The National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing.

China’s National Center for the Performing Arts has a way of holding one’s gaze as it floats on the local skyline, a giant titanium dome hovering in a pool of water. Its look is futuristic, its scale enormous. And it is only one of a wide array of concert halls, opera houses, and other cultural centers that have sprouted up across China in the last 15 years, as part of a construction boom unparalleled in the modern history of the art form.

In classical music, architecture may not exactly be destiny, but it sometimes feels close. Halls and the orchestras that reside within them tend over the years to resemble each other. There is, for instance, no symbol more illustrative of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s history and present-day ethos than Symphony Hall itself, the very cauldron in which its sound has been forged.

So what exactly can China’s new crop of concert halls tell us about the state of classical music in that country? Certainly from the street, the facades are gleaming and brilliant. So too, often, is the view of China’s entire classical scene as pictured from the United States, where we often hear reports of new audiences, zealously cheered Western orchestras, and the tens of millions of Chinese children studying piano or violin. How easy it is for anyone concerned about those perennially graying and shrinking American audiences to project onto China their own hopes and dreams for the art form’s future.

All of this said, unfortunately, the view from inside China’s concert halls today has a far less consistent gleam. After a week of covering the BSO’s recent tour of China, seeing and hearing a handful of the country’s newly built venues, and speaking with the administrators, musicians, and government officials who make their lives within them, one emerges with a more complex set of impressions. What the country has achieved already in this realm is astonishing, and the most encouraging aspect is the sheer energy, curiosity, and openness of Chinese audiences. But let’s be clear: China’s classical music scene is not coming to the rescue anytime soon. It is too busy and bogged down by the hectic, messy, and sometimes dissonant work of becoming itself....Continue Reading

> via The Boston Globe