Cellist Jian Wang gears up for his downtown debut with Chicago Symphony

In 1979, just seven years after President Richard Nixon visited China and began the establishment of American diplomatic ties, violinist Isaac Stern traveled to the country with a documentary team in tow.

The chronicle of his interactions with China’s classical music scene became an Academy Award-winning film titled “From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China” (1981), which featured the appearance of a talented young cellist named Jian Wang.

Wang, now 55, has gone on to became an internationally recognized soloist who has performed with many of the world’s top orchestras, including the London Symphony, Orchestre de Paris and Cleveland Orchestra.

After first performing with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the Ravinia Festival in 2000, he will make his CSO subscription series debut Oct. 26-28 with Danish guest conductor Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider at Symphony Center.

“At my age, it’s really hard to think of anything as a debut,” Wang said with a laugh. “But the Chicago Symphony is one of the top orchestras in world, and any time you get to play with them, it’s very exciting, so I’m really looking forward to that.”

The cellist is especially glad to be collaborating with Szeps-Znaider. “We are really close friends, and we have actually performed together with many orchestras,” Wang said. Just before the two come to Chicago, they will be collaborating on a recording of Richard Strauss’ Don Quixote, a tone poem for cello, viola orchestra, with the Orchestre National de Lyon in France, where Szeps-Znaider is music director.

Wang was born into a musical family; his father was a professional cellist and his mother a professional flutist. Despite the strictures of China’s Cultural Revolution, which closed music schools and suppressed many other artistic activities from 1966 to 1976, he began cello lessons at age 4 with his father. After the Shanghai Conservatory of Music reopened around 1978, the young cellist began studies there, joining a flood of new students.

“Apparently, a lot of kids were able to learn instruments, and they auditioned for the conservatory,” he said. “I suppose, at least as far as classical music was concerned, the policy was much more relaxed during the end.”

“It’s one of my favorite pieces. It’s a very beautiful piece written in a modern way.” — Jian Wang on Schelomo

At 11, Wang met Stern at the Shanghai Conservatory, and some of their interactions were captured in “From Mao to Mozart.” “The film was quite important historically, because China was really closed for a long time,” Wang said. “Nobody knew what China was like, so this was the first Western-made documentary about China.”

Stern helped Wang, then 16, gain admittance to the Yale School of Music, where he began studying with Aldo Parisot. Wang later pursued a bachelor’s degree at the Juilliard School but dropped out after three years, because he had many concert offers and was ready to devote himself to a full-time career. “The fact that I was a part of that film really helped me a lot when I went to the States,” he said. “People kind of knew who I was, so it helped to start playing concerts. It was very important.”

He later became the first Chinese artist to sign with Deutsche Grammophon, releasing in 1996 the first of his 10 albums, a recording of Brahms piano trios, on the prestigious label. His other releases include a 2005 set of the six milestone cello suites by J.S. Bach.

After living most recently in Europe, Wang saw his career come full circle, when he moved back to China last year to take care of his aging parents and assume a music professorship at the Shanghai Conservatory, where he began his musical odyssey decades earlier.   

For his CSO concerts, Wang will serve as soloist in Schelomo by Ernest Bloch, a Swiss-born American composer who died in 1958. The 1915-16 work, subtitled Rhapsodie Hébraïque for Violoncello and Orchestra, is part of the composer’s Jewish cycle in which he explored his ethnic and musical identities. It employs the solo cello as the voice of King Solomon — Schelomo in Hebrew.

In an article published in Musica Hebraica in 1938, Bloch explained that he did not employ any familiar Jewish musical tropes in his cycle but dug into his own soul for inspiration. “I have but listened to an inner voice, deep, secret, insistent, ardent, an instinct much more than cold and dry reason, a voice which seemed to come from afar beyond myself, far beyond my parents,” he wrote. “This entire Jewish heritage moved me deeply; it was reborn in my music. To what extent it is Jewish, to what extent it is just Ernest Bloch, of that I know nothing. The future alone will decide.”

Schelomo became one of Bloch’s best-known works, and it is now solidly part of the standard repertoire for cello and orchestra. Wang performs it regularly. “It’s one of my favorite pieces,” he said. “It’s a very beautiful piece written in a modern way. It’s one of the rare instances where modern technique really shines very expressively.

“It’s a little bit like mood music in a way, so it’s very easy to listen to. However, it’s also very deep, so it’s a really a great piece of work.”