World Premiere: 1969
Most Recent HSO Performance: This is the HSO's first performance of this work.
Instrumentation: solo piano, 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, triangle, suspended cymbal, harp, and strings: violin I, violin II, viola, cello, and bass
Duration: 22'

The animosity between China and Japan concerning hegemony over eastern Asia erupted into open warfare in 1894 around the issue of control of Korea. Japan, adopting Western technology at a furious pace since 1875, scored an easy victory over the ill-prepared Chinese, thereby greatly limiting Chinese influence in the Korean peninsula. In 1937, Japan, by then thoroughly modernized, sought conquest in mainland China itself, and quickly occupied Beijing, Shanghai, Nanking and other major cities. By mid-1938, the Japanese had overrun Canton, cutting the main railway supply line to Wuhan, the country’s temporary capital. Among those driven from the city when Wuhan fell in November was the poet Guang Weiran, who fled north to the center of anti-Japanese resistance in Shaansi province. His crossing of the Yellow River at a spot just below a magnificent waterfall inspired from him a series of poems about the great river and those whose lives are touched by it; the verses were completed when Guang reached Yanan in January 1939. 

The composer and educator Xian Xinghai, then director of music at Yanan’s Lu Xun College of the Arts, heard Guang recite his poems and he was immediately moved to set them for voices and instruments. Xian brought to the task an exceptional background for a Chinese musician of his time. He had been born in Macao in 1905, and educated in music and general studies in Canton, Beijing and Shanghai before traveling to France in 1935 to study composition with Vincent d’Indy and Paul Dukas and train in violin at the Paris Conservatoire. He returned to Shanghai in 1935, working for the Pathé Record Company and the New China Film Company while allying himself with the anti-Japanese movement, for which he composed many songs in popular styles. He moved to Wuhan when war broke out in 1937, and the following year fled to Yanan, where he took up his post at Lu Xun College. In 1940, when the Second Sino-Chinese War had settled into a bitter stalemate as both countries became embroiled in World War II, Xian headed to Moscow, remaining there until his death five years later. Xian promoted the use of folk idioms in his works of nationalistic purpose, and his setting of Guang Weiran’s poems — the Yellow River Cantata — was introduced on April 13, 1939 in Yanan and heard across unoccupied areas China as it became a musical symbol of the resistance.

The Yellow River Cantata came again to prominence during China’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and in 1969, a “Central Philharmonic Committee” — Yin Chengzong, Chu Wanghua, Sheng Lihong, Shi Shucheng, Xu Feisheung and Liu Zhang were identified — was organized to fashion a Yellow River Concerto for Piano and Orchestra from Xian’s composition. (It is thought that most of the work was done by Yin Chengzong, second-prize winner in the Tchaikovsky International Music Competition in Moscow in 1962 and soloist in the premiere, who has enjoyed a successful performing career since settling in the United States in 1983.) The Yellow River Concerto gained international notoriety when the Chinese government requested that Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra include the work on their pioneering tour of the country in 1973; Daniel Epstein was the soloist. The Yellow River Concerto was one of the first works from mainland China to be heard in the United States, perhaps a reflection of the quotation from Chairman Mao that heads the score: “Let flowers of many kinds blossom. Weed thin the old to let the new emerge.”

With its Oriental themes and subject and its stylistic grounding in the music of Liszt and Rachmaninoff, the Yellow River Concerto bridges two worlds. In the first movement — The Song of the Yellow River Boatmen — sweeping waves of sound suggest the flow of water before the piano introduces a simple, sturdy theme such as might have been sung by those who ply the river. Contrast is provided by a quiet interlude before a brilliant coda closes the movement. Ode to the Yellow River is based on a nostalgic melody that evokes the beauty and grandeur of the scenery along the river’s banks. The first portion of The Yellow River in Anger is devoted to a peaceful folk-like theme, but bolder music as the movement continues suggests the river’s less halcyon moods. The marching vigor of Defend the Yellow River indicates both a pride of country and a resolve to protect the homeland from foreign aggression. The work closes in triumph with a coda incorporating the revolutionary song The East is Red. 

Notes on the Program by Dr. Richard E. Rodda