Program Notes: Xian Conducts Iris Unveiled

QIGANG CHEN 
Iris Dévoilée (Iris Unveiled) 
BORN: August 8, 1951, in Shanghai, China 
WORK COMPOSED: 2001 
WORLD PREMIERE: February 6, 2002, by the Orchestre National de France, with Muhai Tang conducting and Peking opera sopranos Bixia Wu and Luwa Ke among the soloists. 

Chen Qigang was born into an artistic family. When the Cultural Revolution broke out in China, he was a middle school student in the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. His father — administrator of the Beijing Academy of Fine Arts — was sent to a labor camp, while the young Qigang was subjected to “ideological re-education.” 
 
When the Central Conservatory was restructured in the late 1970s, he was one of 26 students chosen from 2,000 applicants, studying composition with Luo Zhonghong. In 1983, he had the opportunity to study abroad and spent four years in Paris, studying with Olivier Messiaen. Chen explained that the “detail and nuance in French music” were very similar to his own. He had already discovered Debussy and Ravel; Messiaen proved to be a major influence. In 1992, Chen became a French citizen. 
 
In 2008, Chen was the Music Director of the Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing. Among his major works is the four-act ballet Épouses et concubines, based on Raise the Red Lantern. In recent years, Chen has often incorporated Chinese traditional music into his works. In Iris dévoilée (Iris Unveiled), a suite concertante for full orchestra, three singers and traditional Chinese instruments, we hear pipa (the Chinese lute), erhu (the bowed string instrument) and guzheng (a zither), and the vocal writing in the work is a combination of Western bel canto and Peking opera techniques, with the vocal parts shared between two Western sopranos and a Peking opera performer. Commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation, it was premiered in Paris in February 2002. 

Iris is the name of the Greek goddess of the rainbow, who memorably reveals herself in Apuleius’ The Golden Ass. As Christine Frémaux notes, it was used as a pseudonym or symbol for an idealized woman in poetry. Chen uses the rich colors of a rainbow to depict his vision of female volatility and charm. In his piece, he imagines his female subject in nine states or moods — ingenuity, chastity, wantonness, sentimentality, jealousy, melancholy, hysteria and lust — after which the nine parts of the suite are entitled. 

The text is slight, and indeed sometimes the vocal writing is wordless, but it’s notated by the composer with clear indications of the emotional intent of each statement. Chen’s orchestration is appropriately colorful, using unconventional techniques like the glittering random harmonics heard on the violins near the start, and he makes striking use of effects, like doubling a solo violin with the bowed erhu. He also creates active but static textures via the use of guided improvisation, where players are given a set of notes to which they can apply their own rhythmic ideas. Against these textures, he can be radically simple, as in the Tender movement. Chen’s evocation of hysteria contains real violence, but the piece ends in calm, light voluptuousness.

Read more about the work here. 

Gordon Kerry © 2019  

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH  
Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 47  
BORN: September 25, 1906, in Saint Petersburg   
DIED: August 9, 1975, in Moscow  
WORK COMPOSED: 1937  
WORLD PREMIERE: November 21, 1937, in Leningrad, with the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra and Evgeny Mravinsky conducting. 

Dmitri Shostakovich finished his First Symphony when he was just 19 and graduating from the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. It garnered immediate praise and established him as an important composer. In the following years, he wrote music that was celebrated for its modernism, including his First Piano Concerto and a satirical opera, The Nose, based on a short story by Nikolai Gogol. By 1936, the culture had shifted so drastically that Shostakovich came under intense scrutiny for his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk after Stalin stormed out of the performance before it was over and declared it “degenerate” music. An article in the newspaper Pravda the next day titled “Chaos Instead of Music” attacked the composer for the immoral subject matter, lack of melody and “formalism” in the opera. Stalin went on to impose criteria for Soviet opera, demanding socialist themes, “realistic” tonalities based on Russian folk songs and happy endings that glorified the state. In his memoirs, Shostakovich wrote that he was suddenly “an enemy of the people.” His Fourth Symphony was well under way but, fearful of too harsh a criticism, he shelved it and began work on his Fifth Symphony. 

Working within this new and impossible reality, Shostakovich composed a work that he declared represented “the making of a man,” in which “the tragically tense impulses of the earlier movements are resolved in optimism and the joy of living.” The premiere was met with great enthusiasm and a sense of relief. The audience was well aware of the pressure on Shostakovich and the implications tied to the symphony’s success. A journalist described the work as “a Soviet artist’s creative reply to just criticism,” and Shostakovich was thereby considered rehabilitated. 

Much beauty lies in the bleakness, intensity and irony of this symphony’s music. Though it fulfilled the Soviet mandates by ending on a note of triumph and victory, there is a sense of ambiguity and pain lying just below the surface of the work. Its first movement contrasts dramatic jagged rhythms with long sustained melodies. There is tender vulnerability in the phrases as they reach to upper registers, searching and halting, growing more adamant as the movement continues.   

The Alegretto has a sinister humor with militaristic drums and seemingly innocent solos from the violin, flute and bassoon. The spacious Largo focuses on lush strings before the flute takes over, accompanied by sparse notes in the harp. The sonic landscape builds to a searing climax before retreating to a barely audible shimmer.   

The finale is a fervent march that veers from terrifying to heroic, ending with a relentless insistence that is both joyous and agonizing. Though scholars dispute the reliability of Shostakovich’s memoir, Testimony, it did shed light on the finale of the Fifth, quoting the composer as saying, “The rejoicing is forced, created under threat… It’s as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, ‘Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,’ and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, ‘our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.’”  

Catherine Case © 2022, revised 2025