As her first season at the helm of the Seattle Symphony moves into its second half, what Music Director Xian Zhang is hoping to achieve with the orchestra — and with the local audience — is beginning to crystallize.
Zhang is beginning to define what she wants the orchestra to explore — not only in sound, but in scope. New colors, unfamiliar combinations and an emphasis on attentive listening have emerged as key elements of her approach, along with a collaborative programming philosophy that asks audiences to engage with music they may not yet know.
A clear expression of that vision arrives Feb. 12, 14 and 15 with “Iris Dévoilée” (“Iris Unveiled”), a major work by Qigang Chen, performed in Seattle for the first time. The program pairs “Iris Unveiled” with Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony.
Chen, a Chinese-born composer long based in Paris, wrote “Iris Unveiled” in 2001; it has since become his best-known and most ambitious work. Bringing together traditions informed by Peking Opera and Chinese instruments with the technical range and expressive capacity of a modern Western symphony orchestra, the piece resists easy categorization. It invites a different kind of listening than the familiar symphonic language represented by the Shostakovich work sharing the bill.
One might describe “Iris Unveiled” as a suite for large orchestra and three singers lasting nearly 40 minutes, but such labels feel too narrow. Set in nine brief movements, each titled after a different emotional or psychological quality, the piece presents a multipart portrait of the feminine psyche, allowing contrasting inner states — such as innocence, tenderness, sensitivity, desire and jealousy — to surface without resolving them.
The music unfolds in an almost hallucinatory way, through sensual shifts of color and texture, drawing on both Western orchestral language and traditional Chinese musical expression.
“Chen wanted to depict the nature of woman through music,” Zhang said in a recent interview from her home in New Jersey. “Each movement is its own little universe, and only after you hear all of them do you get a complete picture. To me, it’s his masterwork. ‘Iris Unveiled’ creates a dreamlike atmosphere for the listener. Especially in the final movement, it feels almost weightless.”
That sense of immersion — and unpredictability — is what has kept Zhang returning to the piece. She has conducted “Iris Unveiled” in a range of international settings, including performances at the BBC Proms and in Beijing.
“There’s always an element of surprise,” she said, noting that audiences tend to respond less to the piece’s novelty than to the enveloping quality of its sound world. “Things emerge suddenly, and you’re not warned — as a listener, you’re just carried into it.”
Bringing the work to Seattle now is a deliberate choice. While it shares the month with the Symphony’s Lunar New Year celebrations in February, Zhang sees that context as an opportunity rather than a justification. Programming “Iris Unveiled” as part of the Symphony’s core subscription series signals her confidence in the orchestra — and in its audience — to engage deeply with a large-scale contemporary work that rewards close attention.
Surrounding the concerts will be a range of contextual events, including preconcert performances by an ensemble from the Seattle Chinese Orchestra and introductions to Peking Opera traditions and female role types. The goal, Zhang said, is not to frame “Iris Unveiled” as a curiosity, but to offer listeners added context for the musical language the piece draws upon.
The work’s title gestures toward multiple layers of meaning. Iris refers not only to the ancient Greek goddess of the rainbow, but also, as Zhang explains, to a recurring symbol in Song dynasty lyric poetry, in which the iris flower evokes ideas of spring, renewal and vitality.
Such layering of cultural reference is characteristic of the composer’s own background. Born in Shanghai in 1951, Chen belongs to the first generation of Chinese composers to emerge after the Cultural Revolution, when the Central Conservatory in Beijing reopened, and the study of Western music was once again permitted. Chen left China in the early 1980s and settled in Paris, where he studied privately with Olivier Messiaen, one of the most influential composers of the second half of the 20th century, and later became a French citizen.
Zhang recounts that Messiaen was no longer taking on new students at the time, but Chen wrote to him directly from China and persuaded the French composer to meet — and ultimately accept him. That lineage, she said, left a lasting imprint on Chen’s ear for orchestration.
“It’s not theatrical music,” Zhang said. “It really is a sonic experience.” His scores, she noted, often look almost French on the page — “even like Ravel in passages” — with meticulously divided strings and impressionistic layering, while also drawing on melodic contours that echo Chinese folk traditions.
At the same time, that emphasis on sound as its own form of drama does not exclude visual elements. “Iris Unveiled” includes a striking stage presence in the role of the Qingyi singer, a female role type in Peking Opera associated with lyrical singing and refined expression.
That part is performed by Meng Meng, a specialist in the Qingyi tradition who appears in traditional makeup and headpiece. Set alongside two Western-trained sopranos, Mei Gui Zhang and Tess Altiveros, the interplay between vocal styles is central to the work’s aural palette. “The delicate tone of Peking Opera’s Qingyi resonates with the gorgeous lyric soprano,” Meng said, resulting in what she described as “a beautiful and magnificent auditory experience.”
The interplay of East and West extends to the instrumental forces as well. Alongside the Western orchestra, Chen incorporates traditional Chinese instruments — the pipa (a plucked lute), played by Yang Jin; the erhu (a two-stringed bowed fiddle), performed by Cathy Yang; and the zheng (a long zither with plucked strings), played by Lucina Yue. “The subtlety of Chen’s orchestration is unique,” Zhang said, adding that the challenge lies less in technical difficulty than in balance and attentive listening among the musicians.
Seattle’s musicians, she added, are especially well suited to that task. “They read any contemporary music really well,” Zhang said. “They have no trouble at all.” That fluency, combined with the orchestra’s openness and flexibility, allows for the stylistic responsiveness the piece demands.
The pairing with Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, meanwhile, is anything but incidental. Zhang sees the program as a study in contrasts — a “yin-and-yang relationship” between an expansive contemporary work shaped by color and introspection and one of the most familiar symphonic statements of the 20th century. Yet she believes the two pieces ultimately illuminate one another.
Shostakovich’s Fifth contains its own dualities, which Zhang describes as moments of chamber-like delicacy set against passages of overwhelming force; irony is shadowed by lyricism. Even its famously ambiguous finale poses a question conductors continue to debate — defiance or hope? Zhang falls firmly in the latter camp.
“I go for hope,” she said. “Especially at this moment.”
For audiences, Zhang hopes the program is both grounding and expansive. The familiarity of Shostakovich provides an anchor, while “Iris Unveiled” opens a different kind of listening space — one that resists quick interpretation and rewards attention to color, texture and nuance.
“Sometimes you hear something you’ve never heard before and it makes you listen differently,” she said. “I hope people leave feeling that the boundaries of their listening have opened up.”
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