With 'presence on the podium,' Jindong Cai leads symphony
Stanford Symphony Orchestra Conductor Jindong Cai studied with the late Leonard Bernstein at Tanglewood.
BY BARBARA PALMER
Early in the evening on Election Day, a kind of restless suspense was percolating in the rehearsal hall where members of the Stanford Symphony Orchestra gathered to rehearse Beethoven's Violin Concerto in D. Over the rumbling, squeaking cacophony of instruments being tuned and chairs and music stands scraping the floor, students discussed the electoral votes that were just beginning to be tallied on television and computer screens all over campus.
Conductor Jindong Cai, dressed in a casual shirt and trousers in neutral tones, quietly stepped onto a riser in front of the orchestra, looked around and raised an index finger. The room immediately hushed, almost as if Cai had thrown a switch.
Cai "has a presence on the podium that everybody notices," said violinist Sean Wang, a graduate student in the Music Department and the symphony's assistant conductor. "He's very enthusiastic and encouraging to students—and quite demanding."
Among the many reasons that Cai was chosen to lead the Stanford Symphony Orchestra—extensive international experience conducting professional and academic orchestras and ensembles, commitment to musical innovation, a recently published book—one of the most compelling was his ability to connect with students, said Stephen Sano, associate professor of music and part of the search committee that brought Cai to campus last spring.
The university had launched a rigorous international search to replace Karla Lemon, who was the symphony's conductor for a decade. Cai, one of four finalists invited to campus to conduct rehearsals, teach a class and meet with students, faculty and administrators, "was the overwhelming choice of members of the Stanford Symphony Orchestra," Sano said.
"You can feel his experience," said bassist Martin Sukopp, a postdoctoral student in chemistry who has played with professional orchestras in his native Germany. "He can tell you exactly how to play every note." That kind of proficiency goes only so far, continued Sukopp. "For a conductor, it's important to tell you about the whole piece," to communicate its emotional content. And at that, Cai is outstanding, he said.
"No. No," Cai said a few minutes later as the woodwind section swelled during the first movement. "They are the grass and the water and earth," he said, sweeping his baton-wielding arm toward the violin section. "You are the sunshine. I need you to be more transparent."
Although the student symphony has few music majors, its members are "great players," talented enough to be admitted into any music conservatory, Cai said during an interview earlier in his office. But "music is not only about technique. It's more about what you want to say, its intellectual content, its historical context"—areas that a Stanford education can only benefit, he said.
Cai sees himself as a bridge between members of the orchestra and the audience. Musicians have their own ideas about how a work should be played. A good conductor looks first to the composer and then convinces players to accept his vision. "The orchestra is united into one sound," he said.
Back at the rehearsal, after several starts, the notes began to melt into one another in a shimmering, lyrical strain. "Thank you," Cai said to the orchestra. "Thank you."
Cai was born in 1956 in Beijing, while Mao Zedong was the leader of the People's Republic of China. Cai came of age during the Cultural Revolution, when Chairman Mao and his wife, Jiang Qing, declared war on bourgeois culture, including Western music. Cai and his co-author and wife, Sheila Melvin, include a chronicle of those days in their book Rhapsody in Red: How Western Classical Music Became Chinese. Seventeen professors, spouses and students from the Shanghai Conservatory committed suicide and others were imprisoned in work camps. Since Cai was still a child, the turmoil of the period became clear only in retrospect, he said.
His first instrument was the two-stringed erhu, which he studied with an uncle. His father, who worked for the Beijing trolley, paid the equivalent of $3 to buy a violin for Cai when he was 13 years old.
Cai wasn't discouraged from playing the violin, but Western music was largely banned from 1963 until Chairman Mao's death and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, he said. Even so, many people listened to the Voice of America broadcasts and to Soviet stations—which always played Tchaikovsky—on shortwave radios.
One day a friend came to Cai to say he had found copies of record albums of all Beethoven's symphonies. "I went to his home and we closed the window and listened to them for two days on an old wind-up turntable. We had to change the needles every two or three records," he recalled. Since then, "I have always been fascinated by Western music. I was drawn by its complexity and freshness and emotion, and still am."
It may sound strange, Cai said, but he's not certain that he would be a musician were it not for the Cultural Revolution. He performed for a troupe that played propaganda songs—which was then a respected and even glamorous position, he said. "I was taught that music always had to serve a political purpose and that there was no absolute music; all music reflected the composer's political class and values," he said. But even though the music was intended as propaganda, "if you take away the title, it was still music," with a language of its own, he said. "I didn't think much about the content. I just wanted to perform."
At age 18, Cai was asked to conduct a high school orchestra—the only one in Beijing. The orchestra played in the Great Hall of the People for visiting foreign delegations. "I was younger than some of the students," Cai said.
After the Cultural Revolution ended, Cai enrolled in college—at age 23—to study composition. Western orchestras were beginning to perform in China, and Cai switched to conducting after attending performances of the Boston Symphony, led by Seiji Ozawa, and the Berlin Philharmonic, with conductor Herbert von Karajan. "I realized how influential individual conductors could be in making music," he said. After graduation, he reached another conclusion: "I realized if I really wanted to study Western music, I have to go the West."
In 1985, Cai moved to Boston to study at the New England Conservatory of Music. He spoke no English and knew no one except for his brother, who also lived in Boston. The first year was the hardest. "Your mouth is trying to speak and your eyes have to watch and your brain is constantly straining to understand," he said. "And at the same time I had to work to support myself, doing various odd jobs like working in the library, cleaning buildings and conducting choruses.
"But I feel you can learn from any experience—you learn about life. If you know what struggle is, for example, you will feel this more deeply in a Beethoven or Mahler symphony."
Four years after he arrived in the United States, Cai was chosen to study conducting with Leonard Bernstein at the Tanglewood Music Center, an experience that he considers a high point, he said. The conductor, then in his 70s, was so energetically devoted to music, he stayed up until 2 or 3 in the morning talking with students, Cai said.
Another high point came three years later, when Cai was a doctoral student at the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati, where he was the chief assistant to conductor Gerhard Samuel. Samuel was scheduled to conduct the conservatory's new production of Mozart's opera Zaide at the Mozart Bicentennial at Lincoln Center in New York. Ten minutes before dress rehearsal, Cai learned that Samuel was ill and was asked to lead the orchestra.
It was a case of opportunity intersecting with preparation, Cai said. A critic reviewing the performance in the New York Times called the production "one of the more compelling theatrical experiences so far offered in the festival."
The experience gave the conductor new confidence. Because of cultural and language differences, "it's hard for a conductor from China to work with Western orchestras," Cai said. "I had hesitated and questioned myself, 'Can I make it here?'" After his triumph at the Lincoln Center, "I thought, 'If I can do this, I can do much more.'"
Since then, Cai has served on the faculty of Louisiana State University and has taught at the University of Arizona and the University of California-Berkeley. He's held professional conducting positions with the Cincinnati Symphony and the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra and has been guest conductor for the Arkansas Symphony, the Lexington Philharmonic and other orchestras.
Since 1996, Cai has traveled every year to China, where his mother still lives, to guest conduct orchestras, including the Shanghai Symphony and the China National Broadcasting Symphony. ("I have to teach them how swing works," he said.)
In 1997, Cai met Melvin, then director of the Shanghai office of the US-China Business Council, while conducting the Shanghai Symphony in a performance of American symphonic music. Melvin, a writer who contributes work to leading U.S. magazines and newspapers, interviewed Cai and wrote a story about the concert for the Wall Street Journal. ("We do not know each other enough," Melvin quoted Cai in the story. "Music lets people know each other more.")
Melvin's image stayed in Cai's mind, he said, and when he returned to Shanghai to conduct in 1999, he called her. Thousands of e-mails and several visits between "an American in Shanghai and a Chinese in America" later, Cai proposed in Beijing on New Year's Eve, 2000. The couple went to the Great Wall to watch the first sunrise of the new millennium.
The couple now has two children, Sebastian, 3, and Cecilia, 10 months. Their book, which traces the history of classical music in China, was published this year and grew out of articles the couple wrote together for the New York Times. Sano called the book "not just the most detailed account on this topic, it's a tour de force of contextual culture and history."
Cai was trained as a Western conductor and "Chinese opera and music are in my bones," he said. His vision for the symphony, however, goes beyond the core repertoire of Western European composers to include music of all kinds, contemporary works, Chinese, Korean, Cambodian, Mexican, Brazilian and others, he said.
"We talk about the global economy—what about global culture and music? The world has become so small. We have more chances to explore many composers." Such a cosmopolitan approach can give Western audiences a fresh experience, he said.
He said he will never forget a lesson he learned from Leonard Bernstein, who told students that conducting was very difficult, but it looks easy: "It looks as if anyone can do it. It's easy to be mediocre." Bernstein told his students that he himself was still searching for the truth about conducting. "It's always in the back of my mind," Cai said. "I have to try and be better and learn from that."
The Stanford Symphony will perform Beethoven's Violin Concerto in D, with soloist Tai-Jin Lee, and Mahler's Symphony No. 1 at 8 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 20, in Dinkelspiel Auditorium. Tickets are $5 for students and $10 for general admission. For more information, contact the Music Department at 723-2720.