Events

Festival of Premieres: Shuying Li’s “Eight Immortals and the Sea”

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  • Date: January 31, 2025
  • Time: Available Through Jan 31
  • Venue: Streaming Online

Through the month of January, CMSCVA celebrates our contribution to the chamber music repertoire with an online digital festival of pieces we have commissioned and premiered. Enjoy works written for CMSCVA in the past four years that have transformed the chamber music repertoire and delighted audiences throughout Richmond.

Up next is Eight Immortals and the Sea, an octet for clarinet, bassoon, horn and strings by American composer Shuying Li, commissioned by CMSCVA and premiered on May 15, 2022.

For CMSCVA’s first season coming out of the COVID pandemic period, CMSCVA approached Li to write a piece with the same orchestration as the famous Schubert Octet. She paired the idea of a piece for eight players with the Eight Immortals, mythological figures from Chinese culture. Although individually powerful, the Immortals cooperate and complement each other’s skills to accomplish great feats. It’s a perfect metaphor for the art and skill of chamber music!

Li provides the notes on her piece, Eight Immortals and the Sea:

Eight Immortals and the Sea draws inspiration from the Chinese Taoism mythology. The Eight Immortals are considered to be signs of prosperity and longevity, so they are popular themes in ancient and medieval art. Among the literature on the subject, one of the work made during the Ming Dynasty (c. 14th–15th centuries) is called The Eight Immortals Cross the Sea. It is about the Immortals on their way to attend the Conference of the Magical Peach when they encounter an ocean. Instead of relying on their clouds to get them across, Lü Dongbin suggested that they each should exercise their unique powers to get across. Derived from this, the Chinese proverb “The Eight Immortals cross the sea, each reveals its divine powers” indicates the situation that everybody shows off their skills and expertise to achieve a common goal.

In the composition, the eight players who each musically represent one of the legendary Immortals depict a more abstract and loose-structured picture of the story. The music takes over its own logic beyond the inspiration and focuses on the collaborative and dramatic elements represented in the story. It also treats the “sea” as an equally important aspect to present the relationship between individual Immortals (each musician) and the Sea (composite sound world contributed by the entire ensemble).

Click here to watch a performance of “Eight Immortals and the Sea” with:
Njioma Grevious, violin
Celia Hatton, viola
David Lemelin, clarinet
Kevin Newton, horn
Thomas Schneider, bassoon
Andrew Sommer, bass
Suliman Tekalli, violin
James Wilson, cello