Unsuk Chin : Composing Outside the Lines, Alice in Wonderland Opera

Composing Outside the Lines

Unsuk Chin Talks About Her Music and Influences

By CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM

The South Korean composer Unsuk Chin. Myriad influences affect her pieces, one of which is being performed by the New York Philharmonic. Credit Julie Glassberg for The New York Times

“Verboten” often becomes the first word to impress itself on the mind of a visitor to Germany, so numerous — and explicit — are the rules. It’s also a word that the South Korean composer Unsuk Chin encountered early on when she moved to Hamburg in 1985 to take up studies with Gyorgy Ligeti, the restlessly innovative Hungarian composer who was a dominating figure in 20th-century music.

“It was very difficult,” she recalled during a recent interview at a coffee shop on the Upper West Side, which she gave in the precisely articulated German she has perfected in nearly three decades of living in the country. “He was in a phase of transition and wanted to try something new. He spent a lot of time ranting and denouncing things.” Among them, the Western European avant-garde music Ms. Chin had studied in South Korea and was then trying so earnestly to imitate. To her, Ligeti made clear, that music was verboten.

Today, Ms. Chin, 53, is sought after by leading orchestras and soloists for her colorful, audacious and often darkly humorous music. On Tuesday, Alan Gilbert will conduct the New York Philharmonic and the Finnish star clarinetist Kari Kriikku in the American premiere of Ms. Chin’s Clarinet Concerto at Avery Fisher Hall. In February, her zany opera “Alice in Wonderland” receives its West Coast premiere at the hands of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a production, featuring video art by Netia Jones, that will subsequently travel to London.

Taking a cue from the verbal ingenuity of Lewis Carroll’s novel (adapted for the libretto by David Henry Hwang), Ms. Chin offers a madcap kaleidoscopic setting that juggles a breathtaking variety of styles and techniques. This time, she said, she provoked the wrath of purists in the German new-music scene.

“They couldn’t understand how I could write such melodies,” she said. “But in order to understand it, you have to understand the sarcasm, the irony and the sense of humor behind it.”

So while her fresh, vivid and uncompromisingly modern musical language is not exactly verboten in her adopted home city, Berlin, Ms. Chin notes that her music is still not played as much in Germany as it is outside it — though she has powerful champions at the Berlin Philharmonic and at the Bavarian State Opera, where “Alice” was unveiled in 2007 under the direction of Kent Nagano. “I actually feel more at home here in New York than in Germany,” she said.

One route Ms. Chin refused to take is the ethnic one, mining her Korean roots for exotic effect, even though she watched many of her Chinese colleagues do well with music that blended Eastern and Western traditions.

“It was much easier to get ahead like that,” she said. “But I didn’t want that.”

The musical memories of her childhood — playing the piano in church, watching troupes of itinerant performers, hearing Korean folk music on the street and American pop music on the radio — are distilled into her palette but don’t show up in her work in any representational way.

The Clarinet Concerto is part of a series of instrumental concertos that give voice to her taste for technical wizardry and drama. In 2001, she won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for her Violin Concerto. A recording of her Piano Concerto (with Sunwook Kim as soloist), her Cello Concerto (Alban Gerhardt) and “Su for Sheng and Orchestra” (Wu Wei) was recently released on the Deutsche Grammophon label and demonstrates the breadth of her imagination and technical versatility. The sheng is a Chinese mouth organ capable of producing intricate polyphonic sounds; the work, full of pulsating textures that appear to contract and expand, sounds, at times, uncannily like electronic music.

The concertos for piano and violin are both extravagantly difficult — not only for the soloists, but also for the orchestra. In a phone interview, Mr. Gilbert said that Ms. Chin’s writing is “unbelievably specific; there’s a kind of control of the craft that is highly developed.” He said her music is distinct because “it’s her own hybrid of styles,” adding, “It’s very atmospheric, with lots of colors and effects.”

“I’m attracted by virtuosity,” Ms. Chin said. “This enthusiasm and virtuosity of a player trying to go beyond his or her boundaries: I like that. It’s a situation that I experience all the time as a composer: pushing the limits of your possibilities, not knowing whether you can do it — and then somehow succeeding. I ask every bit as much from a soloist.”

Mr. Kriikku, for whom she wrote the Clarinet Concerto, said in a phone interview that he enjoyed being pushed. “A composer asks questions a musician would not think to ask,” he said. After the world premiere of the concerto in Gothenburg, Sweden, in May, he said she offered only this piece of advice: “Sound more like a bird.”

As it happens, Ms. Chin’s music very rarely sounds “like” anything recognizable. When it does, she tends to pile on layers of references and meta-references for ironic effect. The most dazzling example is “Alice.”

For the scene in which the Mad Hatter gives Alice a riddle to solve, Ms. Chin wrote a firework of pastiche and allusions, ranging from Baroque music to Bizet to Schoenberg.

“Alice makes a series of guesses, and each time, the music is in a different style: now Baroque, now new music, and each time the answer is ‘No,’ ” Ms. Chin explained. “That ‘No’ is in answer not only to Alice’s guesses, but also to the music. So you have to dig a little deeper.”

“Humor is distance from yourself,” Ms. Chin said. Then she made a declaration that, in certain new-music circles, may elicit even more horror than her decision to quote from Bizet: “I, for instance, don’t take myself seriously at all.”

Correction: September 24, 2014
A Critic’s Notebook article on Tuesday about the composer Unsuk Chin misspelled the surname of the clarinetist for whom she wrote her Clarinet Concerto. He is Kari Kriikku, not Kriiku.

The New York Philharmonic performs a program that includes Unsuk Chin’s Clarinet Concerto on Tuesday, Friday, Saturday and next Tuesday at Avery Fisher Hall; nyphil.org.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/23/arts/music/unsuk-chin-talks-about-her-music-and-influences.html

U. Chin : Alice in Wonderland –


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