Follow the musicians of the Chicago Symphony as we embark on our eighth tour to Asia. We'll be posting stories and photos, so stop by often. 

We leave on January 11, 2016 for Taipei and continue on to Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing and Seoul.

On the plane, the trip home…another international tour, another tour of Asia, the third since 2009, the seventh of my career in the Orchestra.  Every one of these types of tours, including the ones to Europe or South America and Australia, are always exhausting.  The musical side of tours, the many performances in front of audiences that are hungry for the Orchestra, hanging on every note, exploding with applause and gratitude, is deeply moving, and, well, a lot of fun.  For almost fifty years, and certainly in my 37 years with the orchestra, we have enjoyed success in almost every place we play.  With our Music Director, Riccardo Muti, the CSO is enjoying the greatest success touring that we have had in many years.  He has the ability to prepare and inspire the orchestra, and maintain the quality of what we do, every time we go out on stage. That makes a huge difference on a tour, but it means the Orchestra must meet that level of preparation and commitment, too.  I think the results speak for themselves.  Touring is a big part of my career and something for which I will be forever grateful.
 
But in tandem with the music, is the personal side of tours.  While each tour is different, they are the same in one regard: each one takes you completely out of your life; your routines, your family.  I think it is fair to say that each tour exacts a cost from all of us.  Sure, on tour there are illnesses, injuries, and personal dramas.  But for all of us, when we are so removed from our regular lives, sometimes for three, or up to six or seven weeks a year, the costs are deeper.  While one is gone, life at home continues.  There was one stretch where for seven years in a row, we were on tour during my son’s birthdays. We have all had to miss weddings, graduations, and other events. For my wife and me, this tour has been especially bitter sweet.  Two days before we left we had to give our dog, Prince, what turned out be his final chemo treatment for lymphoma.  He did well for almost three weeks, but now is very sick.  We’ll see how he is doing in a few hours.
 
So in spite of the problems, many in the Orchestra try to fit in as much activity on tour as possible: sightseeing, exploring food and culture, and seeing old friends and family.  For me, after over forty tours, frequently returning to the same places, it is more difficult to summon the energy for a schedule of tourism: a nap or a turn in the gym seems like a better alternative. Our travelblog has attempted to give you a taste of how our members enjoy, tolerate, and endure, a tour.  If you have seen a lot of pictures of us at airports, dinner tables, and concert halls, well, that is ninety percent of touring.  No matter what one does during the day before a concert or rehearsal (and I have done things like hiked up a mountain, getting lost along the way!), you have to be ready when the Maestro walks out and the concert begins.  People always say, “oh, touring must be so much fun, going to all those places!”  Well, yes, there is some fun, but you can never forget the rehearsal today or tomorrow, or the concert that night.   
 
The Musicians have many people to thank for making this tour a success.  It takes detailed planning from our talented and experienced staff, and our tour operator, Travtours, who make the hotel and travel arrangements.  Our superb CSO stagehands handle all of the equipment that makes these concerts, continents away from Chicago, a success.  Thanks also to Todd Rosenberg, whose photos you have seen on this blog, as well as the CSO.org site.  We would also like to give a tremendous thanks to all of our Members who contributed their stories, photos, and energy for our travelblog. 
 
Ultimately, it is the Music Director who is responsible for the success of a tour.  Maestro Muti takes this responsibility very seriously.  The response of the audience, critics, and presenters attest to the success of his preparation of the orchestra, and to the beauty of the music we make together.  So our heartfelt thanks go to you, Maestro, Bravissimo! 

By Andrew Huckman. Published January 7, 2016

Li-Kuo Chang, assistant principal viola of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, embraces Shanghai, his home for his first three decades, like a virtuoso concerto. He indulges the gilded elegance of its old boulevards and battles the harrowing shifts of revolution, then rushes with the dynamism of its soaring skyline — a soloist in harmony with a frenetic ensemble of a city that sometimes drifts precariously off-tempo, then pushes forward twice as fast. That’s Chang and Shanghai.

The CSO’s Asia tour, its first with Music Director Riccardo Muti, returns Chang and the orchestra to Shanghai for the third time in eight seasons. Ahead of the orchestra’s departure, Chang reflected on his youth and musical development in a city refashioned with the revolutionary promise of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, then cast backward by the harrowing Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976.

In 1979, at age 30, Chang came to the United States, the year that diplomatic relations were resumed with China. “I was one of the very first — maybe the very first mainland China musician — to start considering an orchestral experience in the United States.”

He joined the CSO in 1988. “The whole orchestra opened its arms to welcome me,” Chang remembers, and so many seasons later, it’s his special privilege whenever he welcomes the CSO back to Shanghai — a city that’s still crafting resonant cadenzas for the evolving violist and a remarkable orchestra. That’s Chang and Chicago.

China’s Cultural Revolution and the Shanghai Conservatory of Music

It has been 50 years since the turbulent spring of 1966, when Chang and Shanghai were pitched into a decade of tragedy — China’s Cultural Revolution. Chang’s memory of its start is sad and succinct: “In my young heart I thought, ‘Everything’s finished.’”

Mao Zedong, chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, was sensing uncomfortable rumblings — growing factionalism and a leaning toward Western perspectives. Concerned the 17-year-old regime and perhaps his primacy were at stake, China’s leader doubled down on his own Maoist ideology. He shut schools and universities, attacked “bourgeois” Western ideas and fostered a feared student cadre, known as Red Guards, to ferret out dangerous thought. The Cultural Revolution hit hard in Shanghai, China’s rich Western gateway, and the Shanghai Conservatory of Music drew especially intense fire.

Memories of that spring still haunt Chang, then a 17-year-old violin student at the conservatory’s high school; his mother was a pianist on the conservatory faculty. Chang recalls a “chaotic, tragic, horrendous experience.”

“Suddenly all the schools stopped, and there was a huge movement against Western ‘corrupted’ imperialism’s influence on the intellectuals. Our professors, even the administrators — many of them were Communist Party members — they were being persecuted as criminals who spread dangerous ‘anti-revolutionary’ thoughts and ideologies.

“It’s students against students, divided by class. They say if you come from a working-class family, if you were poor before 1949, you are considered a loyalist. If you’re from the bourgeois, like my family, immediately you become, they called it, the ‘six condemned types of people’ — and I belonged to that kind of family.

“So those from a ‘revolutionary’ background — that means the government officials’ and the party officials’ families and working-class families — those people become the first generation of Red Guards. And the Red Guards, at that time, control everything.”

Chang, like many Shanghai Conservatory students, remembers “being very, very scared that our home might be raided and our parents would be arrested and taken away, and we would just become wandering kids, like orphans. We wouldn’t know what to do. There’s no school. There’s nothing.

“It happened to me. My mother, overnight, suddenly disappeared. She was confined in the school; all of our teachers, professors put there together — stories thousands of people have already heard.
“That time as a teenager gave me such a deep scar of fear, of desperation. I didn’t know what to do. I felt it’s the end of the world. Gradually things started to change. The ironic thing about the Cultural Revolution was that, each year, a different group of people became persecuted. The very first generation of Red Guards, in the second year, became ‘anti-revolution’ criminals because they did too many horrible things.

“People committed suicide  — people tortured to death by the first generation of Red Guards. Then when the Red Guards themselves become anti-revolutionary — they’re being persecuted — many of them commit suicide. Then the next year it becomes something else, like that.

“We were looking for survival in-between. Miraculously for my own fate — because I knew how to write well, and in school, people knew I was a person who wasn’t very aggressive — in the second year of the Cultural Revolution, friends started asking me to step up. They said, ‘Do something. Maybe join the administrative committee’ — the Red Guard committee — ‘to manage the school.’

“The school was paralyzed. There were no teachers. The teachers were being criticized. My mother was still in confinement and being criticized. The students just divided in different groups, fighting each other. So in the second year, 1967, I started to step up and do some organizational work. Gradually I became the No. 2 person on the Revolutionary Committee managing the music high school.”

The Shanghai Conservatory: “If you enter that school, your fate has been decided”
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Chang’s mother, Sheng Jianyi (盛建颐) — “Clara” to friends and schoolmates — was a proud bastion of Shanghai tradition: elegant, worldly, prosperous and determined. An aspiring pianist from a prominent family, she attended Shanghai’s elite St. Mary’s Hall for Girls and continued her studies at London’s Royal Academy of Music. In 1934, Sheng returned home, ahead of the 1937 Japanese occupation that scarred the city through World War II. The unwavering loyalty that always pulls Sheng back to Shanghai — during war and revolution, at times of personal triumph and adversity — will define her family for three generations.

The future CSO violist was born in 1949, an auspicious year for family and nation. He arrived 500 miles up the Yangtze in Wuhan. Chang’s parents, who had fled upriver as far as wartime capital Chongqing, would sail home to Shanghai the next year

Read the entire article at CSO Sounds and Stories.

​By CSO violist Max Raimi, January 21, 2016.