To the beat of a different drum

Shanghai Percussion Ensemble, part of the Chinese Festival in Ireland, mixes its music, reports Clifford Coonan from Shanghai.

'It is dangerous for a woman to be too beautiful. It is much better for a woman to be plain and lead a simple life." This mother's chilling advice to her beauty-queen daughter, Wang Qiyao, comes in the opening act of Chang Hen Ge, or Song Of Everlasting Sorrow. "It is an ambitious play depicting the life and loves of Wang Qiyao and how she endured the social and political changes in the turbulent times of the 20th century," says Rongjun Yu of Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre, which brings the work to Cork this week.

In the play, adapted from Wang Anyi's hugely popular 1995 novel, Wang Qiyao becomes the mistress of a senior member of the Kuomintang, the nationalists who came to power in China in 1928. When her lover dies, in 1949, the year the communists took over, the hapless beauty falls into penury, has affairs and tries to keep up her privileged lifestyle, but to no avail.

Its beauty-pageant theme makes the play immensely topical in China, a country whose obsession with such events has culminated in the staging of Miss World on the tropical island of Hainan, in southern China, last year and again this year.

It was adapted by Zhao Yaomin, one of China's leading dramatists, who needed two years to produce a script from the 376-page novel, which contains not a line of dialogue. "Wang Anyi's works are driven by description and characters rather than plot and dialogue, which makes them very resistant to adaptation," he says.

Wang Anyi is the best known of a group of writers reviving the haipai style, which characterised Shanghai's art and literature before communism. Born in 1954 to the novelist Ru Zhijuan, she was banished to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. She started writing after returning to Shanghai, in the late 1970s. Wang has been called China's most important mainland writer of the past 20 years.

Like the book, the play has tapped into a growing nostalgia for old Shanghai. Li Shengying, its producer (the director is the award-winning Su Leci), says it was the book's setting that caught his eye. "Song Of Everlasting Sorrow has this wonderful way of using the story of a woman's life to capture Shanghai's turbulent culture and changes."

Chang Hen Ge, in Mandarin with surtitles, is at Cork Opera House on Friday and Saturday (021-4270022)Yang Ruwen, musical director of the Shanghai Percussion Ensemble, which is coming to Cork, Ennis and Dublin next week as part of the Chinese Festival in Ireland, has been to Ireland before. "We climbed a hill near the Cliffs of Moher, and we came across this Irish man just sitting there, playing the flute. He didn't seem to care who was listening, if anyone. I found it a very moving experience. He reminded me of a Chinese philosopher," says Yang, an animated, gangly man, who founded the ensemble in 1998.

"Last year I was struck at how well Irish music has done in maintaining its tradition," he says, sitting in an office at Shanghai Conservatory of Music. "Also, the people's mood seemed quite peaceful, even in the city, totally different from New York and Shanghai, where everyone is stressed out the whole time."

Yang, who is 38, founded the ensemble with students and graduates of the conservatory, which is based in an old colonial building. Its repertoire includes both Chinese traditional works and contemporary percussion pieces. It filled a gap, says Yang. "Chinese percussion music has a very rich and profound history, but there was nothing like the Shanghai Percussion Ensemble around to help present this form of Chinese culture - and also bring in Western percussion to China," says Yang.

The ensemble has built up a serious profile in its short history, collaborating with Meredith Monk, Zhou Wenzhong and the French National Symphony Orchestra, among others. Yang says the audiences for its Irish appearances - in Cork on November 4th, Ennis on November 6th and Dublin on November 10th - can expect to hear very traditional forms of Chinese music. "But they'll also get some unique forms of Chinese music, something they might not be expecting," he grins.

Tonight the Ensemble will play with the French percussionists Jean Geoffroy and Percussions Claviers de Lyon. The concert is the first to sell out in the conservatory's new concert hall, which was finished a year ago. Yang is a little nervous ahead of the show, smoking and brushing hair out of his face.

One of the women in the office believes that Yang is too thin to be a percussionist. He's too busy and doesn't eat properly, she says. He says he's a driven man. "I think percussion instruments are universal. They have been around since primitive societies; they've been a feature for as long as we've been human beings. Even in the womb we heard the heart of the mother beating," he says. "We are at a turning point in the development of Chinese music. We are returning to natural rhythms and to nature itself, away from more industrialised sounds."

Yang is keen on philosophy and its overlap with music. "I'm interested in Taoism, the idea that everything is natural and vivid. You can see a bit of this philosophy in our music: it's contained in our music, where the composers try to explain things in their own way through the music."

The music begins slowly, a smattering of individual sounds from the xylophones, drums and gongs assembled on stage. There is indeed a Taoist feel to its spare elegance, the way it threatens to pick up volume and come to a crescendo but then pulls away unexpectedly.The music is pretty avant-garde for a Chinese audience, but its immediacy makes it accessible.

When You Jinshun, a star musician from Shanghai Opera, appears to play his erhu, a traditional Chinese violin, with the percussionists you worry that it could sound incongruous. But the collaboration, which begins to make sense as the piece progresses, turns out to be a highlight of the evening.

Yang says the ensemble is trying to address an interest in the rhythms of the world and the challenges of globalisation. On the one hand globalisation means more integration of culture, including music. So while Chinese music is a major element of the ensemble's repertoire, its influences also include Western music and sounds from South Africa and South America.

His principal Western influences are Bach, Stravinsky, Mahler and Beethoven; in China Zu Xiaosong and Chen Qigang inspire him. "These are all composers who write with their hearts, and they don't care what society thinks of them."

But retaining an identity in the face of globalisation is another issue. "What we try to explore with our music is the rapid development of our world and how we think about the world around us. Here in China we face the same problem as all nationalities: how to keep our own characteristics in the face of globalisation."

China is booming, and the pressure to produce commercial, market-driven music has never been more intense. "It's not easy to work as a musician in China. You have to resist all kinds of temptations to get to your goal. I admire those Chinese composers working today for their ability to be alone and to ignore the opinions of others," says Yang.

Many musicians fall by the wayside, as they are unwilling to produce commercial music. "But long term it's better to do the music you want and not the music the market demands. It's the tradition of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music: we don't make music just for the market, we make music for the sake of music, for art. Because of this tradition our ensemble is respected and recognised - even if the financial situation is not so good at times."

Shanghai Percussion Ensemble is at City Hall, Cork, on November 4th (021- 4270022, www.cork2005.ie), Glór, Ennis, on the 6th (065-6843103, www.glor.ie) and Liberty Hall, Dublin, on the 10th (01-8721122, www.improvisedmusic.ie)