Violin binds Chinese masters, students across the globe

STORY BY TARA MALONE | Daily Herald Staff Writer
PHOTOS BY PATRICK KUNZER | Daily Herald Photographer

Violin professor Lin Yaoji, 68, has shaped a generation of Chinese violinists in his Beijing classroom, teaching them to play with discipline and inner calm.

Erik Malmquist raises his violin, glancing at the sheet music as he tucks the instrument beneath his chin.

He pauses for a moment, then one more.

The 18-year-old Roosevelt University freshman lifts his bow and begins to play.

A Tchaikovsky concerto drifts through the rehearsal room, drowning car horns along Chicago's Congress Parkway nine stories below.

Malmquist stands straighter as his music climbs to a crescendo, his thick fingers dancing across violin strings and his legs planted wide in a stance reminiscent of his days on Hampshire High's football squad.

Across the room, Yang Liu listens to the concerto, pinning his gaze to the student's bow. An open notebook and water bottle go untouched.

Only when Malmquist lowers his bow does Liu rise.

One of China's premier violinists who performed in concert halls from Moscow to Madison, Wis., the 30-year-old Liu faces his newest challenge: teaching Tchaikovsky.

Liu demonstrates the quick bow strokes and handiwork demanded by the concerto in D Major.

"Here, it should be strong, bold, like Chairman Mao," Liu says, punching his right fist in the air to underscore the point. "Here, it should be soft, gentle," he whispers, moving his arms as if playing a piano.

"Erik, try to make all the sound connect," Liu says. "In a way, every concerto, every piece of music is one life, one picture. You can't have too many breaks."

For an hour every Tuesday in Room 957 of Roosevelt's Auditorium Building, Liu coaches Malmquist to master concertos, sonatas and caprices.

His method of teaching — interpretive, bold, full-bodied and unlike anything Malmquist has seen before — is rooted in a Beijing rehearsal room thousands of miles away. Now it blossoms here in the minds of musicians like Malmquist.

‘Like pearls on jade'

Beijing, 2005 — His slippered feet skim the floor.

Violinist Yang Liu, 30, above, performs in concert halls around the world, an opportunity he owes to teacher Lin Yaoji back in Beijing. Liu, left, coaches Erik Malmquist of Hampshire through a Tchaikovsky concerto in a rehearsal room at Roosevelt University in Chicago.

Sinking into the living room couch with his arms crossed over an orange Tommy Hilfiger sweater, Lin Yaoji smiles as the opening strands of a familiar concerto fill apartment 701.

It is Nicolo Paganini. The Italian composer is one of Lin's favorites.

Wrestling through the operatic score written more than 150 years ago is Wang Liang, a 20-year-old student at China's Central Conservatory of Music.

The shifting melody draws the 68-year-old Lin to his feet.

"Hurry up here," Lin says as he grips Wang's shoulder. The fingers on his right hand twitch as if he is holding a violin.

"Just like singing opera, you should control the rhythm. Ch-ch-ch-ch-cha," he chants, giving voice to Paganini's composition.

"Dra, dra, dra, drah," Lin continues, humming with Wang's bow strokes.

"Make sounds just like people laughing, ha, ha, ha, ha," Lin shouts, doubling over with the effort. "It's like pearls falling down on a jade plate. You can imagine the sound like that."

A generation of Chinese violinists have sweated through Paganini, Bach and Beethoven under Lin's watchful gaze. Yang Liu — who now trains young violinists in the Chicago area — was among them.

Lin drilled Liu and some of China's most accomplished violinists to play with the discipline of a kung fu master and the serenity of a Buddhist monk. The combination is rooted in China's Taoist tradition, which teaches harmony between man and nature.

This cornerstone of Lin's music philosophy emerged during China's decadelong Cultural Revolution, when music ground to a stop.

What history books call the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of 1966 came as a response to dissent within the communist party. Its purpose? To eradicate any hint of Western elitism.

To play the violin — an instrument performed in royal European courts by Mozart, Bach and Beethoven — was to risk imprisonment.

The Central Conservatory of Music closed its doors. Lin put down his violin for 10 years.

A portrait of professor Lin Yaoji hangs in Beijing's Central Conservatory of Music, where many of China's premier musicians study.

This, after Lin spent two years studying with one of the Soviet Union's renowned violinists. Lin had earned the honor with his success during the Second Moscow Violin Competition in 1960. High blood pressure kept Lin from pursuing a career as a concert violinist. Teaching proved a better fit.

"It was a hard time for me because I learned so much when I studied in Russia," Lin recalls, the edge of any resentment curbed by time. "I wanted to teach students this knowledge, but because of political reasons, the music stopped."

Cloistered in his Beijing apartment on the conservatory grounds, Lin studied away a decade. He researched bow positions, breathing drills and pacing. Students, Lin thought, should learn music by studying nature, holding an inner peace amid a torrent of emotion unleashed in a Paganini caprice or a Tchaikovsky concerto.

In 1976, Lin tested his theory.

By then, the Cultural Revolution had subsided. China's isolation ended, President Nixon walked on the Great Wall, trade resumed with the West and in September 1976, Chairman Mao Zedong died.

A cacophony of classical erhu, violin, piano and opera again spilled from closed studio doors into long, dimly lit conservatory corridors.

Lin dusted off his violin and resumed his role as teacher, testing his newly minted philosophy on 13-year-old Hu Kun. Four years later, the teen became the first Chinese violinist to win honors at an international competition in Finland.

Lin Yaoji listens from the living room couch of his Beijing apartment as his student, Wang Liang, plays a passage by Nicolo Paganini. Now 68, Lin has taught some of China's most accomplished violinists during the past three decades.

More international prizes accrued as Lin recruited more students, including Yang Liu. When Liu received three nights of standing ovations during his 2002 American debut in Atlanta, the honor was not his alone.

Liu's accolades — as well as those of other violinists who honed their talents under Lin's guidance — boosted the teacher's standing among the musical pedagogues of his time.

"First you can see much talent," Lin says of his proteges, "but after training, you can find more and more talent like in a mine when you dig deeper, you go deeper."

Yearning to play

Qingdao, 1980 — Liu's journey to center stage began in the seaside city of Qingdao on China's eastern coast.

There, through muffled windows and padded doors — a testament to the fear and political unease that gripped China during the Cultural Revolution — a young Liu heard a neighbor playing violin. He was hooked.

Just 4 years old, Liu begged his mother for a violin.

Her reply was a decisive no.

The violent backlash against anyone or anything with Western trappings that occurred during the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976. Still, fear lingered. Liu's mother worried a violin would make him a target for communist officials looking to make an example of someone.

Liu's family had been targeted before.

His university-educated father with degrees in English and Chinese literature was relegated to the countryside for what communist officials called "re-education."

His grandfather was dead, killed by his own hand in 1970 as the Cultural Revolution dragged on.

"My father had seen people who owned a book by Mark Twain get into jail and eventually disappear," Liu says.

In 1981, the architects of the Cultural Revolution were arrested and brought to trial. China's economic opening inched forward, the country began to relax and Liu's mother changed her mind.

Chinese violinist Yang Liu divides his time between performing and teaching students at Roosevelt University ’s music conservatory.

A year later, 6-year-old Liu picked up a violin. With guidance from his mother, Guo Chunxia, he learned to hold the instrument, position the bow and play scales.

Liu played well enough for his mother to move with him to Beijing, home to the Conservatory of Music, China's version of "Fame."

After only a year of study and countless tutoring lessons, Liu auditioned to get into the school. Seven out of 64 violinists made the cut. Liu, then just 9 years old, topped the list.

The little boy who pleaded to play violin was on his way. The conservatory would lead him to Lin who, in turn, would groom him for performances in concert halls around the world.

"Very soon," Liu remembers, "I became a little star in school."

Teaching Liu

Beijing, 1989 — At 13, though, Liu was a has-been.

The young virtuoso, who at 10 had played with Tokyo's NKH Symphony Orchestra, lost the skill that distinguished him from others at the conservatory.

"He's very smart and has good talent," a violin professor told Liu's mother. "But sometimes talent is not enough, sometimes talent fades. He's that case."

The professor dropped Liu as a student, effectively ending his career as a concert violinist. Liu had plateaued as a musician. In the competitive halls of China's premier music conservatory, charged with grooming a new generation of musicians, that was tantamount to a death sentence.

"I cried all night long," Liu recalls. "I was hurt because I was told I could not play the violin anymore, and my parents were hurt because they were hoping I would make this a career. They think this is where my talent is, this should be my life."

Defeated, Liu prepared to return home to Qingdao. Until Lin knocked on his door.

Lin would take young Liu as his own student. He had heard Liu play before and recognized his talent. But Lin's offer came with a condition: Liu must start at the beginning.

If he resented the remediation, Liu never complained.

"We felt our lives were saved," Liu recalls.

For eight hours a day, Liu practiced drills he first learned as a 6-year-old. He learned how to hold a bow. He learned to play the violin anew, Lin's way, with a mindfulness and inner calm rooted in the Taoist tradition.

It paid off.

When he was 17, Liu took first place in China's National Violin Competition, a victory that led him to concert halls around the world.

At 25, Liu made his American debut in Atlanta Symphony Hall. Like an old friend, Paganini led Liu through the familiar tricks and turns of the same concerto he'd practiced in the Beijing classroom years earlier with Lin guiding him through the coquettish passage.

"I had standing ovations each night, people screaming bravo," Liu recalls, his tone subdued. "It was very nice."

Liu came to his own classroom at Chicago's Roosevelt University last year. He divides his time between teaching and performing around the country, a privilege Liu attributes to his old professor.

"If I didn't meet him in my life, I would never get where I am," says Liu, who is expected to play New York's Carnegie Hall next year. "I would probably be a mediocre violinist playing in a mediocre orchestra in China. I am quite certain of that."

Taming Tchaikovsky

Chicago, 2006 — Erik Malmquist could not escape the violin.

As the son of an Elgin Symphony Orchestra musician and the brother of an aspiring one, Malmquist's life was set to music long before he came to the conservatory classroom in Chicago.

Only after a run of sports, studying and schoolyard adventures did Malmquist devote himself to the instrument he first heard as a child.

Half a world away, another boy born to a family of musicians resisted the pull of the violin.

Wang Liang's father, a Chinese teacher, offered the only reprieve in a family filled with concert violinists — his mother, grandfather, uncles and cousins all played. He would too, Wang's concert-master mother told him.

Wang relented, eventually.

"When I was very little no child wants to study every day with violin," Wang says in faltering English. "Now I feel music in my heart. Music is my only love."

Neither Wang nor Malmquist ever begged to play, like Liu.

Neither Wang nor Malmquist ever feared studying violin could cost him his freedom, like Lin.

But a passion for the violin binds them to the two men who will mold them each as musicians, as people.

"Just to think the way I'm being taught is not just this random way, but it has so much to do with his teacher and his teacher's teacher," Malmquist says of Liu. "All their life experience is getting poured into their devotion to the music."

Such devotion brings responsibility, a duty Liu takes seriously.

Just as the man he still calls Professor Lin changed his life as a musician, as a person, Liu hopes to shape a new generation of musicians in the Chicago area.

And in his classroom a world away, Lin does the same.

"If you want to play well, he is willing to do everything to make you go wherever you want to," Liu says. "That's what I like to give to people in the audience, in the class, that positive energy."

Continue:
• A childhood interrupted
• Keeping the faith can be a test of it
• Strung together