7/12: Tan Dun’s Elegy: Snow in June

The music of composer-conductor Tan Dun (b. 1957) crosses all boundaries: classical, multi-media, Eastern, Western. His opera “The First Emperor” was presented at the Met in 2006 with Placido Domingo as the star; other recent works include “Internet Symphony #1″ for an online orchestra, transmitted by Google and YouTube, and concertos for two of his countrymen, pianist Lang Lang and violinist Cho-Liang Lin. Tan Dun is best known for his Oscar-winning original score for Ang Lee’s fim “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”

In 1991, the New Music Consort commissioned a work from Tan Dun that became “Elegy: Snow in June.” It evokes the mass killing of protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989. The title comes from a 13th-century Chinese drama about the life of a young woman, Dou Eh, who is executed for a crime of which she is innocent. In the drama, the natural world is shown as a protester against this injustice: Dou Eh’s blood flies upward instead of falling to the earth, a blizzard occurs in the month of June and is followed by a years-long drought. “Elegy: Snow in June” has been described as singing “of pity and purity, beauty and darkness…a lament for victims everywhere.”

Scored for four percussionists and a cellist, the work unfolds as a set of free variations. Opening with sparse phrases, it eventually presents a unified theme whose elements fall apart again. Each percussion group has solo passages, contrasted with the sound of the cello, a lyrical voice of lamentation.

Critic Allan Kozinn wrote in The New York Times that “the singing quality of the cello line shares the spotlight with percussion scoring that is light and tactile at first, but evolves into full-throttle rambunctiousness by the work’s end.” The cello mourns; the percussion cries out against tyranny.