Tan Dun Premieres Choral Concerto Nine in UK — SkimNews
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- Tan Dun's Choral Concerto: Nine received its UK premiere, performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra under the composer's own baton with the combined London Philharmonic Choir and London Chinese Philharmonic Choir arrayed on an extended stage.
- The work was commissioned for Beethoven's 250th anniversary and scored for the same orchestra-and-chorus forces as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, plus additional percussion including a full battery of drums.
- The concerto deploys extended choral sound effects — hisses moving from high to low voices, mouth noises, pitch slides, collective inhalations, and hints of Mongolian throat singing — alongside English translations of Chinese poets Qu Yuan and Li Bai, with brief quotations from Beethoven's Ninth threaded through the orchestral writing.
- The same programme paired a Beethoven Ninth also conducted by Tan, which the review criticized for fast tempos, minimal magic, an overloud rather than dissonant 'chaos' chord, and a workaday moderation that even the soloists' vocal wattage could not lift.
- Vocal soloists Elizabeth Watts, Hongni Wu, John Findon and Matthew Rose were well matched in the Beethoven, with Rose singled out as thrillingly stentorian in his Ode to Joy solo entry.
- Tan Dun's career backdrop includes the Oscar-winning Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon score (2000), the 2008 Beijing Olympics official music, concertos for Yo-Yo Ma and Lang Lang, a Metropolitan Opera commission, and an Internet Symphony commissioned by Google/YouTube.
Why it matters: Tan Dun is one of the few living composers with simultaneous footholds in Hollywood (Crouching Tiger, 2000), the Olympic stage (Beijing 2008), classical megastar commissions, and tech partnerships (Google/YouTube's Internet Symphony), and his decision to mark Beethoven's 250th with a new work in the Ninth's exact forces positions the premiere as a direct creative dialogue across 200 years of choral-orchestral tradition.
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