Silk Baroque

This is an elegant album of mainly European baroque music and pseudo-baroque compositions, but with a twist – the solo instrument is a sheng, a Chinese wind instrument with a history of at least three millennia, masterfully played here by Wu Wei.

The sheng is made up of a bundle of fixed-pitch bamboo reeds and is one of very few Chinese traditional instruments where the use of chords is a staple feature of its sound-world. When played, its sound occasionally resembles that of an oboe, clarinet, harmonium or accordion. The sheng is no doubt one of the most suitable Chinese instruments to blend seamlessly into a European baroque setting.

And blend in he certainly does. Wu is clearly a most charismatic performer, particularly during live performances. Surprisingly, his playing in this baroque repertoire is idiomatic to the extent that one questions whether there is any point at all in this endeavour, since in many of the pieces the sheng does not even sound ‘Chinese.’ Is this yet another manifestation of that regrettable trait often found among East Asian musicians of desiring to prove they can perform Western art music with ease? It is interesting then that the one piece where we get a true taste of what the sheng is capable of is ‘Improvisation’, where Wei finally lets his hair down and his instrument takes flight.

Scattered between the baroque classics are three contemporary Chinese showpieces, including the popular erhu solo written by Huang Haihuai in 1959, ‘Pferderennen’ (Horse Racing), and the 1952 orchestral composition ‘Dancing song of the Yao Tribe’. Although equally well performed and arranged by the wonderful Holland Baroque ensemble, Wei swaps the sheng for the erhu and bawu (flute) in these tracks, which breaks up the unique cut-glass atmosphere expertly created in the rest of this enigmatic project.