“The Orphan”, the two-act opera of Fil-Chinese composer Jeffrey Ching, premiered in Germany’s Theater Erfurt last Nov. 29, and will end its six-night run on Jan. 16, 2010. Ching’s wife, soprano Andion Fernandez of the Berlin Deutsche Oper, portrays the lead role.
Commissioned by Theater Erfurt, the opera is based on a 14th century Chinese play and its European transformations that hark back to Voltaire, Goethe, and other Enlightenment dramatists. The new multi-cultural music-theater, rooted in both Eastern and Western traditions, has a seven-language libretto, a large conventional and electronic orchestra, and a cast of singers, mimes, chorus and dancers.
Ching’s first creative phase, already incredibly prolific, produced over 200 works in a multiplicity of techniques laying the foundations for the harmonic and contrapuntal assurance of his mature compositions. Some of these exploratory pieces test specific classical methods to extreme limits; e.g., the Superklavier Sonata for piano (1980s). Despite its self-mocking rivalry with Beethoven’s Hammerklavier implied by the title, Ching’s single large movement of 1,531 bars has the quantitative edge over Beethoven’s 1,167 bars in four movements; the Hammerklavier ends with a double fugue not obviously related to earlier material; the Superklavier has a triple fugue that incorporates all the themes and most of the subsidiary ideas of the preceding 37 minutes.
Contrasting with such grandiose experiments are satirical miniatures such as the five-minute Miniklavier Sonata for piano (premiered by Ching in Makati, 1993, and heard by this reviewer), a score that indicates use of fists, arms, elbows, palms, pointed fingertips, and even buttocks on the keyboard!
Symphony No. 1 in C (premiered by the Bach Society Orchestra under James Ross, Harvard U., 1981) was a meticulously crafted homage to Viennese classicism; the expressionist Symphony No. 2 “The Imp of the Perverse” (premiered by the Jeunesses Musicales World Youth Orchestra under Woldemar Nelsson, Manila, 1995) was set down fully orchestrated by Ching in a trance-like state lasting around forty days, without any sketches or pre-conceived structural or tonal plan!
Source: http://www.philstar.com/Article.aspx?articleId=535080&publicationSubCategoryId=64
