If there is a composer, throughout the History, that could reflect a musical sincretism more stressed between the east and the west, this is none other than the chinese Tan Dun. Son of the Cultural Revolution, and of the new social theories of the Chinese communism, Tan Dun felt immediately attracted by the musical world, so much properly eastern as western. Migrateed to New York in 1986, it is since then when his labor as composer has grown and matured in fullness. Already we had had the pleasure of listening his stupendous Symphony 1997, composed for the reunification of Hong Kong, and now we are able to do the same with his previous Marco Polo (1996) commissioned by the Edinburgh Festival, and perhaps his more personal work; "an opera within an opera", such and as is subtitled.Using a text of the Welsh Paul Griffiths, the work have been splited into three parallel structures or journeys (very well explained by the own composer in the libretto that accompanies the disk) that reflect the musical worlds that uses (from the Beijing Opera, with its peculiar instruments and rhythms, till contemporary and medieval harmonic developments), as well as the spiritual (split into four timespace stations) and physical (with the travel from the medieval Italy to the China of Kublai Khan). Furthermore, the personality of Marco Polo is distributed between two singers, a tenor (Marco, the exterior part) and a mezzosopran (Polo, the interior part), that stresses even more the duality of the work. Impressive changes between traditionally classic melodic lines in the West (as Venezia vento), or the movements in fourths of tone and harmonies so burnishers to eastern ears (as in anyone of the Book of Timespace), and the use of a gigantic instrumental set -that includes together with a great western symphonic orchestra, a wide instrumental section of the Beijing Opera, multitude of percussion as well as tibetan and medieval instruments- are the perfect example of the vigorous and original style of this author, one of the most interesting of the moment.
