Jiang Rong’s novel Wolf Totem – about a young man’s cultural re-education in the steppes of Mongolia – became a publishing sensation in China in 2004: a screen adaptation by Jean-Jacques Annaud has just premiered at the Berlin film festival. It is also the inspiration for a remarkable new concerto by Tan Dun, in which the double bass plays the role of the lone wolf.
Co-commissioned by five international orchestras for the principal bassist of each, it befell the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic’s Marcel Becker to give the British premiere. The esoteric, ritualistic sonorities of the piece – which included the percussion section bowing temple bowls – captured the epic, widescreen quality of the nomadic grasslands. Becker, playing with exemplary intonation and keening timbre, succeeded at times in making the double bass sound like a completely different instrument, the morin khuur, or Mongolian two-stringed horse fiddle. Though some of the gaping octave leaps could have been more easily accomplished on a cello, the punishing physicality is clearly part of the work’s discipline and succeeded in heightening the sense of primitive exposure.
The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic already possess a world-class interpreter of Shostakovich in Vasily Petrenko, so it seems almost impolite to have purloined another one. But though Darrell Ang was born in Singapore, he trained in St Petersburg and his witty, visceral, ultimately profound rendition of Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony rounded off a remarkable Liverpool debut. The symphony’s almost indecently brief response to the defeat of Nazism seemed to be thumbing its nose at Stalin rather than honouring him; yet the space Ang accorded to the desolate bassoon meditation at the heart of the work – sublimely played by Vahan Khourdoian – seemed to suggest that victory, in the Russian peoples’ experience, was merely a different kind of defeat.
• This article was amended on 16 February 2015 to correct the name of the principal bassoonist.
