`Water Passion'.

Byline: Fred Crafts The Register-Guard

TAN DUN, who composed an Academy Award-winning score for the gravity-defying martial arts love story "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," is himself flying high.

Fresh from a whirlwind tour of Europe and Asia, the globe-circling composer will land in Eugene next week to conduct his popular film score and other seminal works at the Oregon Bach Festival, then take off for more far-flung appearances.

He brings with him yet another award, the 2002 Classical Brit Contemporary Music Award, which he received May 23 for the "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" score. It joins his collection, which includes the Oscar and the Grawemeyer Award for music composition.

It's been that kind of life lately for the 45-year-old Chinese composer, whom Oregon Bach Festival Executive Director Royce Saltzman considers "one of the most prestigious young composers living today.

"He seems to have an ability to cross over into various types of music - with the movie scores, with his symphonies, with his operas - and do them all well."

With so many demands on Tan's time, Saltzman considers himself fortunate to have him on this year's festival schedule - three times.

Tan will give a lecture-demonstration at 5 p.m. July 4 and conduct concerts at 8 p.m. July 5 and at 3 p.m. July 7. A free showing of the film "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. June 30 in the Hult's Soreng Theatre.

Tan will come here next week after a round of concerts in Lisbon (May 25), Singapore (May 31-June 1) and the Shanghai Film Festival (June 8).

Among his other recent engagements: the opera "Death and Fire" with New York City's Metropolitan Opera Orchestra; the opera "Peony Pavilion" directed by Peter Sellars in Vienna, London, Paris and Rome; and conducting the orchestral piece "Symphony 1997' at the BBC Proms.

Ahead are world premieres of his new opera, "Tea," commissioned by Japan's Suntory Hall in celebration of its 15th anniversary; "The Map," a cello concerto for Yo-Yo Ma and the Boston Symphony that will debut in February 2003; and a new opera for the Metropolitan Opera that is scheduled to premiere in 2006.

No matter how big Tan becomes, he will have to go some to top his `2000 Today: A World Symphony for the Millennium," which was broadcast on the first day of the new millennium by more than 55 major networks worldwide.

Passion playing

Tan's visit here is the happy byproduct of his friendship with the festival's artistic director and conductor.

Helmuth Rilling commissioned Tan (and three others) to compose modern settings of the biblical Passion narrative for concerts in 2000 at the Internationale Bachakademie Stuttgart, which was commemorating the 250th anniversary of Bach's death.

"Bach himself certainly is the composer in the past who has written the most important music to the story of the Passion," Rilling explained by phone from his home in Stuttgart, Germany. "My idea was that four contemporary composers coming from completely different cultural backgrounds should compose a Passion, too."

Wolfgang Rihm's St. Luke Passion is in German, Sophia Gubaidulina's St. John Passion in Russian, Osvaldo Golijov's St. Mark Passion in Spanish and Tan's St. Matthew Passion in English.

The Eugene performance of Tan's "Water Passion" according to St. Matthew embellishes the Oregon Bach Festival's reputation for pioneering new work. Much about the intense piece is unorthodox; the sound, style, instrumentation and presentation are guaranteed to make concertgoers take notice.

The capacity audience at the Stuttgart premiere roared its approval and repeatedly called the performers back for bows. Rilling himself shouted "bravo."

"It's really a wonderful invention," Rilling says. "He (Tan, who is a Buddhist) told me after that first performance that working with these texts and composing this music had changed his life completely."

Rilling views Tan's "Water Passion" as "a completely different approach to the Passion story itself, because he has chosen himself from the Bible special texts which have to do with water. For example, the water of the baptism, or the thirst for water at the time of Jesus' temptation in the desert."

To emphasize the point, Tan has created a "water instruments orchestra." Water is dripped, splashed, poured and pounded throughout.

The piece opens with the words, "A sound is heard in water," sung to the soft dripping of water.

Seventeen transparent water bowls, lighted from beneath, form a large cross that divides the performance areas for two choruses (sopranos and altos on one side, tenors and basses on the other), two soloists (soprano and bass) and two string players (violin and cello).

One percussionist is stationed at ends of the cross, the conductor at the fourth.

The vocal soloists sometimes make otherworldly sounds that resemble Mongolian overtone singing and what Tan terms the "calligraphic," high-pitched contortions of the Peking Opera. The soloists contrast sharply with the chorale-style, four-part singing of the choirs.

Tan also utilizes string instruments heard along the Silk Road, such as the cello-like Chinese erhu and the Mongolian horse-head fiddle. With these disparate elements swirling together, Tan provides a mind-bending concoction of Eastern and Western music.

Classically Chinese

Tan arrived at classical music

circuitously.

Born in 1957 in the rural Si Mao village in China's central Hunan province, he lived with his grandmother in an ancient culture. When he was 10, he was given a violin that was missing a string. He learned to improvise on it anyway, perfecting a peculiar sound.

During Mao Tse-tung's Cultural Revolution, Tan was sent to work the fields, where he began collecting folk songs and providing music for village ceremonies. Later, when the Peking Opera troupe was decimated in a ferry disaster, he became the company's violinist and arranger.

In 1978, Tan entered the new Central Conservatory in Beijing. After Mao's death, the Chinese musical establishment eased restrictions on access to contemporary Western music, and Tan took advantage of the change.

At first, he rejected his musical past. Then gradually, he began to celebrate it in his compositions.

His string quartet "Feng Ya Song" won a Weber Prize in Dresden in 1983. Two years later, he introduced the orchestral work "On Taoism," written to mark his grandmother's death.

In 1986, Tan received a scholarship to study at Columbia University in New York City, where he completed his doctoral studies. Because the scholarship didn't cover all his costs, he performed on the streets in Greenwich Village, often startling passersby with his distinctive shaman's shriek.

Awards rolled in. Tan's opera "Marco Polo" was named opera of the year by the German magazine Oper. He has been cited as one of the musicians of the year by The New York Times, and he won the city of Toronto's Glenn Gould Prize in Music and Communication.

"Tan Dun's music is a vital expression of independence from the weight of Chinese history, and of self-assurance amid contemporary turmoil," the late Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu said. Adds avant-garde American composer John Cage, "His music is one we need as the East and West come together as our one home."

Tan didn't discover Bach until was 20 years old, when a friend took him to a church where he heard Bach's organ music and chorales from the St. Matthew Passion. Bach's influence can be felt in Tan's "Ghost Opera" (1994), which ends with some of Bach's themes and the sounds of water.

In essence, "Water Passion" is an extension of that piece. The work's eight movements are divided into two halves. Tan will conduct.

For his second concert, Tan will conduct his famous "Crouching Tiger Concerto" and Orchestral Theatre 1 (`Xun') and 2 (`Re').

`Tiger' is a suite from his acclaimed film score. The latter pieces are two of four innovative works responsible for much of his later direction.

The "Crouching Tiger Concerto" for cello, chamber orchestra and film is in six movements, with cello cadenzas linking the orchestral sections. Each of the movements is accompanied by video footage created by Ang Lee and James Schamus from material produced during the making of the film.

As in "Water Passion," the piece uses Silk Road instruments, such as the tar (a North African frame drum), the bawu (a Chinese copper-reed flute), the rawap (a plucked string instrument) and the erhu (a Chinese bowed instrument). The score was written in 10 days.

Tan's Orchestral Theatre series springs from his reflections on the place of music in the world.

"I began to see the orchestra itself as a drama medium, as theater," Tan has written.

Tan is, Rilling asserts, a perfect fit for the Oregon Bach Festival, and his "Water Passion" is a milestone event.

"We are living in world where we should not think only about the United States and Europe, but also about other countries and how grateful we have to be that other people are interested in our philosophy, our religion, and make it part of their thinking and creative activities.

"This is something which we will need in the future."

Arts reporter Fred Crafts can be reached by phone at 338-2575 and by e-mail at [e-mail].

CAPTION(S):

`Water Passion' includes orchestrated dripping, splashing and plopping in 17 transparent water bowls.