Spirits: East Meets West (CD)

All Music Guide

Seemingly in tandem with China's growth as an economic player, a steady stream of releases of Chinese music, often displaying some kind of interaction with the West, has been appearing on the market. The Western influence, of course, is not new. Anyone who remembers the Chinese folk music beloved by the Maoists cannot fail to have been struck by the degree of Western harmony present in many of the arrangements. (Of course, that shouldn't have been a surprise, either, given the origins of Communism itself.) This release from Denmark's OUR label is both highly listenable and fascinating in terms of the cultural meeting points it represents. Chinese bamboo flutist Chen Yue and Danish guitarist Lars Hannibal take as a point of departure the fact that, however inscrutable they may appear to each other, Chinese traditional music and European concert music meet in the emphasis each places on melody, greater than in most of the world's other musical traditions. The mixture of Chinese and European on this album, which seems simple at first, turns out to be quite subtle. The program is a mixture of Chinese and Western tunes. Some of the Western ones, drawn from both classical and traditional repertories, are familiar (The Last Rose of Summer); some much less so. The pentatonic scales of the Chinese pieces are reduced to Western scale degrees, while the Western melodies seem to have been chosen for intervallic content and melody shapes that are intelligible in Chinese terms. The paradoxical result is that the Western tunes, if you sit and listen to this album for a while, start to sound Chinese, and the Chinese ones start to sound Western. The booklet is a minor masterpiece in itself (When mystic plain Oriental music is mixed with a romantic Western classical style, what do you feel? This is our sincere love for beautiful music). Highly recommended, whether you are interested in musical mixtures or just like the sound of the bamboo flute, beautifully played.

- James Manheim, All Music Guide