Ever since he moved to Manhattan from China in 1986, Tan Dun's compositional career has continued to cross geographical and musical continents. The Barbican's weekend-long festival, Fire Crossing Water, was an appropriately diverse showcase of some of his most recent collaborations, featuring artists such as cellist Yo-Yo Ma and film director Ang Lee.
All of Tan Dun's compositions programmed in the festival - played by the London Sinfonietta and BBC Symphony Orchestra, sung by London Voices, and conducted by Tan Dun himself - are grounded in the aesthetic principles of multi-culturalism and multi-media.
His radically universalist vision seeks to demonstrate that all cultures are equivalent in their essential humanity and common compassion - an ideal as artistically watertight as it is politically unassailable. But in practice, the terms of Tan Dun's fusion of different cultures and media are creatively problematic.
There was a telling contrast between Tan Dun's realisation of multi-media in the world premiere of his Crouching Tiger Concerto - written for Yo-Yo Ma and bawu soloist Jun Qiao Tang, and accompanied by images derived from Ang Lee's forthcoming film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon - and Bill Viola's video for Edgard Varèse's Déserts, performed live by the BBCSO and Pierre André Valade.
Introducing the Crouching Tiger Concerto, Tan Dun and Ang Lee spoke of their attempt to invert the usual priorities of the interaction between film and music.
Instead of music enhancing a cinematic narrative, here the music's drama - driven by Yo-Yo Ma's contributions - was the catalyst for Lee's images. Tan Dun's music was a series of immediately attractive and descriptive episodes - exactly like a suite from the most conventional film score.
In the end, Ang Lee's and James Schamus's discontinuous, improvisational film had very little room to produce any creative friction with this transparent, directly affecting music.
At the other end of the spectrum, Bill Viola's video-track for Varèse's Déserts articulated the real possibilities of multi-media collaborations. Imitating - but never slavishly mimicking - the music's elemental changes of texture and mood, Viola's editing created an interpretative space between image and music.
In comparison, Tan Dun's Crouching Tiger Concerto allowed only the narrowest gap for difference or imagination.
A directness of musical communication is also an essential part of Tan Dun's multi-culturalism. In The Gate: Orchestral Theatre IV, Tan Dun dramatises the deaths of three legendary women from Japanese, Chinese and English-speaking cultures, all of whom commit suicide: Yu Ji, from the story Farewell my Concubine, Shakespeare's Juliet, and Koharu, a central figure of the Japanese drama The Love Suicides at Amijima.
Three soloists represented these respective cultures, with Beijing Opera Actress Shi Min, classical soprano Nancy Allen Lundy, and Japanese puppeteer Hua Hua Zhang.
Tan Dun's music dramatises each of the women's stories with a mix of expressionist outbursts and generic, folk-music modality. The piece tells the three stories against the backdrop of this suggestively cinematic music.
For Tan Dun, the fact that he features three different cultures is enough to make the piece meaningfully multi-dimensional. But the combination of all this music and theatre is mystifyingly bland.
Water Passion after St Matthew, composed in response to Bach's St Matthew Passion, encapsulates the problem.
When each piece comprises so many different elements - like Water Passion's performance-art percussion-playing with 17 bowls of water, an oratorio-style chorus, and instrumental and vocal soloists - the compositional interest is in how Tan Dun weaves them together.
But Tan Dun simply appropriates the surface power of individual gestures and styles. There is no real engagement with each kind of musical material. For all the grandiose theorising behind much of Tan Dun's music, the actual results in performance are frustratingly predictable.
Tan Dun's mix of media may be innovative, in some sense, for the concert hall. But the way Tan Dun synthesises his panoply of cultural sources is skilfully manipulative rather than radically contemporary.
