Tan Dun brings his Buddha Passion to the Edinburgh International Festival

Not for the first time, Chinese-American composer Tan Dun’s distinctive confluence of East-West influences will bring refreshing originality to the Edinburgh International Festival. Twelve years ago his Water Concerto - in which the solo percussionist performed by splashing his hands in a bowl of water - was as remarkable for its spiritual inner voice as its unintentional dousing of the Usher Hall ringside audience.

This time round, Tan Dun’s Festival presence is writ immeasurably large, with his Buddha Passion filling the entirety of the festival’s Opening Concert. He’ll conduct the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, two choruses, soloists and indigenous Chinese performers (including traditional pipa player and dancer) in a near two-hour epic that comes with its own deluge of Eastern spiritualism and ethnic timbres, wrapped for good measure in plentiful Westernised washes of Puccini. That he describes his reaction to the 2018 premiere in Dresden as “an immersive experience” is not another flood warning.

Even the title smacks of cross-fertilisation, the word Passion drawing instant comparison to those iconic Easter oratorios by JS Bach. Was this a conscious borrowing from a Christian concept? Yes, he says, but the etymology is more literal. “To me, in the last thousand years from Bach to Michelangelo, it seems all artists are working from passionate stories, from Western culture and their ancient stories. But actually I find few music stories from Buddhist compassionate philosophy, from an Eastern spiritual approach. So I feel this music, these stories, are very important as this time is truly a time for West and East to become one home. We must learn to share passion and compassion.”

If political undercurrents are implicit in these comments, that’s hardly surprising from a composer whose Hunan childhood was consigned to compulsory rice picking during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the collapse of which in the 1970s enabled him to convert his then amateur pursuit of music into a burgeoning global, professional career.

Work as an arranger and violinist for a Peking Opera troupe led to acceptance by the Beijing Central Conservatory, in turn opening up the opportunity to pursue a doctorate at New York’s Columbia University. Among the dizzy heights of his achievements since was his widely acclaimed soundtrack for the award-winning 2000 Hollywood movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

In the UK, Dun initially came to prominence as associate composer and conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in the late 1980s, early ‘90s. “It was an unforgettable moment in my lifetime, because that orchestra became my teacher; it became my experimental dream factory and the most important first step in setting up my GPS towards my spiritual goal,” he recalls.

Among his most significant works then were the opera Marco Polo, commissioned by the Edinburgh International Festival, and his first large orchestral work Death and Fire. “Scotland, for me, is like returning home.”

His spiritual home, though, remains China, along with the Buddhist philosophies that shaped his thinking. Nothing reflects that more, perhaps, than a work inspired by one of the world’s most intense manifestations of Buddhist art, the Mogao cave paintings in Gunhuang. “You know, there are over 4000 paintings there involving music,” he explains. “‘Three hundred orchestras and more than 3000 instruments are depicted on these walls from over 1500 years ago. It’s been amazing to tell this story through the sound of ancient instruments.”

It was from six of these vivid paintings that Dun created his dramatic Passion, the story in six acts of a prince in pursuit of enlightenment who becomes Buddha en route to reaching Nirvana. But he is justified in referring to it as six mini-operas.

“When I hear this music I hear the caves, the transposed and transformed sound from the paintings. That is a very special experiment for me. I am going back and forth, reality and dream, meditation and real life. To me, opera is drama. It’s not just character and story development. It could also be a dialogue between real and surreal, between past, present and future lives.”

In essence, that thought resonates powerfully with his earliest philosophical experiences. “When I was a child I wanted to be a shaman, because I thought the shaman could visualise the last life and the next life. He had a cinematic technique to his movements, even though no-one on the countryside of Hunan had ever seen a movie before. He had no electronics, no modern media, but he could still be incredibly engrossing. That organic sound world became so seductive to me, and I wanted to have that power. It wasn't long before I found that being a composer held an advantage over being a shaman because I can transform my reality, my vision of the last life or the next life into a sound, into a colour, to hear it with an audience.”

More than anything, though, composing for Dun has been the key to unlocking a creative freedom that has allowed him to express himself in ecstatic universal terms, to create such highly individual works of art that speak just as powerfully of his fundamental Chinese roots as his wider experience of the West.

That doesn’t mean he is confronted with conflict. “As a person trained in both cultures, music has a spiritual function for me. It makes you open yourself to accept the whole world and all people. I don't really have any great interest in the east and the west as a dialogue," Dun recently stated. And that’s what figures at the crux of this Buddha Passion. It’s not for him, he says, to engage in overt political polemic. Instead his music speaks of an optimism achievable through both individual and universal aspirations, but just as importantly it speaks for him.

“I have always written whatever I want and sometimes, of course, music itself says much more than my words. I can speak to all kinds of people who come from different traditions, different languages and different backgrounds. Music can speak to them all.”

Tan Dun conducts his own Buddha Passion featuring the RSNO at the Usher Hall, Sat 5 August. www.eif.co.uk. A world premiere recording is also available on Decca from 4 August.