first violinist in 1994; Jessica Feng, a Chinese-born-and-trained pipa player; Leo Grinhaus, an Argentine cellist; and others who performed in Saturday's concert.
The caliber of performers reflects the mission of the International Chamber Ensemble and its artistic director.
“I would like to seek out everything I feel is first class and the residents will love and reflect the international character of Queens,” Soong said. “Nowhere else in the world do so many cultures live together – and rather peacefully.”
Describing the difference between popular and classical music, Soong explained that he would like to present world classical music defined either by the music or the performer. In Saturday's concert, he said, that meant bringing together Hee Sung Joo, a Korean pianist, who gave an excellent performance of Chopin's “Etude in A minor, Opus 25, No. 11 ('Winterwind') and “Scherzo in B minor,” and Jessica Feng, a pipa player who gave a moving performance of a traditional Chinese song on an age-old Chinese instrument.
And, in some cases, the East and West will be brought together in one piece –
