Shen Tianyi: Sound of Imagination is the new album in the Debut Series of young Chinese musicians released by NCPA Classics, the music label of the National Center for the Performing Arts. The album was recorded in August 2023 at the NCPA studios in China with Shen Tianyi on clarinet and An Tianxu on piano.
The album contains five works of very different styles – Poulenc’s Clarinet Sonata with its great emotional ups and downs, Weber’s Concerto No. 2 with its emphasis on drama, Vidor’s Introduction and Rondo with its strong Spanish style, Saint-Saëns’ Clarinet Sonata in E-flat Major for the Romantics and emotional personalization of Schumann’s Fantasia
As a monophonic instrument, the clarinet’s way of expression is more inclined and specialized in timbre and line. Tony Shen（Shen Tianyi） pursues a focused, clean and soft tone, and vibrates a three-dimensional and metallic tone with the reed and wooden body, in other words, vibrates the “copper sound” of metal collision and the crisp sound of jade, a kind of “sound of gold and jade! “The sound of gold and jade.
In his perception of tone, the clarinet’s tone is extremely “imaginative”, sometimes like a pearl wrapped in a piece of velvet or silk, the pearl’s halo effect allows one to observe from the light reflected on the pearl’s surface the iridescent colors floating on its surface or underneath the surface. Sometimes it is like the moment of sunrise and dawn, the earth is covered in a layer of silver-gray veil, and the first ray of sunlight like a sharp sword cuts through the sky and blooms, reflecting a red haze, presenting a gorgeous scene of “the sun coming out of the sky”. The imagery of these two tones, a bright and a dark, reflecting each other; a soft and a hard; a small and delicate, beautiful and lovely, a majestic and spectacular splendor.
The choice of works for this album is a selection of five extremely different styles, in order of recording, Poulenc, Weber, Widor, Saint-Saëns and Schumann. Through these works, Shen hopes to give the listener a more comprehensive and clearer understanding of the characteristics of the clarinet. He also looks forward to using his five selected works as an entry point to inspire music fans to explore more about German, Austrian and French music and to gain a deeper artistic experience.