“Huang Ruo is still in his 20's, but a program of his works at the Miller Theater in February showed him to be an imaginative straddler of East and West.” (Ranked as number two of the Top Ten Classical Moments of 2003)   ------ Allan Kozinn (The New York Times) “Mr. Huang's People Mountain People Sea, the flashiest and most openly exuberant piece of the evening, was a cello concerto for Jian Wang, who looked like a businessman and sounded like a force of nature. The visual aspects of Mr. Huang's imagination were apparent: the piece crackled with color and movement. The cello moved from thick double-stops to a dark lyrical elegy; the orchestra popped with sounds like the banged strings of a piano, the taut thwack of woodblocks between movements and the sizzle of tongued whispers from the musicians, like water on a hot stone.” ------ Anne Midgette (The New York Times)   “… Tree Without Wind (2005) by the inventive Chinese composer Huang Ruo. The work begins with a cascading figure that ripples from the top of the keyboard down to a bass register roar, and parts of the work are positively Lisztian. Yet at various points a gentle chordal figure emerges and shimmers momentarily.” ------ Allan Kozinn (The New York Times) “Huang Ruo, used Chinese percussion and Western strings and winds to create a compelling update of the Baroque concerto grosso.” ------ Allan Kozinn (The New York Times) “Huang Ruo's Three Pieces (1999-2001), an inventive set that includes two virtuosic, insistently angular and rhythmically vital movements, as well as a lyrical, soft-toned movement for the left hand alone.” ------ Allan Kozinn ( The New York Times) “Mr. Huang’s contribution was strikingly assured, marked by a descriptive grandeur and gravity achieved by exact and economical means.  His writing adds a new tint to the orchestra palette, and combines many voices, many lives.” ------ Matthew Gurewitsch (The Wall Street Journal) “Ruo Huang’s Concerto for Eight Instruments, however, stole the show with its brash percussive romps and unexpected (yet totally sensible) Buddhistic chants.”  (Ranked as one of the “10 Best Classical Concerts of the Year”)     ------ Ted Shen (The Chicago Tribune) “Three Pieces for Orchestra by 24-year-old composer Huang Ruo was most notable for its highly original musical language, pastoral chirping, and the gorgeously mystical touch of asking the orchestra members to chant quietly.”   ------ Peter Dobrin (The Philadelphia Inquirer) “What I know is that Huang Ruo is a hugely gifted young composer.  Remember the name.” ------ Peter Burwassser (The Philadelphia City Paper) “Immensely interesting, Three Pieces progresses from a slow, jagged prelude for left hand to a furiously percussive conclusion deploying both left and right hands at full tilt. Once the other hand entered, the texture soon thickened, the intervals narrowed, and the pace quickened into a violent toccata.” ------ Zachary Lewis (The Cleveland Plain Dealer) “Among these scores was Huang Ruo's invigorating "The Three Tenses," which evokes the meeting of past, present and future in music of fluttering and kaleidoscopic personality.”  ------ Donald Rosenberg (The Cleveland Plain Dealer)   “It was good to hear some contemporary Chinese music by Huang Ruo: two selections from Three Pieces for Piano, including a bravura workout for left hand alone, which Huang dispatched tidily.”   ------ Tim Page (The Washington Post) “The opening work was the sonically stunning premiere of Path of Echoes: Chamber Symphony No. 1 by Huang Ruo and commissioned by IRIS. Huang's lifelong fondness for mountain echoes inspired this amazing array of textures representing sounds both natural and manmade, changing as they ricochet in the hills, in the concert hall, in the brain. The composer evoked a rich variety of noises, from birds and falling rocks to funeral music and voices. The musicians were called on to do unorthodox things to coax remarkable sounds from their instruments and the result was energizing. The brass would shape one sound and pass it on seamlessly to the strings who would reform it and artfully dispatch it on its way.   Path of Echoes is a visceral and humane work, and the future of this young Chinese-American composer is one to hear -- and watch.” ------ Jon W. Sparks (The Commercial Appeal) “It was a new composition by Huang Ruo that provided the excitement. Called Shattered Steps, the premiere piece gave the percussion section a chance to stretch and everyone else an opportunity to pay attention. Full of surprises, the composition actually started as a series of vocalizations Ruo did at a friend's recording studio. His voice, in fact, began the piece, then broke into various instrumental "fragments." He called it a "big feast" during his introduction. Like the Bobby McFerrin of China, Ruo was able to get plenty of diversity from his experimentation. At times, it sounded like "West Side Story" as directed by Alfred Hitchcock. At others, it was like being on a city street at rush hour. Almost a Chinese rap, the music used everything from a slapstick (yup, it's just what you think it is) to a Chinese gong. A percussionist blew a whistle at one point; two others clapped at another. Clearly, this wasn't your father's idea of classical music, but it had an energy that couldn't be denied.”   ------ Bruce R. Miller  (The Sioux City Journal) “And the transition to Huang Ruo’s Leaving Sao couldn’t have been more startling. “Sao” is Chinese for sorrow or sadness, and he gave Gardner a lyric in that language sung with plenty of pitch blending and other native vocal effects that were mimicked and expanded in the orchestra. Much of it was keyed to the natural music of the language; combined with a very different harmonic and rhythmic background, the East-West fusion is difficult to achieve without sounding trite, but Ruo was impressively effective.”     ------ Joseph Dalton (The Albany Times Union)  “A grid of 24 squares, Atmosphere and Environment was inspired by a Louise Nevelson sculpture of 24 boxes. Ruo's music for solo flute was playful, colorful and varied.”  ------ Joseph Dalton (The Albany Times Union)    “Confluence - Concerto No.4 with the Asko Ensemble was a success. With enormous flair, the Chinese composer Huang Ruo processed finely-sieved Stravinskian ingredients and spicy oriental sounds into a filmic festive banquet.” ------ Frits van der Waa (Amsterdam Volkskrant, Holland) “A wonderful exception was Curve of the Shadow by Huang Ruo, a double concerto for sheng (mouth-organ) and zeng (zither).  There were splendid moments: dark mantras sung by the musicians, hoketus-like passages and a strong ending with grating over the piano-strings. Ruo is actually the only one who makes you really curious about his future development.” ------ Jochem Valkenburg (NRC Handelsblad, Holland) “Huang Ruo discovers a convincing synthesis between the hushed Chinese sound-world and modernist composition techniques. His music speaks directly to the heart.” ------ (VPRO Radio Guide, Holland)   “Two Pieces for Piano proved Chinese composer Huang Ruo, born in 1976, a sound expert.  Postlude: Left (only for the left hand) and Prelude Diffluent showed the intensity of the tone and the sound from attraction.  It started from a single tone then became a sound cascade.” ------ Von Sonja Müller-Eisold (Westfaelische Rundschau, Germany)   “Huang Ruo is a fresh rising star among the new generation of Chinese composers.” ------ Li Jin  (Music Weekly, China)   The New York Times Featured Article on Huang Ruo: Chinese Composer Talks Cello, All Dialects

As Huang Ruo originally conceived it, his new cello concerto, "People Mountain People Sea," was to have started not with music but with a recorded voice — Mr. Huang’s — speaking in a made-up language, accompanying projected photographs of China in the 1920s. The photographs, by Sidney Gamble, inspired the piece, but after spending an afternoon in a studio recording his speech and trying out this multimedia introduction at the Miller Theater, where the work is to have its premiere tonight, Mr. Huang decided to drop it.

The concerto proper, however, should be no less idiosyncratic without this quirky introduction. Mr. Huang, at 30, writes music in which Western techniques and Chinese timbres, tunings and folk styles mingle, and which often (as in this concerto) require carefully choreographed movements from the ensemble. The work's title is a direct translation of a Chinese expression that in more idiomatic English translates as "a lot of people." And people, Mr. Huang said, is what the piece is about.

One reason he chose to write for the cello in this contribution to the Miller Theater's three-year Pocket Concertos series is that he hears the instrument's voice as almost human.

"I have always had this thing about the cello," Mr. Huang said at his Midtown Manhattan apartment. "It can play up in the violin's range, but it also has a range where the violin cannot go. It reminds me of one of my favorite Chinese instruments, the ma tou qin, or horsehead fiddle. I'm always listening to that. It has a very manly sound, very nasal, very organic. And that sound is there, in this piece. I use a lot of open-string double-stops to get this very earthy sound, which I have always liked."

To suggest the sound of the horsehead fiddle, Mr. Huang has adorned his score with sliding grace notes and bent pitches.

"It’s in standard notation, but the slides and out-of-tuneness are everywhere," he said. "You know, in China, we never talk about 'in tune' or 'out of tune.' I think it's a very Western thing."

He also had a soloist in mind: Jian Wang, who can be seen playing Bach, as a child, in "From Mao to Mozart," the 1981 film about Isaac Stern's visit to China. Now 38, Mr. Wang — who, unlike Mr. Huang, has reversed his family and given names in the Western fashion — has a promising international career.

Mr. Huang was born in 1976 on Hainan Island, in southern China, and grew up in Guangzhou, not far from Hong Kong. His father, Huang Ying-sen, a composer for film and television, insisted that his son follow in his footsteps and began teaching him the piano. The young Mr. Huang didn't like it much, not least because he was prone to memory slips.

"When I played my own music," he said, "no one could say I played wrong notes because only I knew the piece. So that was my starting point toward becoming a composer, although I told myself I was going to be a composer because my father told me I would."

When Mr. Huang was 12, in 1989, his father took him to Shanghai to audition at his own alma mater, the Shanghai Conservatory, where the young Mr. Huang was accepted as a composition student at a time when new musical influences were beginning to be heard in China.

"I grew up in a China where people started to wear bluejeans," Mr. Huang said, "and where we would listen to Bach at the same time as pop songs. It could be Michael Jackson, it could be the Beatles. And Stravinsky's music came to China. I remember hearing 'The Rite of Spring' and thinking, 'My, I haven't heard anything like this before.' So for me, there are no differences, no hierarchy. I don’t think of Bach as being greater than a contemporary composer just because Bach is someone everyone should look up to."

Mr. Huang came to the United States in 1995, after he won the Henry Mancini prize at the International Film and Music Festival in Switzerland, as well as a competition at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio. Oberlin promised him a full scholarship if he could pass its English entrance exam. That took several tries and nine months of English courses in Los Angeles, but he completed his bachelor's degree at Oberlin and moved to New York for postgraduate work at the Juilliard School.

He has established himself quickly. Another competition victory in 2000 led to a performance of his "Three Pieces for Orchestra" by the Philadelphia Orchestra. Since then, his list of works has expanded substantially, with music for orchestra, chamber ensembles, solo instruments and voice. His four chamber concertos, which made a powerful impression when they were performed at the Miller Theater in 2003, have just been released on CD by Naxos.

Mr. Huang joins a parade of Chinese composers whose hybrids of Chinese and Western styles have found success in the United States. But where composers like Bright Sheng, Tan Dun, Zhou Long, Chen Yi and Ge Gan-ru grew up during the Cultural Revolution (1966 to 1976) and were affected by it, Mr. Huang was born just as that period of suppression ended. That has created a striking difference of perspective between Mr. Huang and Chinese musicians only slightly older.

Mr. Wang, the cellist, sees Mr. Huang's new concerto in almost political terms that Mr. Huang — while not rejecting them — said he didn't have in mind.

"In Chinese, 'People Mountain People Sea' is like a proverb to us, who grew up after the People’s Republic was founded," Mr. Wang said in an e-mail message. "It was used very often during the Cultural Revolution to convey a sense of people power. However, to me, and to many other Chinese people, these words also convey a sense of reinforced sameness, suppression of individualism and being part of something so big that no one is noticed. I feel, correctly or not, that this concerto is about that."

Mr. Huang, who received a copy of the e-mail, said he was surprised but pleased by Mr. Wang’s reaction.

"What he says is totally right," Mr. Huang said, "but I did not intentionally write about any particular period or even just about Chinese people. The piece is a more general look back at history. For me, the goal is for people in the audience to hear the music with whatever experience they bring to it. No matter what country, people are people. They may suffer, or crave a peaceful life, or enjoy the moment, or get emotional. All this is in the piece. It’s about a lot of people, doing the same thing or doing different things."

Article by Allan Kozinn
Photo by Hiroyuki Ito
Published: April 14, 2007