As well as being the artistic director of the acclaimed Juventas New Music Ensemble, Oliver Caplan is a composer whose works have received over 200 performances worldwide. His Journey to the West, originally composed on a commission from Chinese Symphonic Masterpieces at Harvard University, was the winner of the Reno Pops Orchestra’s 2024-25 Composers Showcase. The music is based on the famous sixteenth century Chinese novel of the same name. ‘The story was new to me,’ says Caplan, ‘but it’s a book that’s very popular in Asia, and there’s a lot of adaptations of it, and I think there’s children’s cartoon based on it, and opera, and all sorts of things.’
Caplan’s music features solo roles for the flute and for the erhu, the traditional Chinese string instrument. The instruments represent, according to Caplan, the two sides of the novel’s protagonist, Monkey: ‘The flute would be his yang, which is his more mischievous, puckish side, and the erhu would be his yin, which is the more soft, feminine side.’…