Viola virtuoso tantalizes with tour

First Chinese member of Berliner Philharmoniker returns for five-city trip with fellow members of Baroque ensemble, Chen Nan reports.

It has been about a year since Mei Diyang was appointed first principal viola at the Berliner Philharmoniker, the first Chinese national to become a member of the orchestra in its 141-year history.

On Sept 28, the 29-year-old returned to his home country with the Berliner Barock Solisten (Berlin Baroque Soloists), an 11-piece ensemble that specializes in early music which was founded by prominent members of the Berliner Philharmoniker in 1995. Their concert in Beijing included a selection of Baroque and early Italian music.

"This is the first time I have performed with musicians from the Berliner Philharmoniker in China, although I've performed several times here since I joined the orchestra. This tour really excites me," Mei said on Sept 27, a day before the concert at the capital's Forbidden City Concert Hall.

The concert was part of the ongoing Beijing Music Festival, an annual event.

Mei played the Viola Concerto in G Major by Georg Philipp Telemann, the first known concerto for the viola. Sixteen years ago, he played the same piece at the same venue when he was a student at the Middle School Affiliated to the Central Conservatory of Music.

He also played the Concerto for Viola and Strings in E-flat Major by Alessandro Rolla, a composer Mei says greatly contributed to the viola, an instrument that is often forgotten, tucked away between violins and cellos. Rolla not only wrote 20 viola concertos and plenty of sonatas for the viola and other instruments, such as the violin, cello and piano, but also wrote small pieces for the viola and orchestra.

"No other composer's legacy boasts this number of compositions featuring the viola," says Mei, who also arranged and played the Sonata per la Grand Viola by Niccolo Paganini, one of Rolla's most famous students.

The Beijing concert was one of five stops on a tour of China, which took Mei and the Berliner Barock Solisten to cities including Shanghai, Guangzhou, Guangdong province, and Changsha, Hunan province, between Sept 28 and Oct 7.

"When the other musicians found out that we were going to play in my hometown, Changsha, they were very happy because they wanted to see where I was brought up and learned to play music."

"I had quite a smooth transition after joining the Berliner Philharmoniker," he says, when asked how his life changed after becoming a member of the orchestra. "Musicians love music, and each of them is a great soloist. When they play together, they sound like one. That's the magical thing about being a part of the Berliner Philharmoniker. All I need to do is listen and fit in."

He adds that around 30 ensembles have been formed by members of the orchestra, and that he is keen to play in them in addition to serving as principal viola at the Philharmoniker.

Mei began to play the violin when he was 5, because his grandfather, a history teacher at Hunan Normal University, loved classical music. In 2005, when a team from the Middle School Affiliated to the Central Conservatory of Music visited Changsha to recruit new students, the then 11-year-old Mei auditioned as a violinist. One of the school's teachers, Wang Shaowu, was impressed by his performance and suggested that he switch to the viola. That was Mei's introduction to the instrument.

The mellow, deep tone of the viola, so unlike the higher-pitched violin, instantly attracted him and so between 2005 and 2014, he studied the instrument under Wang in Beijing.

In 2014, Mei continued his studies at the Central Conservatory of Music, and also enrolled to study at the University of Music and Performing Arts Munich under violist Hariolf Schlichtig. In 2018, he won first prize in the viola category, as well as the Audience Prize at the 2018 ARD International Music Competition in Munich. In 2019, he became principal viola at the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra while continuing to study with Japanese violist Nobuko Imai at the Kronberg Academy.

When he became the first Chinese musician to join the Berliner Philharmoniker last year, Mei made headlines, but what matters to him is that people notice the viola and enjoy its sound.

"He became a part of the Berliner Philharmoniker from the day we rehearsed together. The young man knows us very well and did a lot of homework before his audition. We are happy to have him," says double bass player, Ulrich Wolff, who performed in China for the first time in 1979, the year after he joined the Berliner Philharmoniker, which was conducted by Herbert von Karajan at the time.

Contact the writer at chennan@chinadaily.com.cn