The picture perfect pianist
- Source: Global Times
- [10:23 July 27 2010]
- Comments
Song Siheng. Photo: Courtesy of Lü Jiaojiao
By Hu Bei
While many people were mourning the decline of classical music, a Japanese manga comic series started bringing it back to life. The manga, Nodame Cantabile, is about two aspiring young classical musicians, pianist Megumi Noda (Nodame) and would-be conductor Shinichi Chiaki along with their classmates at the Momogaoka College of Music.
Nodame is a frivolous undisciplined girl who is talented but prefers eating to making music. She falls in love with the highly disciplined and arrogant Shinichi who lives and breathes music.
The manga became a television series that attracted a huge audience and was followed by a sequel and an anime series with the two central protagonists and their classmates searching for love and fine music.
Not only did the series score with its ratings but suddenly young people found themselves introduced to classical music painlessly.
Young Shanghai pianist Song Siheng could see this rare chance to build on an initial interest in classical music like a cool breeze on a hot summer's day.
Two years ago he began planning and designing a show that incorporates visual elements from the manga series with his own live music. His multimedia performance, Nodame Cantabile, will be staged at the Shanghai Concert Hall on July 31.
His concert will feature a series of video clips which will be screened on a gi-ant 6-meter video screen. After each video clip Song will play the classical music associated with the video.
"They are all classic pieces including Beethoven's Pathetique Piano Sonata, Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue and Chopin Etudes," he said.
"I hardly ever watch television shows, especially shows designed for teenagers that follow the same plot and over dramatize unrealistic love. However, when I watched Nodame Cantabile accidentally in 2008, I was deeply impressed and affected. The experiences of the students learning classical music were very similar to mine," Song said. "What was more amazing was that all the incidental music in the television special was classical."
Because this year marks the 200th anniversary of Chopin's birth, Song is adding more pieces by Chopin for his Shanghai concert.
"Chopin's Piano Sonata No.2 in B-flat Minor is my favorite work, especially its third movement, the Funeral March. It is a particularly patriotic work because when it was written, Russia was invading his homeland, Poland."
"It is a difficult piece and artistically demanding. We created an animated video especially for this piece to help the audience understand it better," Song said.
He told the Global Times it was another important reason why he has added video to his concert - "to help visualize classical music."
"The solo piano concert has been performed for more than 200 years and has followed a traditional pattern without change; one artist, one piano and one spotlight focusing on the artist on stage," Song said.
"Why not inject some fresh blood into this stereotypical performance and make it more vivid, especially today when audiences seem to prefer visual images and multimedia technology."
In Song's opinion, the reason why many people cannot understand classical music is because they just hear the music and have no knowledge of the background to the works.
"If, by playing the videos, we can illustrate something related to the music, it must make our audience understand better."
He takes Debussy's famous symphonic sketch La Mer as an example. "It is a difficult piece for ordinary people to understand if they can only listen to it played by a pianist or an orchestra. But if we put an image of a turbulent sea on the screen, the music's meaning becomes more obvious."
As a pianist who began to play at 3 years old, Song believes that multimedia concerts will be a future trend for classical music.
Date: July 31, 7:30 pm
Venue: Shanghai Concert Hall 上海音乐厅
Address: 523 Yan'an Road East 延安东路523号
Tickets: 50 to 280 yuan
Call 6386-2836 for details
