Outside the Rockport-Tanglewood-Newport summer circuit and the like there is a welcome alternative: Foundation for Chinese Performing Arts summer concert series at New England Conservatory―free or with a ten-dollar donation— running August 8th through 24th. Tucked away from NEC’s major venue, well-known Jordan Hall, one of several of the conservatory’s flanking smaller auditoriums, Williams Hall will be filled on summer evenings with east-west comradery. Exemplifying this from opening night, the Formosa Duo of Sam Ou 歐維聖 partnered with Chi-Chen Wu 吳紀禛 in Fauré, Debussy, Strauss, and Grant-Still chamber selections.
Both natives of Taiwan, Ou and Chu, preferring to call themselves by the other name of the island, returned to their alma mater; they have been concertizing together for 20 years. On Thursday evening, cellist Sam Ou faintly recalled the sound of the Chinese two-stringed spike fiddle named erhu, and pianist Chi-Chen Wu may have remembered Debussy’s exposure to imported sounds of Southeast Asia at the Paris Exposition Universelle.
A unifying element would be D minor in a recital highlighting individualism. The Formosa Duo’s plans seemed to pair the Debussy of Golliwog’s (seen today as a racist caricature) Cakewalk with the Grant-Still of African Dancer before juxtaposing sonatas by 72-year-old French Catholic Fauré and 19-year-old German “freethinking” Richard Strauss. With his strikingly different vocabulary from the other composers whose harmonies interfaced, the duo wisely inserted intermission tying the first three together and leaving the German as a stand-alone.
To kick off the Foundation for Chinese Performing Arts’s 16-concert summer run, the Ou-Wu duo chose Claude Debussy’s compact 1915 Sonate (often labeled “Sonata in D Minor). The modernizer, musicien français, taking his mature hand to this tried-and-true instrumental scheme, afforded Ou-Chu a veritable introduction, Prologue: Lent, sostenuto e molto risoluto. Ou’s personalized cello and Wu’s sensitized piano prompted the opening of a listener’s ears. A flirtatious moment in the Serenade came with both instruments plucking á la guitar. The duo’s being in tune with the sonata’s nature prompted a listener’s eyes to gaze at the sky—all should know that Williams Hall also has windows, one of a rare few.
Fiddling aside, Williams Hall pronounced Sam Ou’s cello transcription of the 1943 Suite for Violin and Piano by William Grant-Still in an out-of-the-blue booming voice. “African Dancer,” “A Mother and Child,” and “Gamin” (a boy who hangs out on the street), while contrasting the Frenchman’s culture, felt right with the Formosa’s rhythmic bite. And again, their programming came to the fore. That sound of the Chinese, its five notes denoting north, south, east, west, and center, and that of the American Blacks, the same notes standing for the blues, contributed to a special sense of community. A deeply moving moment from Ou-Chu came in “A Mother and Child.” And this duo’s engagement with this Grant-Still Suite would land listeners to an evocative throwback of the early1900s.
The “roving” Formosa Duo in Gabriel Fauré’s 1917 Cello Sonata No. 1 in D Minor and Richard Strauss’s 1883 Cello Sonata in F major would have the two sonatas flipping relative keys in their Andantes. So much of this roving in and out of a key became too much. If the Catholic sees one beyond after another and the freethinker one growth after another, the duo of Ou-Chu found difficulty in creating wholes out of each of these works.
In NEC’s satellite Williams Hall, a prevailing kindness and appreciation permeated the room on opening night, with welcome comradery everywhere.