Shanghai Chinese Opera Orchestra

The other night Dan and I had the opportunity to purchase tickets to see the Shanghai Chinese Opera Orchestra. I wouldn't have gone, except during my band class earlier that day, they gave us a demonstration of the wind instruments they used, and they were so awesome! The members of the orchestra played on traditional Chinese instruments (although they did use a few western instruments, a couple of cellos and a bass, but mostly I think because they don't really have any traditional instruments in that register). It was called an Opera Orchestra because the players usually play with a smaller ensemble for the Chinese Opera, but they had come together to play some orchestral pieces. Each of the players in the orchestra had studied their individual instruments at Chinese music conservatories, and had completed their studies.


The instruments themselves were fascinating. They have their version of a violin section and they all looked like this:

 

This is an Erhu. You can't see it very well in the picture, but it has two strings (those two horizontal pegs at the top are for tuning said strings). The Erhu could be considered a Chinese violin, and in the orchestra we saw there were three others that are pitched consecutively lower than the Erhu, except for one which was higher than the Erhu and used mainly for solo playing. (I really wish I could remember the names of all of these!)


So the Erhu is part of the bowed strings, but there are also plucked strings...

 

This one is called a Pipa. I chose this picture because you can see how it's played. The liugin (below) is played similarly, except angled a little bit, and it's pitched a little higher.

There's also the Ruan (below, top) and Zhong Ruan (below, bottom), which are differently pitched Chinese equivalents of guitars.

There were a couple other stringed instruments that were sort of in a family of their own. One was the guzheng, which looks like this:

 

 She sat in front of it, and plucked the strings, and the little peg-thingies you see in the middle of it she used too while she was playing, and it changed the pitch of a sustained note as she pressed on it. The other one they used was a yangqin:

 The box on the bottom was hollow and that's where the performer's knees went, sort of like sitting at a desk. He had little sticks that he used as hammers to hit the strings, and it was very pretty.

 And then there were a few wind instruments. There were these awesome mouth pipe organs called sheng (I think) but there were different sizes. I really wanted to find a picture of the ones we saw, but Google only gave me this crappy image:

 

I drew a yellow arrow to the one that we definitely saw, there's one to the left of that one that's the same. The green arrow points to one that we saw, except it was way smaller than that, just a little larger than the yellow arrow one. They were so cool, and could sometimes play two-note chords.


There was also the Dizi, a Chinese bamboo flute.

 

(Gasp! She's immodest! ...)

I put this picture because unlike the western flute that we play now, it's centered more in the middle when you play it. There are two sizes of dizi:

  ...and obviously the smaller one is played in a similar fashion to the normal sized-one and is the equivalent of the western piccolo.

My favorite wind instrument is the suono, probably because it's the Chinese equivalent of the trumpet.

Of course, the suono doesn't sound anything like the trumpet. I can't even describe the sound of it, it was sort of like a... bagpipes without the drone mixed with an oboe?? I give up. It was very loud and hurt my ears during the demonstration because I was three rows from the performer. During the concert, though, it was SO cool! It has a completely different timbre (or tone) from anything else in the orchestra, and it stuck out when he was playing melody. But it didn't stick out in a bad way, it was really cool how he could blend with the rest of the performers.

And of course there was percussion. There were some small hand cymbals, two gongs of different sizes (little hand gongs) and the main drum that they call the Ban Gu.

Before there was an actual conductor, whenever Chinese got together to play instruments it was the Ban Gu player that kept the performers in time together. The performers would watch the Ban Gu and see what he did that directed them. There was another set of drums too that a Chinese woman played for one of the pieces, the Chinese version of our western marching band quints:

(Except I don't think she had the biggest drum; they had trouble bringing it as well as their Chinese bass drum, which is ginormous. They said the airlines wouldn't allow the huge drum to go on the plane!)

The group also brought along a man and a woman who were their opera singers, and they each sang a Chinese opera piece separately, and then one together. It was so cute! They wore Chinese costumes and sang in Chinese, and it was so beautiful.

The concert was amazing, but my favorite piece was the first one they played. It was called "Celebration Orchestra" by Zhao Jiping. I suppose my opinion might have been skewed because that was the first piece I ever heard a Chinese orchestra ever play... but it was still amazing. The entire audience was awestruck. The sounds from the traditional instruments playing together were so different from western music! There's an ok recording of "Celebration Overture" on YouTube that gives you the general idea about the piece. It's played with a national orchestra, so the sound is a little different but mostly the same. You can see that by clicking here. 

This other clip though sounds more like what we heard. I think it's even one of the pieces they played for us! The concert was so amazing, and I would go again in a heartbeat.

If you want to read more about the instruments, I went to this site and this site. The sites also tell about other Chinese instruments that I didn't see in the concert I went to. (However, they also don't tell about some of the ones I did see...) All my images came from Google. Special thanks to the unknown Chinese people in the photos.