A Night Tour de force

Shanghai Isaac Stern International Violin Competition has had a unique arrangement since its first edition, with each contestant required to play a Chinese composition.

This year they were required to play a new violin concerto named Night Tour by Zhou Tian. The 41-year-old composer is the first Chinese musician to be nominated for a Grammy Award in the best contemporary classical composition category.

The final round of contestants presented a series of online concerts from Friday to Sunday, forming the official conclusion of the third edition of the prestigious music competition. The six young musicians from five countries each played a piece of their own choice from the stipulated repertoire, and then Night Tour, a violin concerto commissioned especially for the event by the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, organizer of the competition.

Since its first edition in 2016, Yu Long, music director of the SSO and founder of the competition, made it part of the contest's mission to promote Chinese culture to the international music community, by including the interpretation of a Chinese composition as an integral part of the final round.

The first edition featured the beloved violin concerto Butterfly Lovers, created by Chen Gang and He Zhanhao in 1958, and the 2018 edition featured Chen Qigang's La Joie de la souffrance (The Joy of Suffering), a new concerto jointly commissioned by the competition and several music institutions home and abroad.

Night Tour was commissioned by the SSO in 2019, for the third edition of the violin competition, which was scheduled to take place in 2020. It was postponed for nearly two years because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Eventually, the plan was changed to cancel the final round of competition in Shanghai, and have all six contestants record their final round of performances and present them online. The prize money was divided among them, with each receiving a scholarship of $20,000.

Compared to the Chinese composition for the first two editions of the competition, this year's piece is different in that "it reflects the modern outlook of China, as part of the global village", Zhou told the media in Shanghai via a web conference on Aug 22. He hoped audiences would feel like they were walking on the streets of Shanghai, "where modern landscape would merge seamlessly with traditional architecture," he said.

Praised by the Broad Street Review to be "a prime example of 21st-century multiculturalism", Zhou was nominated at the 60th Annual Grammy Awards for best contemporary classical composition for his Concerto for Orchestra. The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and music director Louis Langree who commissioned and recorded the work, were also nominated for best orchestral performance.

Zhou's work has been performed by leading orchestras and musicians from both China and other countries. He was named "artist of the year" by Beijing Music Festival in 2019, and the artist in residence during the SSO's 2019-20 music season.

The inspiration for Night Tour came from an evening trip he made a few years ago from Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, to Shanghai. "At the train station, I saw people going in different ways. Some may have been starting a new journey, while others were heading home, and the idea arose," he said.

Creating the concerto was a long process－taking almost three years as the competition was postponed－and he made as many as 90 revisions. "I grew up among many violinists, and it is an instrument that I am most familiar with. This added more pressure, especially since it was a piece composed for a competition, where it would be played by many different musicians with an orchestra."

When creating a new composition for an international competition, it was important to "achieve the balance between providing lyrical expression and offering technical challenges for the contestants," he said. When the six musicians came out in 2021, he listened to their performances and felt confident with their skills and expressions. "Each will be able to give their individual interpretation," he said.

In three chapters, Zhou presented three night scenes in the concerto. "It was meant for the soloist and orchestra, so I wanted to present the harmonious dialogue and chorus between them, as well as some competition between the violin and the orchestra.

"I believe when you can create high quality expression with music, as well as do a good job telling stories with it, you can compose an enduring piece that lives on beyond the competition," he said.

Because the six finalists could not travel to Shanghai, they were unable to play the concerto with the SSO, so Zhou had to make a final revision to adapt the piece for the violin and piano.

"Had there been a formal final round of competition, I would have refrained from any interaction with the contestants, because that would be unfair for others," he said. "But this year, the six finalists were not ranked, and the final round has become a musical carnival."

The SSO arranged online meetings between Zhou and the contestants before their performances, when he answered their questions, and provided them with a list of artworks to help them understand the composition. Zhou named Edward Hopper's painting Nighthawks, Chen Kaige's film about Peking Opera, Farewell My Concubine, and the renowned Chinese folk composition by Hua Yanjun, The Moon Reflected on the Erquan Spring.

Later this year, when the SSO kicks off its new music season, one of the six finalists of the violin competition, Lin Ruifeng, a student at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, will collaborate with the orchestra and present an orchestral performance of Night Tour in Shanghai in November.