“The Orphan”, the two-act opera of Fil-Chinese composer Jeffrey Ching, premiered in Germany’s Theater Erfurt last Nov. 29, and will end its six-night run on Jan. 16, 2010. Ching’s wife, soprano Andion Fernandez of the Berlin Deutsche Oper, portrays the lead role.
Commissioned by Theater Erfurt, the opera is based on a 14th century Chinese play and its European transformations that hark back to Voltaire, Goethe, and other Enlightenment dramatists. The new multi-cultural music-theater, rooted in both Eastern and Western traditions, has a seven-language libretto, a large conventional and electronic orchestra, and a cast of singers, mimes, chorus and dancers.
Ching’s first creative phase, already incredibly prolific, produced over 200 works in a multiplicity of techniques laying the foundations for the harmonic and contrapuntal assurance of his mature compositions. Some of these exploratory pieces test specific classical methods to extreme limits; e.g., the Superklavier Sonata for piano (1980s). Despite its self-mocking rivalry with Beethoven’s Hammerklavier implied by the title, Ching’s single large movement of 1,531 bars has the quantitative edge over Beethoven’s 1,167 bars in four movements; the Hammerklavier ends with a double fugue not obviously related to earlier material; the Superklavier has a triple fugue that incorporates all the themes and most of the subsidiary ideas of the preceding 37 minutes.
Contrasting with such grandiose experiments are satirical miniatures such as the five-minute Miniklavier Sonata for piano (premiered by Ching in Makati, 1993, and heard by this reviewer), a score that indicates use of fists, arms, elbows, palms, pointed fingertips, and even buttocks on the keyboard!
Symphony No. 1 in C (premiered by the Bach Society Orchestra under James Ross, Harvard U., 1981) was a meticulously crafted homage to Viennese classicism; the expressionist Symphony No. 2 “The Imp of the Perverse” (premiered by the Jeunesses Musicales World Youth Orchestra under Woldemar Nelsson, Manila, 1995) was set down fully orchestrated by Ching in a trance-like state lasting around forty days, without any sketches or pre-conceived structural or tonal plan!
In 1998, Ching’s technical versatility served his widening ethnographic interests: An RP-centennial commissioned work, the Symphony No. 3 “Rituals” (premiered by the PPO under Josefino Toledo, 1998), fuses Balinese gamelan, Chinese Ming and Spanish Renaissance elements into a 45-minute collage for three orchestras and male chanter. After this breakthrough, Ching broadened his field of cross-cultural investigation in the following works which further show his incomparable erudition and creative genius.
Terra Kytaorum for ten brass and two percussionists (premiered by Weltblech, Berlin, 2001) creates an hour-long, pseudo-historical liturgical service for the last Mongolian emperor of the diverse medieval traditions — French, Tibetan, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese — that could have been represented at his court. Ching also first attempted to create musical sculptures out of Chinese calligraphic samples by a precise tabular method of his own invention.
Symphony No. 4, “Souvenir des Ming” (Jeunesses Musicales commission, premiered by the Shanghai Philharmonic under Dmitri Jurowski at Shanghai International Festival, 2006), is a passacaglia and fugue on fragments of Ming dynasty temple hymns that use fractal proportions to enable the chromatic polyphony of Bach and the equal temperament discovered by the Ming musicologist Zhu Zaiyu to engage in a kind of conceptual dialogue.
Symphony No. 5, “Kunstkammer” (premiered by Andion Fernandez, Trio Neuklang and the Deutsches Kammerorchester Berlin under Mikhail Jurowski, Berlin, 2006), is an encounter between the strict contrapuntal devices of Frescobaldi, the Turkish melodies with four quarter-tones notated by Demetrius Cantemir, and the court music of Qing China based on a 14-note “octave” with 12 eighth-tones.
Two other works are equally mind-boggling. Ching’s latest are Spohr’s Last Thoughts for clarinet, violin, cello and piano, Ayres for Fallen Kings for bass baritone and piano, both premiered in Berlin, 2009, and Concerto da camara for guitar, cello, soprano and strings to be premiered in Munster in 2010.