On Thursday night the Windpipe Chinese Ensemble gave its North American debut at Northwestern’s Thorne Auditorium. The one night only concert was the product of a collaboration between the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office of New York (HKETO), and Chicago’s own Fulcrum New Music Project, in celebration of the Chinese New Year.

As people were filing into Thorne before the performance began, footage of the Windpipe Ensemble doing presentations at two Chicago public schools was projected on the back wall of the stage. (The obviously tireless group did these despite having a total of 36 hours in Chicago.) The students looked engaged and impressed, though perhaps a little mystified, which mirrored my own reaction to the beginning of the concert.

The concert opened with three original Chinese compositions, which the ensemble played from memory and with impeccable ensemble. Admittedly it took several minutes for my ears to adjust to the tones and tunings of instruments I had previously encountered maybe once or twice, if at all. After this initial acclimation though, I began to be struck by how many familiar sounds I was hearing. Yi Jian-quan’s “Birds Returning to the Woods” was full of rapid, high-register erhu glisses, which could literally have been plucked from Ravel’s “Ma Mère l'Oye,” where the composer uses high tessitura violin glisses also to evoke birds. I don’t know who would be mimicking who, so this may well be a case of musical convergent evolution. Parts of Clarence Mak’s “Koel on Mount Parker” sounded very much like Irish flute playing, and such sonic similarities were in abundance.

This had me thinking, “Hey! We’re not so different after all!” However, when Joshua Chan’s piece “Distant Reflection” combined the Chinese ensemble with players from Fulcrum Point, I was reminded that, whichever way you slice it, the Chinese and European musical languages are a bit different from each other. This was no better embodied than when Widepipe’s erhu played the same notes as the tempered piano that had joined them, and the pitch was jarringly off. I’m sure it's simply a question of hearing pitch differently, but at least for me effect was a little unpleasant. The work seemed a self-conscious effort at fusing two musical worlds that, as I suggested above, are not THAT different in the first place, just in a few details.

The highlight of the evening for me was easily the world premier of Ng Cheuk-yin’s “Tiger Sketch.” The work accompanies/is accompanied by a video of Chinese artist Li Chi-Ching sketching and painting, well, tigers. The Windpipe Ensemble’s playing was thrilling, as was it to witness a successful fusion of the two art forms. It was also pretty cool that NBC’s Nesita Kwan closed the evening playing narrator to a charming piece by Fulcrum Point’s artistic director Stephen Burns about the origins of the Chinese zodiac. It was a great way to ring in the Year of the Tiger, arriving not speaking one word of musical Chinese, but leaving knowing two or three.