The in between

A new book tells how classical music, played to the Chinese by the Philadelphia Orchestra, ushered in decades of valuable interchanges now under threat.

“That trip opened up our relationship, the beginning of the culture exchange,” Platt said. And this orchestra sound, this orchestra – actually, all of you – changed my life.” Cui Zhuping, at the time a young violinist in the Chinese Central Philharmonic, recalled the moment she heard the Philadelphia Orchestra on her home turf. “It was a very tricky business because the wife of Chairman Mao Zedong, Jiang Qing, had very firm ideas about what should be played and what should not. And, of course, in performing on Chinese soil in front of Madame Mao, the communally composed Yellow River Concerto had to be included, too. And in 1973 he was asked to open the first US liaison office in Beijing, which later became the American embassy. This is called ‘symphony’. The Philadelphia Orchestra is in China,” a friend said to Tan. It was the first time he had heard about a “symphony orchestra”, and it was striking. A year after Richard Nixon’s historic trip in February 1972 to China, Henry Kissinger learned from Chinese leaders that they would like to invite the Philadelphia Orchestra to China. Nixon rang its music director, the Hungarian-American conductor Eugene Ormandy, who immediately sensed history in the making: “That’s wonderful. But its two-week tour of China in 1973 marked the beginning of five decades of people-to-people exchanges between the two nations, something that is now under threat with the rise of geopolitical tensions. China was at the height of the Cultural Revolution. One day, Tan heard a sound from a loudspeaker in the field. “I think it was something by Beethoven – the Sixth or the Fifth symphony.” Until then, Tan had never known of Beethoven or Mozart, but he was deeply touched by the performance blasted from the loudspeaker.