When three professional orchestras from China’s Northeast, the Liaoning, Jilin, and Harbin symphonies, converged on Shenyang to perform Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 under a single conductor, the event was unusual enough to prompt comparisons to the World Cup.
The conductor at the centre of it was Yongyan Hu, a graduate of both Yale and Juilliard who founded the Orchestra Academy at the Central Conservatory of Music and has spent decades building orchestral culture across China.
I spoke with him in Shanghai immediately after the performance on July 24th, tracing a conversation that ranged from the logistics of multi-orchestra collaboration to the nature of Mahler’s genius, his friendships with Gilbert Kaplan, and the arc of his own lifelong relationship with one of the most demanding bodies of music ever written.
Maestro, you have just conducted the Mahler Symphony No. 6 in Shenyang with three Northeast orchestras. Could you walk yus through how this collaboration came about?
The joint project between the three orchestras has a history going back before the Covid. I had already collaborated with them on Mahler’s Second, then the Third, and Richard Strauss’s An Alpine Symphony. This must be our third or fourth time.
The core is always the Liaoning Symphony here in Shenyang, with the Jilin Symphony and the Harbin Symphony joining them. The numbers vary each time, but we always gather at the Liaoning’s own rehearsal hall and concert venue.
What makes these collaborations work is first of all the relationships between the three ensembles, from the leadership down to individual players. Many of them grew up together, went to school together.
When you finally bring this many outstanding musicians into one room and the collective energy erupts, it is genuinely thrilling. It reminds me of the World Cup: every player comes from their own excellent club, but when they join the national team they serve a larger interest. The head coach says “we’ll do it this way”, you might have been a striker, but now you play defence. The analogy fits rather well.
As conductor, you are the head coach. How do you work through rehearsals with three combined orchestras to draw out the sound you are looking for?
Every conductor wants to hear their own sound, that is a fundamental element of the conducting art. But we all know that realising every idea is impossible. With so many people gathered in one city, sharing a hotel, eating together, the costs are real and the time constraints are considerable. So the task is to find the most efficient approach, and the first principle is that we must never compromise the dignity of the music itself.
Understanding Mahler’s score, what it actually says, what he actually intended, is paramount. The closer you come to Mahler’s original intent, the better the decisions you make. And those decisions, however complex the music they address, must be as simple as possible. The conductor’s work is to reduce complexity to clarity.
Where do you find the greatest difficulty in Mahler specifically?
The primary requirement, I believe, is an exceptionally strong grounding in music theory, like a surgeon’s scalpel or an X-ray, something that lets you see through to the structure at once. Everything in Mahler is assembled from smaller structural units, and in the process of combining them something new and entirely unexpected emerges. It is like a chemistry experiment: knowing each element is not sufficient, because when A and B, or A, B, and C, combine, they produce a reaction that none of the elements produced alone.
Take the simplest example: Mahler uses a quadruple woodwind orchestra, four flutes, four oboes, eight horns, six trumpets, two sets of timpani. A simple melody is sometimes given to one flute, sometimes to all four simultaneously. What is the difference? Why did Mahler make this choice? The conductor must know this intimately.
The second difficulty is what I call the temptation. Mahler in fragments is so extraordinarily vivid, the emotional tension in a single passage can be overwhelming. A conductor resonates with one section and over-colours it, over-extends it. The result actually damages the integrity of the whole. It is the most common problem in performing Mahler.
China’s orchestras once rarely touched Mahler, and now he is performed everywhere. What does that shift signify?
I think of it as a breakthrough from zero to one, and that matters enormously. When I was a student at the Central Conservatory, Chinese orchestras had essentially never performed Mahler.
Around my third or fourth college year, the Central Philharmonic, now the China National Symphony, gave Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, conducted by Han Zhongjie. We all went. Honestly, none of us really understood it yet. But the orchestra had done it. That was a breakthrough from zero, not easily achieved.
In the early 1990s, I was invited by the Central Philharmonic to visit Taiwan, the first musical exchange of its kind across the Strait. I remember when our musicians first walked onto the stage in Taipei. The entire hall erupted in thunderous applause because there were many family members in that audience who had been separated across the Strait for decades, reuniting in a concert hall through Mahler’s music. Many people were in tears. That was the Mahler Fifth, almost certainly its first performance on the mainland.
Later I conducted it again with the Shanghai Symphony, and it has since become one of the works I have returned to most often throughout my career. I remember my audition programme for the music director post at Duluth was also the Mahler Fifth. And the tenth anniversary concert of the Orchestra Academy I founded at the Central Conservatory in 2016, the Mahler Fifth again. There is something almost sacred about that work for me.
You borrowed the score of Mahler’s First from the Conservatory library as a student and could only read two pages. How did you get from there to conducting Mahler regularly?
Life experience, and relentless study. But I would add: it is most directly connected to the relentless study one puts in when young. We talk about the foundation built in childhood. We usually mean playing the piano or the violin, but the capacity to read a score like Mahler’s is very closely related to how one learned to read scores as a young conductor.
I should say: Mahler’s music is actually closer to us than it might seem. The Sixth Symphony was written around 1906 to 1908, well within living memory of living memory.
I first conducted Mahler before I was thirty, with a youth orchestra in Connecticut called the Norwalk Youth Orchestra, which was between Yale and New York, about fifty minutes by train. I was rehearsing there every Saturday during my years at Yale and Juilliard. A cohort of students about to graduate asked whether they could perform Mahler’s First. I had never conducted it. I thought they were overestimating themselves a little. But I said: of course. It was the first time I truly experienced what conducting Mahler meant.
At that same time I was working as an usher at Lincoln Center. Zubin Mehta was music director of the New York Philharmoni, a great Mahlerian conductor. Bernstein came back frequently and recorded those legendary recordings, the Mahler Third was recorded live there, five concerts in a week, at least five takes. Every conductor’s path to Mahler is different.
Tell us about Gilbert Kaplan and his influence on you.
Gilbert Kaplan was a dear friend who has since passed away. His influence on me was profound.
When I was at the Shanghai Philharmonic I invited him to conduct the Mahler Second. He came, and in a wonderfully amusing turn invited me to dinner at the Jinjiang Hotel. He had brought an entire entourage of American press, the Wall Street Journal, Money Magazine. I said: you’ve come all this way and the whole American media followed you. He smiled and said: all of that is mine.
He later sold everything and founded the Mahler Foundation. He acquired the autograph manuscript of Mahler’s Second Symphony at auction. His final recording was a chamber arrangement of the Second, his own arrangement, with the Vienna Chamber Orchestra. He went separately to Berlin to record the organ passage in the Resurrection finale because he was told the organ at the Berlin Philharmonie was superior.
For Mahler he would stop at nothing. One of his later projects was a book cataloguing every work Mahler ever conducted as a conductor throughout his career. You can see Mahler’s obsessive devotion, Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3 was a particular love of his, performed nearly every season at the New York Philharmonic. And when he programmed his own symphonies, knowing they were long and not yet popular in America, he would often place his First Symphony in the first half, follow it with Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5, and close with a Wagner overture: the dessert at the end. If his own symphony had closed the programme, many people might simply have left.
There is one detail I find particularly moving: in 1911, the year of his death, the season was drawing to a close and he fell ill. He went to Europe for treatment; everyone assumed he would be back very soon. The concerts were taken over by the associate conductor, but the orchestra never bothered to change his name on the programmes, they thought he would be back any day. Those programmes still bear his name. And he never came back.
I remember the very first day I arrived at Juilliard, on the corner of 66th Street there was Tower Records. Hanging in the window was a large photograph advertising Kaplan’s Mahler Second recording. I recognised Seiji Ozawa, but I had never seen this unfamiliar face. Gradually I came to understand: this man was a devoted amateur , as we say in Chinese. Yet his contribution to the Mahler cause was indelible.
What is the source of Mahler’s extraordinary power, for conductors, for music lovers?
Beethoven was the master of them all, Mahler, Wagner, Bruckner all descend from that lineage. In Mahler we see a great and gifted musician showing us how to inherit an entire tradition while revealing a world completely unlike Beethoven’s own. The polyphonic elements in the Sixth Symphony are extraordinarily powerful, especially in the fourth movement, where you can dimly make out Bach’s name encoded: B, A, C and the H emerges elsewhere in the texture. It is said that Mahler studied Bach’s polyphony every single day; he regarded it as the wellspring of everything.
What Mahler inherited from Beethoven above all, I think, is the spirit of thought within the music, and he took it to its absolute extreme. He is philosophy expressed in sound. Mahler is also close to us in a way Beethoven cannot be. Beethoven’s world had no industrial revolution, no motor car. Mahler arrived in New York, it was already the dazzling, overwhelming world we can recognise. He himself said his compositions were a world, which is entirely unlike Sibelius, who wrote a symphony in thirty minutes: one Sibelius symphony equals one movement of a Mahler symphony.
You hold the Bruno Walter Scholarship at Juilliard. What does that connection mean to you?
When I was first awarded the scholarship, it was actually named for Alma Mahler, Mahler’s wife. The school used to suggest that each semester we write a thank-you letter.
Bruno Walter, of course, was Mahler’s most devoted student and his greatest interpreter. To receive a scholarship bearing that lineage, and then to spend a lifetime in Mahler’s music, the connection feels like more than coincidence.
At my stage now, thirty or forty years on from those first encounters with the score, the way I see Mahler is completely different. I very much want to conduct more of his symphonies, to go further, to approach what the music is capable of touching in the soul.
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