Fan Linfeng, Shanghai Changqiao String & Pipa Ensemble Everlasting Chinese Classical Folk Music

reviewed by: Frank Kouwenhoven

Fan Linfeng, Shanghai Changqiao String & Pipa Ensemble. Everlasting Chinese Classical Folk Music. Central Conservatory of Music, Beijing Global Audio-Visual Publishing Co, 1 cd, 2024, TT 53’33”

How wonderful it was, the relaxed atmosphere of Shanghai teahouses in the early 1980s. Men, dressed in green or blue Mao suits, would chat away, smoke pipes, drink tea, and pay no more than casual attention to the group of musicians seated around a table in the corner, playing that easy-going, radiant ensemble music known as ‘silk and bamboo’: pleasing, melifluous, joyful, an unmistakeable blend of nasal bamboo flute flourishes, plucked string sounds, hammered dulcimer, sonorous mouth organ chords and small percussion. In those days musicians didn’t care whether you, as a visitor of the teahouse, listened or not, and the constant buzz of teahouse conversations formed a natural backdrop to the pieces, almost as if it were a part of the music.

This ambiance can no longer be found in Shanghai, not quite in this way at least. Silk and bamboo still exists, but it has become serious business. Teahouses now tend to line up their chairs like in a concert hall, telling visitors to keep their mouths shut, pay proper attention to the music, and applaud at the end.

This cd album, although recorded in a sound studio, and lacking any sort of background buzz, still captures the traditional ambiance of sizhu quite well. It is played here by senior performers from Shanghai, mostly male, who have been playing sizhu all their lives, and stil take audible joy in it. They founded a group called the Shanghai Changqiao Jiangnan Sizhu Ensemble. However, the dizi (bamboo flute) part on this disc is played by Fan Linfeng, a young professional musician trained at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music.

Fan Linfeng is a remarkable lady. I first met her when she was a visiting student at the Geneva Conservatory, and joined classes on western Baroque music, learning all about authentic performance but playing it on Chinese bamboo flute - to great acclaim. Her teacher in Shanghai, dizi virtuosoTang Junqiao, first put her on the trail of silk and bamboo. Fan Linfeng went further than customary at that time: she took additional lessons with Lu Chunling and Cheng Haihua, and even undertook extensive fieldwork, for example on Chongming Island where she learned from local rural sizhu players. She is now a flute teacher at the Central Conservatory, where she began her own sizhu ensemble. Fan Linfeng is strongly motivated to capture the authentic playing style of the elderly musicians, and that includes Chinese tuning, the incentive to improvize, and the joy that sprouts from a genuine affinity with the genre. She succeeds quite brilliantly here, in a programme that blends five key pieces from the sizhu repertoire with a few lesser known ones. A highly recommendable disc !