Life and Leisure

Dear John

By Chen Jie (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-10-15 08:19

What can a philharmonic orchestra have in common with pop's abiding legend? Plenty, finds Chen Jie.

While Chopin and Schumann are the toast of the classical music world this year, the Beijing Music Festival (BMF) is also including a concert to celebrate the 70th birthday of legendary Beatle John Lennon (1940-1980).

On Oct 19, The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra will give a concert at the Forbidden City Concert Hall, that will have British actor, Mark McGann, impersonating a drawling Lennon, narrating the punchy and witty life-story script written by veteran British theatrical visionary Bob Eaton, and acclaimed jazz influenced vocalists Curtis Stingers and Claire Martin.

The vocalists will sing Lennon's classics including Imagine, Woman, A Day in the Life, Free As a Bird, Norwegian Wood, Jealous Guy and others accompanied by the orchestra conducted by John Wilson.

Tu Song, the festival's program director tells China Daily that when the agent of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra contacted him about the possibility of performing at BMF, he found that while not a big-name classical orchestra, it had made a name for itself for forays into the world of pop in Liverpool.

Its musical tribute to Lennon in 2008 was the talk of the local music scene.

"It's normal to celebrate Chopin and Schumann this year. But BMF has a theme this year, From Baroque to Contemporary. Instead of pure classical music, we are highlighting modern works. Music has no boundaries and John Lennon is no doubt one of the greatest figures in the music world," Tu says, adding that this is a good time to celebrate Lennon's music and legacy given it's the 70th birth anniversary of his birth, the 50th anniversary of the founding The Beatles and the 30th anniversary of the singer's tragic murder.

"Purists on both sides of the music fence may thumb their nose at such a concert. Those with a rock slant may disagree with Lennon being feted in such a way while others may snort with disdain at a full symphony orchestra accompanying pop singers. But those who leave their prejudices at home, will be treated to a 90 minute show of pure perfection," Tu says.

A fan of Lennon, he believes the concert will offer one of the finest and most imaginative reworkings of such a revered song catalog.

Zhang Xiaozhou, a rock and pop music critic and editor-in-chief of the magazine Esquire, will give a pre-concert talk in the afternoon of Oct 19. This big fan of Lennon tells China Daily that he cannot wait for the concert.

"It would be hard to find any Westerner born in the 1960s and 1970s for whom The Beatles were not the defining cultural influence of their teenage years. And it would be hard to find any Chinese musician of that generation who has not learned from John Lennon," Zhang says.

He says Esquire once published an interview with Cui Jian, China's finest rock musician, and the main picture showed Cui playing the guitar with his back to the camera and facing a wall on which hung a poster of Lennon.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, when few Western albums were officially available in the country, many Chinese rockers sought out pirated discs from all kinds of sources to listen to and learn from Lennon. Some singers such as Gao Qi even imitated Lennon's performances for pub audiences.

Zhang also shared the story of his 2002 trip to Liverpool where he was impressed by the admiration of both the locals and tourists for The Beatles. At almost every place, such as The Cavern Club, where Lennon once performed, his fans would gather to commemorate him.

"Lennon is the one Beatle who stood out. He may not have had the consummate musicianship of McCartney, but the sharpness of his intelligence, humor, music style, the sheer force of his personality and his social influence make him unlike any other pop star," Zhang says.

"Thanks to BMF for bringing such a concert to let us Chinese fans enjoy his (Lennon's) music and commemorate him," he adds.

But he should first thank Eaton, the man who has created the show.

When Eaton was 15, the guitar-playing Liverpool-born boy used to have a recurring dream that the Beatle asked him to stand in for him. When he became director of the Liverpool Everyman Theater in the spring of 1981, the whole world, and in particular Liverpool, was still in shock from Lennon's murder just a few months earlier.

So, for the Lennon fan whose plan for the theater was to create a new work with a local resonance and an emphasis on popular music, it was only fitting to try and create a celebration of the Lennon's life and work.

Using Lennon's words and music and the words of those who knew him, Eaton put together a show simply called Lennon.

"We tried to be as honest as we could in telling the story of this complex character, a job made both easier and harder by John's own openness in talking and singing about his life," Eaton says.

He met McGann, then a young Liverpool actor whose portrayal of the young Lennon, he says, was simply astonishing. The show played for some time and then moved to the West End, at Sheffield's Crucible Theater, where the vice-chair of the board was Mick Elliott. Elliott became very fond of the show and many years later in 2008, after he had been appointed chief executive of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, he happened to meet Eaton on a Liverpool street, and asked him if he would be interested in contributing in some way to an orchestral evening of Lennon's work.

Eaton said yes, of course. He met with the conductor Wilson, who had some clear ideas about which songs would work best with the orchestra and suggested a list of songs for which Eaton could create some kind of biographical context.

So once again Lennon entered Eaton's life as he has done so many times before. But this time, he shares the musical legend with China.