As the Illinois Symphony's new music director Taichi Fukumura makes his way through his first season as maestro, the previous one stops in for a visit.
Ken Lam returns to the ISO podium this weekend to lead the orchestra in Romantic Reflections, featuring works by Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms and Zhou Tian. Aristo Sham, a former child prodigy originally from Hong Kong represented by Young Concert Artists, is the featured soloist, playing Liszt's Piano Concerto No. 1.
Lam left the orchestra after five seasons to direct orchestral studies at a new satellite campus for the Juilliard School in Tianjin, China—the school’s first and only presence outside New York, and the first performing arts institution to offer U.S.-accredited master’s degrees in China.
It was an offer he couldn’t refuse.
“The Juilliard School has always been international,” Lam said in an interview for WGLT’s Sound Ideas. “Over 30% of the students are from all over the world. But it’s never really been global.”
In the past few decades, orchestral music has enjoyed increased popularity in Asia, driving cultural infrastructure in China, specifically, supported by growing wealth among Chinese citizens.
“They want luxury,” Lam said. “They want Gucci bags, but they also want culture. They want the symphony, they want opera, they want ballet companies. A lot of these Asian cities have new concert halls. When you have a concert hall, you need an orchestra. So, there’s a big demand for orchestral players.”
It’s a stark contrast to American orchestras, for which an abundance of players vie for a fractional number of chairs available. Lam said by coming to them, talented musicians can now be trained by the world’s premiere institution for classical music closer to home, where jobs are more abundant.
“It is a very interesting time,” he said. “China wanted the Juilliard School to be there to show how to develop orchestral musicians. That’s what my role is at the moment.”
A longer commute
After giving up directorships with both the ISO and Charlotte Symphony in South Carolina, Lam now resides nearly full-time in Tianjin, a city of 14 million residents 85 miles southwest of Beijing. He serves as artistic director of Hong Kong Voices and, during the summer, is the longtime resident conductor of the Brevard Music Center in North Carolina. His guest spot with the Illinois Symphony—the second former ISO music director to do so this season—was made possible by aligning with the Lunar New Year break in China.
“Both communities in Bloomington-Normal and Springfield are amazing,” Lam said. “I’ve made many friends; that’s why I was so keen to come back and see them—and the musicians, of course.”
For awhile, he even considered keeping the appointment, but realized the 27-hour commute and 14-hour time difference would be too difficult to maintain.
“It’s in the nature of our business that opportunities come up and you have to keep moving,” he said.
Still, Lam was intimately involved with the search committee and helped program a gap year as finalists were selected.
“The ISO are in for a very exciting new chapter,” he said.
Musical diplomacy
In his new role at the Tianjin Juilliard School, Lam teaches about 80 students—enough to fill an orchestra. Half are Chinese and the rest come from around the world. As a Chinese and American collaboration, Lam said the school offers students a chance to rethink stereotypes and cultural barriers between the two countries.
“The U.S. Ambassador in China, he comes to Tianjin Juilliard,” Lam said. “He would always tell us that, yes, politicians are going to fight. And sometimes when you have election cycles, their rhetoric can get kind of rough. But he said that’s why institutions like Juilliard are so important because it’s the arts. This is how two countries can really cooperate.”
Lam encourages his Chinese students to visit America, and vice versa, suggesting the arts are a way to bring people with very different beliefs and experiences together. Indeed, U.S. Supreme Court justices Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Antonin Scalia, morally opposed on nearly every issue, were known as having a deep friendship grounded, in part, by a shared love of opera.
“When we’re on stage together performing and practicing, there are no barriers,” Lam said. “You really feel that music is a language that everyone can speak—anyone can enjoy. We’re literally bringing people together.”
Rangy romanticism
Lam leads the ISO in a quartet of works spanning 150 years of repertoire—each with romantic tendencies. Liszt is a quintessential choice; the Austrian composer, a deep admirer of Beethoven, shifted the formula to avoid trying to compete with the classical master. Les Preludes, a prime example of Liszt’s symphonic poems, appears on the program in addition to Sham’s interpretation of his first piano concerto.
Brahms was considered more a more pragmatic composer of the era. Legend has it he and Liszt were a little like Ginsberg and Scalia, musically, disagreeing on most things but respecting one another. Lam said the third symphony is Brahms’ most wistful and overtly romantic.
“Brahms is known for being terse, Germanic and motivic, instead of writing melodies,” Lam said. “But this symphony is literally one beautiful melody after another.”
Zhou Tian’s 10-minute suite Gift, commissioned for the Shanghai Symphony in 2019, sounds like it should be the outlier, but shares some of the sweeping, melodic qualities of the rest of the program.
“It’s a wonderful, wonderful work,” Lam said. “It has really good melodies. Sometimes with music of today, with the dissonance and the language—sometimes it’s hard for audiences. But this one, people don’t need to worry. It’s very approachable, but modern.”
The Illinois Symphony Orchestra plays Romantic Reflections at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at Illinois State University's Center for Performing Arts, 400 W. Beaufort St., Normal. Tickets are $49 at 309-438-2535 and ilsymphony.org.
