I took part in my second international tour this year with the Russian National Orchestra, after our South American tour in May. This was my second tour of China (after a tour a year ago with the Youth Orchestra of the Americas) and began with a most unusual concert on December 27 at the overpowering, massive, marbled Great Hall of the People, right in the heart of Tiananmen Square. Two orchestras performed together side-by-side, the Russian National Orchestra and the China National Symphony Orchestra, 190 musicians in total. In 2011 China officially announced that it would endeavour to become ‘a major cultural power’. This year the congress announced it would become a ‘maritime power’, so they decided to combine both ideas, and hence the invitation to the RNO and me to perform ‘The First Annual “Ocean China” official New Year’s Concert’.

The Great Hall of the People is an enormous marble building to which the main populace has little or no right of entry. It would be the equivalent of a Western congress building and seats 10,000 people. Security is similar to airports, but much more invasive and the omnipresent serious guards are rather scary. This concert, an official event sponsored by the Bureau of the Oceans, demonstrated very set ideas regarding the music: each work had to represent the ocean. Smetana’s Vltava was rejected because it’s about a river, not the ocean, and the same with the Blue Danube Waltz, a Chinese favourite at that time of year. The Bureau insisted on Debussy’s La Mer, Tchaikovsky’s The Tempest, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade and Wagner’s Overture to The Flying Dutchman.

I rehearsed with the RNO in Moscow, and we flew to Beijing on Christmas Eve. On Christmas Day, just hours after the long flight from Moscow, we held our only actual rehearsal with the two national orchestras together, and to our amazement, it all blended beautifully as if by magic. The Chinese conductor En Shao led the first part of the concert and I was assigned the second part. The huge public consisted of invited guests, probably government officials and their families. It was taped for future national TV broadcast if I approve the results. Both orchestras performed beautifully together, the only question remaining is the quality of sound in such a cavernous hall. I would love for it to be seen by the general public, if I find the sound quality to be of sufficient merit. The video is being sent to me for approval sometime in the future.

The following day, the indefatigable RNO and I began our marathon tour of eight more concerts in as many days, in six cities, inaugurating new halls along the way. In several cities I was asked to sign CDs, hundreds of them! Everything in China is done in a big way. In recent years new amazing concert halls and enormous state-of-the-art opera houses have appeared all over China. In both tours we inaugurated various halls that had been just built with state-of-the-art equipment and unusual architectural shapes. 

One of the most rewarding concerts for us was at the National Centre for the Performing Arts, that famous egg-like structure in Beijing, for a public that would not let us leave the stage, demanding encore after encore. Our repertoire for the tour included Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony and Marche Slave, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade and Russian Easter Festival Overture, Wagner’s Flying Dutchman Overture, and a large selection of encores, including Piazzolla’s Oblivion.

The relationship with the amazing RNO musicians grew even closer as we struggled together daily from city to city, often with only a few hours of sleep, delighted to be bringing music to such culture-hungry people, spreading the message that music, of all kinds, brings people together beyond cultural or political barriers, helping to create an atmosphere of understanding and paving the way for closer communication between peoples. The most important element for me was to touch the hearts of the public, to move them and give them an artistic experience that would inspire them to come back for more music, to touch their souls. It was fantastic to turn around to accept the public’s applause and to see all those smiling faces. Many of these people were first-time concert goers, so the challenge was especially important for me to inspire them and to leave them with a warm, glowing feeling.

From Beijing I flew to London, and went to Poole for a series of concerts with the wonderful Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. My next engagement with the BSO is in June 2013 to record Volume Four of our ongoing Dvořák cycle for Warner Classics, this time the massive Symphony No 2 coupled with several Slavonic Dances as we have done in the previous volumes. I think these early Dvořák symphonies have been neglected because they have been performed mostly in a practical way, and they need, like the early Glazunov symphonies, a bit of inspirational help and imagination. For Volume Three we recorded the Sixth, which has a place of sorts in the repertoire, and the almost unknown Third. This one is my favourites. The slow movement is heavenly. I could listen to it over and over.

Before my trip to Moscow and the China tour, I was home in New York conducting a concert of contemporary music at Carnegie Hall, which included the Ives Third Symphony and my own Flute Concerto with Tango in its US premiere. The flutist was the brilliant Sharon Bezaly, who had just recorded the work with the Australian Chamber Orchestra. In between, and on long interminable flights, I was writing a Suite on The Star Wagon, Dustin Hoffman's first film (before The Graduate). I wrote the music for that film a very long time ago, and the music has since been lost. The film is now on DVD so I listened to it and took the main themes to construct my ‘new’ Suite. It brings back wonderful memories of the days when I was working with Leopold Stokowski in New York. In some place I have the letter he wrote me after his saw the film, including his advice to use more bells and gongs next time.