Li Biao Percussion Band celebrates its staying power with a national tour, Chen Jie reports.
While it is easy to start a new project in China, it is usually difficult to sustain it, especially for a decade.
But percussionist Li Biao has set an example with his band. He and six fellow musicians from Germany and Denmark are celebrating Li Biao Percussion Band's 10th anniversary with a China tour, titled From Baroque to Tango, which began in Shanghai on Saturday.
According to Li, 46, percussion instruments aren't as popular in China as other classical instruments.
"People may associate them with jazz or pop. But they are a regular part of symphonic orchestra and also can be independent," he tells China Daily in Beijing during a rehearsal ahead of the tour.
Percussion instruments are referred to as "kitchen" in orchestra because of the resemblance with a cook's rack of spices.
The seven members of Li's band play dozens of instruments including standard drums, triangle, cymbals, gongs, xylophone and many unconventional instruments that aren't commonly known to people from outside the industry.
"The timpani (kettle drums), for example, provide not only rhythm but also harmonic voice," Li says.
Li started out as a xylophone player at age 5, when he lived in Nanjing, the capital of East China's Jiangsu province.
At 12, his talent and sense of rhythm convinced his teachers and parents to send him to the middle school of the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing.
In 1988, he became the first Chinese student of percussion instruments to study abroad on government scholarship. He spent seven years at Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow.
Upon graduation, Li applied for a music competition in Hungary, but by then he had already exhausted his funds. So, he sought an advance on his scholarship and left for that country.
"I felt like a gambler. If I lost the competition, I would have had only $20 for the next whole year," he says.
Li, of course, won the competition's silver award and $10,000 in cash. The competition also led him to win a three-year fellowship to Munich Conservatory.
Li immersed himself in Europe's rich musical history and culture, learning Western classical percussion instruments and modern music with jazz musicians and symphony orchestras.
In 2003, he joined as faculty of Hanns Eisler College or Academy of Music in Berlin, and two years later, returned to Beijing to establish a percussion instruments' department at Central Conservatory of Music and launched his band. Since then, the band has held some 100 concerts in China and abroad.
"Li is sensitive to music and rhythm, and plays incredibly precise beats," says band member Philip Jungk, who was Li's classmate at Munich Conservatory.
Wang Yue, a percussionist for the China Philharmonic Orchestra and also a former classmate in Beijing, says that Li has done well to promote percussion music in China. Wang plays in Li's band, too.
Other than national and foreign tours, Li's band hosts summer camps for children in Beijing.
"He played various instruments ... to create a wide range of dynamic sounds from harsh to very tender and soft," says renowned conductor Christoph Eschenbach of an earlier concert he had conducted in Beijing, where Li had been featured as a soloist.
In 2010, Li took up the baton of conductor for a Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra show in Nanjing, after the original conductor couldn't make it.
"Music develops in experiments. I had one try, felt good, then I tried a few more times," Li says.
"I can be a percussionist as well as a conductor."
"When I play percussion instruments in an orchestra, I don't need to read the whole score of a symphony. But it is fascinating to read the whole score as you can find more layers of the music," he says, adding that a conductor's job is to bring out different timbres in instruments for an overall balance in the piece being played.
"Different conductor have different interpretations of the same piece."
In the past three years, Li has conducted about 30 orchestras in China, Europe and the United States.
Li likes it all - to play, conduct and teach percussion instruments.
