To be a young cellist praised by The New York Times as
“particularly exciting” and by The New Yorker as “stylishly wild” while still a
student is exceptional. It’s even more exceptional when you are making your
name by performing Bach and other Baroque composers on a period instrument.
Beiliang Zhu, a doctoral student at
the Eastman School of Music and a rising star in the early music world, joins Publick Musick this week for the
group’s opening concert of the season, “Cello-bration!”
It takes place this Friday at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Pittsford and
Saturday at Lutheran Church of the Incarnate Word in Rochester.
Zhu’s awareness of Baroque music dates from when she was
about 10 years old, and heard a piece of music she liked on a television
program. Calling the station, she was told it was by Georg Philipp Telemann. As
a young cellist, she came to love the music of the era, but she admits she knew
little about performing it until she came to Eastman and studied with Christel Thielmann, a noted performer on the viola da gamba, the cello’s ancestor.
“But as a freshman,” Zhu says, “I just couldn’t understand
the music, and wasn’t good at it.” The elusive element was the role of
rhetoric: phrasing and inflecting music in what she calls “a speaking way, or
like instrumental ‘singing.'” A key point in approaching Baroque music, it
involves “translating” the specific emotions in the music into notes and
physical gestures.
By the time Zhu was a senior at Eastman, she understood the
genre, and she also learned more about the physical distinctions of the Baroque
cello. These differences include use of gut strings instead of metal ones, as
well as not using an end pin, which extrudes from the bottom of a modern cello
and holds it steady.
When Zhu went to Juilliard for graduate study, she was able,
as she puts it, “to be totally immersed in Baroque music.” This immersion led
her back to Eastman, for further study with one of the masters of the style, the
lutenist Paul O’Dette.
“My playing became more alert and confident,” Zhu says.
“Paul’s teaching is to learn all the rules in any style of music, before you
break them. The most inspiring musicians are the ones who have mastered
technique, but who also know when to
use what they know.”
In 2012, Zhu entered the Leipzig Bach Competition and won its
cello performance prize – the first cellist to do so playing a period
instrument. The prize raised her profile in the music world, which led to
engagements with the Boston Early Music Festival, William Christie, Masaaki
Suzuki, and other stellar names in the period-performance world.
Zhu describes this weekend’s concert, in which she’ll share
cello duties with Publick Musick
Co-Artistic Director Christopher Haritatos, as “very
hard to generalize.” The program presents composers from the early 17th to the
late 18th centuries: familiar names (to early music lovers, at least) like
Girolamo Frescobaldi and Francesco Geminiani, and
unfamiliar ones, like Jean-Baptiste Bréval, a
late-18th century French cellist. They represent an enormous swath of music
history, in which composition styles changed a great deal.
“It’s comparable to the way that pop music has changed within
a half-century or more,” Zhu says. “You can sense many small changes in styles
as time passes, and eventually they add up to a generational change.”
How does that translate to chamber music? Zhu lists a few
examples. “As you progress from 17th to 18th centuries, there are differences
in how you ornament,” she says, referring to the unwritten flourishes that the
performers add to the sometimes sparse notes on the page. “Also, the tonal
system developed and became more complex, so the harmonies you would use in
certain passages changed.”
Most of the music is written for solo cello – or occasionally
two cellos, perhaps with violin – and harpsichord accompaniment. It is intimate
and graceful, with a hierarchy of orchestration firmly in place between the
solo instrument and the continuo, comprised of the keyboard and bass
instruments As Zhu puts it, “The top part shows off, but the lower parts
articulate the structure and the harmony.”
The idea of a cello virtuoso barely existed until the late 18th
century, so the instrument usually took a modest place in chamber music. “The
cello generally does not have a flashy part,” Zhu says. “It is usually an
accompaniment instrument, and the music is based on a close interaction among
the performers. To me, this music has a refreshing feeling. It doesn’t bombard
the ear. It’s like friends talking to each other.”
In addition to doctoral studies at
Eastman, Zhu is also pursuing a master’s degree in ethnomusicology. Performance
is involved here too, with the school’s gamelan, a Balinese percussion
orchestra whose members memorize all their music.
The clangorous sounds of a gamelan don’t sound too much like
Baroque music, but Zhu does see a connection with playing continuo. “In both
cases I need to be constantly paying attention to what’s going on, to have the
full scope of the performance in mind and my function in it.”
Playing in the gamelan has also added to her conviction that
“music is a living art, and it only comes alive through performance.”
This article appears in Oct 10-16, 2018.
