Chorus of approval

By Chen Jie (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-11-02 11:13

Musician David Stern enjoys a typical Beijing breakfast with Li Jue, wife of late conductor Li Delun, during his recent visit to China.

Mornings are a little cold at the end of October, but last Thursday soft sunlight and lifetime friends reuniting made an old apartment at downtown Hepingli in Beijing much warmer.

At the home of the late Chinese conductor Li Delun (1917-2001), his 86-year-old wife Li Jue and 31-year-old grandson Zhang Kemin were waiting for David Stern, son of the renowned American violinist Isaac Stern (1929-2001). They were to have breakfast together.

The Stern family visited China in 1979 and during that trip Isaac Stern collaborated with Li to give concerts in Beijing.

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Stern's music trip, which was recorded in the Oscar-winning documentary From Mao to Mozart, David Stern, music director of Israel Opera, was invited to conduct the closing concert for the 12th Beijing Music Festival on Friday.

As soon as the door opened, Stern gave Li a big hug, like mother and son, saying: "You look terrific, Mrs Li."

The white-haired Li said in simple English, "You're a big boy now but still look younger than your age."

The host then served up both a Western-style breakfast of toast and milk, as well as a typical Beijing breakfast of baozi (steamed dumplings), youtiao (fried flour sticks) and doufunao (jellied bean curd).

Stern asked the maid to take the toast and milk away and tried the baozi, using the chopsticks easily.

"I know David loves baozi. When he returned to Beijing for some concerts a few years ago I often gave him typical Beijing food from the streets," Zhang said.

The 30-year connection between the Lis and Sterns is not simply a friendship between two musical families, but a history that has impacted the development of classical music in China, as well as cultural communication between China and the United States.

In 1971, after former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger visited China to establish diplomatic relations between the two countries, Isaac Stern wrote a letter to Kissinger to express his wish to tour China. Though Kissinger did not respond him the violinist didn't give up and his opportunity came unexpectedly a few years later.

One day, at a party hosted by his neighbor, Stern was introduced to Huang Hua, the Chinese ambassador to the United Nations. Soon after that meeting, Huang returned to China and was appointed China's Minister of Foreign Affairs.

In March 1978, Huang sent an invitation to Stern and on June 18, 1979, Stern and his family flew to China.

David Stern remembers that on the plane to Beijing in 1979, his father said that he knew some Chinese musicians could speak Russian, but he would not talk with them in Russian. However, when he entered the rehearsal room, he immediately dropped his objection and talked about music with Li Delun, in Russian.

During his three-week stay, Isaac Stern collaborated with the China Central Symphony Orchestra (now China National Symphony Orchestra) under the baton of Li Delun to perform Mozart and Brahms violin concertos; visited conservatories in Beijing and Shanghai; coached many music students; and also visited Peking Opera schools and watched folk performances.

All this was filmed and made into a documentary by the American director Murray Lerner. It was called From Mao to Mozart and won the 1980 Academy Award for documentary feature. The movie made the world realize that China had opened up to the world and that Western classical music was experiencing a revival in China.

The then 16-year-old David Stern thought he had arrived on "another planet" as it was so different from the US.

"My first knowledge of China came from Pearl S Buck's novel The Good Earth. Also, my brother Michael and I studied some Chinese history in school. But these were pre-20th century, romanticized versions of China and very different from what we saw with our own eyes in the summer of 1979," he said.

"We got an incredible cultural shock when we arrived in Beijing. We had just come from Japan, but in Beijing we found everything turned upside-down. It was crazy, millions of people riding bicycles in the streets.

Under the baton of David Stern, a concert was staged on Friday to celebrate the 30th anniversary of lsaac Sterm's visit to China.

"But we were very impressed by people's interest in Western classical music. The orchestra members were focused and played with passion while the audience listened to the concerts carefully and gave an instant reaction to the performances.

"We met many wise, expressive and deep people during the visit. This was very different from what we were told or thought about the communist country."

In 1999, invited by the Second Beijing Music Festival, Isaac and David Stern returned to Beijing for a concert to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the 1979 trip. The 70-year-old Isaac played a Mozart concerto while the 82-year-old Li, who had a stroke, conducted from his wheelchair.

In September 2001, when David came to Beijing to give a concert with the China Philharmonic Orchestra, Li was very ill. David visited him in hospital and told him his father had just had a surgery but was recovering. Just a few months later, both maestros passed away.

For David, his recent visit to Beijing was, "a kind of friendly reunion to see old friends and to share our development in music in these years This is another opportunity to communicate with Chinese people through music".

"My father always told me that being a musician is not a profession, and not just a job. It is not something occasional. It's the totality of your life and your devotion and, something in which you believe profoundly, you have to believe and make other people believe."