Philip KENNICOTT Butterfly Lovers may be silly and saccharine - but in the future who is really going to care what a critic from the West thinks?

With the Iraq War temporarily fading from the headlines and with the presidential campaign promising perhaps some fundamental shifts of perspective on the political horizon, there has been a curious focus on China these days. The Summer Olympics are looming and China seems to be on magazine covers about once a month. Among the chattering classes, there is a sense that perhaps the geopolitical state of the world has shifted, and not to the advantage of the

West. While the US turned inward, fearful and paranoid after September 2001, China just kept going, growing, weaving its vast commercial web, to the point that in the next decades they're basically going to eat our lunch.

with it, the programme-notes explain: "Though universally recognised among the Chinese people — and often cited as the most performed concerto in the 20th century — the piece is largely unknown in the West." It's been available here on recordings for years (I have two of Takako Nishizalci performing it). But for a violinist of Shaham's stature to record it, and pair it with perhaps the most famous violin concerto in the so-called "western" classical repertoire — that's interesting.

The first surprise is the composer. Make that composers. It is that rare piece of orchestral or concert music written by a duo: Chen Gang and He Zhanhao. It emerged as part of an effort to fuse nationalist pride with a Western rinclined movement towards greater sophistication in classical music in Shanghai in the late 1950s. It was a showpiece for the accomplished young virtuosos rising in the uneasy climate of cultural aspiration and communist ideology. Although banished during the cultural revolution, it re-emerged and is now an extraordinarily popular piece of sentimental programme music.

Putting these two pieces next to each other puts the critic in a quandary. To be honest,

I find the Butterfly Lovers Concerto silly, saccharine and little better than movie music. I feel the same way about the Yellow River Concerto, a piano trifle woven of patriotic tunes that Lang Lang recorded two years ago. To borrow the vocabulary of communism, this music strikes me as reactionary, a throwback to...to...well, the age of Tchaikovsky, at least.

Composers from the edges of Europe were franchised to write big, emotional, tonal scores far longer than their counterparts in Germany and Austria. After a century, Sibelius doesn't seem at all regressive to our ears, even when reminded that his Fifth Symphony was written two years after The Rite of Spring. Chasing down folksongs also allowed a back door to respectability even as melodic lines and tonality were shattered.

Given the size of the market for classical music in China, given the shrinking market for it in the US and elsewhere, we must face a brutal reality. History is written by the victors, and if the Chinese market dwarfs the Western market, pieces such as the Butterfly Lovers Concerto will not go away because Western critics sniff at them.

Here's a fascinating possibility: China rewrites the narrative of Western music. Unburdened by the prejudice that music must go forward, technically and tonally, to ever-greater articulation of complexity, they do what few Western composers have done for a century or more. They write the music they want to, for audiences who enjoy it. They change all the rules. Western classical music, which seems a glorious but now vitiated tradition, becomes but a prelude to a new efflorescence of tonality, traditionalism and surface appeal.

I don't know if I find that an exciting or horrifying possibility — and it ignores the fact that there are many highly talented Chinese composers working in contemporary styles. But listening to Lang Lang play the Yellow River Concerto, I'm mesmerised by how his skill and passion turn musical propaganda into something almost as exciting as a Fantasy by Thalberg. Listening to Shaham play The Butterfly Lovers, I'm swept along by the sheer tackiness of it. I wish I liked the music better. But whether a critic in the West likes this music is now irrelevant. We all thought that the solution to the crisis of Western classical music would be a musical solution, a new insight, a new direction. It turns out, perhaps it will be a geopolitical, cultural solution. 0