Life and Leisure
Discovering harmony in Chinese folk music
By Gan Tian (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-08-20 12:05
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The Orchestra of Chinese Instruments is presenting three performances to showcase the variety in local musical styles.
The concert Jasmine will be staged on Aug 29 at Beijing Concert Hall. The song Jasmine is hailed as representative of Chinese folk music. Based on a South China melody, it has become the most popular tune from the genre in China and the world.
Yan Bozheng will take up the baton to lead the group in performances of other famous folk songs. These range stylistically from the pipa solo The Ambush to the suona horn song Hundreds of Birds Worshipping the Phoenix.
It will also feature Melody of Burying Flowers, a song popularized in the TV drama A Dream of Red Mansions, which is based on one of the country's four premium classic novels.
Our Splendid Motherland, to be presented on Aug 30 and 31, at the National Center for the Performing Arts, was developed for the 60th anniversary of New China's founding last year. Under the baton of Chen Xieyang, the concert will include the Xinjiang folk song Why Flowers Are So Red, pipa melody The Swan, and the huqin tune Profound Night.
Some of the songs will imbue classical Chinese music with modern flourishes.
Taiwan pop star Jay Chou's hit The Daisy Platform, for instance, will be performed with erhu and cello. The performance will be enhanced by hi-tech stage effects and lighting.
Chen will also take up the baton for the Golden Echoes concert, which opens on Sept 1 at the same venue with Spring Festival's Prelude and erhu melody The Moonlight Reflection in Erquan Spring. Johann Strauss' Galopp will be reinterpreted in a Chinese folk style.
Classical Western music fans will have the chance to hear pizzicato-polka in which the instruments typically used in the other hemisphere are swapped for local alternatives, such as erhu and pipa.
The three performances have been selected as part of the Great Repertoires of Chinese National Art Ensembles 2010, initiated by the Cultural Ministry.
China Daily
