From Newsday, May 2004

A Swedish proverb claims that "the trouble with foreign languages is, you have to think before you speak." By the same token, the trouble with foreign music may be the degree of attention it demands from its listeners.

The audience at Sunday's Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center concert showed no signs of being troubled. They sat rapt through a generous and challenging program of works combining elements of Asian, Middle Eastern and Western music, and burst into prolonged applause at the end.

The constant in the program was the pipa, a plucked, pear-shaped Chinese lute. As played by virtuoso Wu Man, the pipa can suggest the twangy sounds of the dulcimer, generate a whispery filigree, or slither its way through microtones undreamt of in much Western music. Most of all, it can mesmerize, as it did in two traditional Chinese compositions, "Flute and Drum Music at Sunset" and "White Snow in Spring."

Wu Man's pipa shrieked as it stood in for a samurai sharpening his sword in the suite from Philip Glass's 2003 opera "The Sound of a Voice." This work unites Glass' familiar, throbbing figures with a warm lyricism. Tara Helen O'Connor's cool, seductive flute, the urgent inquiries of Cho-Liang Lin's violin, Jeffrey Milarsky's evocative bells, drums and chimes, and Kristina Reiko Cooper's dazzling cello brought forth a range of moods and colors as great as a full symphony orchestra.

The literally and figuratively plucky playing of pianist Anna Polonsky graced Franghiz Ali-Zadeh's "Sabah" ("Tomorrow") for violin, pipa, cello and prepared piano. This 2003 composition evokes the droning, raspy sounds of traditional Azerbaijani folk instruments, with squealing trills in the violin's highest register and the four players joining in thick smears of arpeggios at its grinding climax.

A single work made up the program's second half: Tan Dun's 1995 "Ghost Opera" for string quartet with pipa, water, stones, paper and metal, featuring violist Ori Kam and violinist Michael Shih along with Lin, Cooper and Wu Man. A work of mourning and hope, the dense, absorbing "Ghost Opera" resists characterization. The composer calls it "a dialogue between past and future, spirit and nature," based on the shamanistic customs of Chinese peasant culture.

"Ghost Opera" begins and ends in darkness, with musicians splashing phosphorescent bowls of water. Gongs are bowed and stones are smacked together; fragments from Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier" commingle with Chinese folk music and give way to raucous hoedowns. One at a time, performers are reduced to ghostly shadows behind a white sash; chants and exhalations alternate with snippets of Shakespeare's "The Tempest" and silence, conducted by one of the musicians. The whole piece is artfully lit and choreographed.

If "Ghost Opera" is typical of Tan Dun's work for the stage, one can only imagine what the audience and musicians of the Metropolitan Opera will make of his "The First Emperor of China," commissioned for a future season. In the meantime, rank "Ghost Opera" as one of the most poignant and magical events of New York's current, exceptionally strong, musical season.

CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER. Traditional Chinese music and works by Philip Glass, Franghiz Ali-Zadeh and Tan Dun, attended Sunday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan.