Music from the Dunhuang Caves / Seeking the Tao of Strings

Wu Man, a contemporary master of the pipa (the Chinese lute) has recently released two albums that demonstrate her fascinating versatility and command of her instrument. The first relates to the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang, China which are famous for their Buddhist paintings dating from the fifth to 14th centuries. In 1900, a large number of manuscripts, including 25 pipa pieces dating back to the tenth century Tang Dynasty, were discovered. Wu Man has had an ambition to play these for years, but they needed a lot of work – in this case by Xia Yanzhou – to interpret them in contemporary notation. Music from the Dunhuang Caves presents her interpretations of the 25 pieces followed by seven improvisations inspired by the scores. These don’t sound like the virtuoso traditional pieces for which she is known for – they are mostly just a single line at various speeds, plus occasional percussion. There’s something meditative about them, taking you back more than a thousand years into Chinese musical history.

While Music from the Dunhuang Caves features ancient music on a modern steel string pipa, for Seeking the Tao of Strings Wu Man plays 11 historic silk-stringed instruments from the 19th and 20th centuries that belonged to great pipa masters of the past and mostly chooses pieces associated with them. She begins with an instrument belonging to Jin Zuli and plays ‘Flute and Drum Music at Sunset’. The sound is elegant and magisterial. One of three folk tunes is played on a smaller pipa from the Late Qing Dynasty (late 19th century), which sounds more nasal. It’s the different timbres of the instruments that makes this disc particularly interesting. One of the highlights is the penultimate track, ‘Ambush From Ten Sides’, one of the most celebrated of the martial pieces in the pipa repertoire. It’s full of battle sounds like drumbeats, cannon shots and clashing swords. Here she plays it on a flat, narrow-necked instrument from the Qing Palace in the Forbidden City. An album that reveals the riches of traditional pipa music.