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Orchestra takes flight on stalled plane

Still from video. Philadelphia Orchestra musicians perform on flight waiting on Beijing tarmac.
Still from video. Philadelphia Orchestra musicians perform on flight waiting on Beijing tarmac.Read more
    by David Patrick Stearns, Inquirer Music Critic
    Published 

BEIJING - The Philadelphia Orchestra was divided but not conquered.

The orchestra's 40th anniversary tour of China was moving on to Macau on Friday - its last and glitziest tour stop - when a handful of musicians and orchestra executives on the early-bird flight from Beijing were stuck on the tarmac due to heavy rain. The takeoff was delayed six hours.

Nonetheless -.

"Our musicians would like to offer you a musical surprise," announced orchestra president Allison Vulgamore to the marooned, disgruntled passengers.

Despite cramped conditions and the dry airplane acoustics, a quartet of Philadelphia string players uncased their instruments and launched into Dvorak's String Quartet No. 12, appropriately subtitled "American" - a therapeutic performance that met with wild applause from fellow passengers.

An amateur video made on a camera phone was posted on YouTube and quickly picked up by sites ranging from the Huffington Post to NPR. (Find it at Inquirer.com/entertainment.)

The musicians - violinists Juliette Kang and Daniel Han, violist Che-Hung Chen, and cellist Yumi Kendall - are becoming used to this sort of thing. The intent of the current China tour, the orchestra's eighth, was to expand beyond the usual concerts to residency activities, including school and hospital performances, and so-called pop-ups in unexpected locations.

To that end, on Friday morning, as the string quartet played to a captive if delighted audience, a contingent of percussionists scheduled for a later flight was in one of Beijing's less-posh neighborhoods, at the Picun Tonqxin Experimental Primary School for children of Chinese migrant workers.

The Philadelphians began by accompanying the students' morning exercise regimen, then visited classrooms where curiosity was not confined to matters musical. During one question session, percussionist Chris Deviney was asked, "Why do you have such a big nose?"

Timpanist Don Liuzzi, offended at being overlooked, jumped in: "I'm Italian! I've got the big nose."