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The China Philharmonic Orchestra in Their Vancouver Debut

Star conductor Long Yu set to perform at UBC's Chan Centre for the Performing Arts

Credit: VSO

China Philharmonic Orchestra

Star conductor Long Yu set to perform at UBC’s Chan Centre for the Performing Arts 

Good News from Beijing! There’s music of Beethoven and Dvořák, as well as a popular Chinese concert overture in store as the globally renowned China Philharmonic Orchestra (CPO) comes to Vancouver’s Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on November 30, 2016, presented by Poly Culture. The historic performance, the CPO’s Vancouver debut, will be led by award-winning and internationally renowned conductor Long Yu, and also feature the 12-year-old piano prodigy Serena Wang as soloist. The performance takes place on Wednesday, November 30 at 7:30 p.m. at the Chan Centre.

Maestro Long Yu Maestro Long Yu is the founding artistic director of the Beijing Music Festival, recognized internationally as a hub of musical life in China’s capital. He serves as artistic director and chief conductor of the China Philharmonic Orchestra, music director of the Shanghai Symphony, and artistic director of the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra. All three ensembles are among China’s finest and tour actively at home and abroad in addition to their regular seasons featuring the world’s top soloists.

“On behalf of the China Philharmonic Orchestra, I am honoured to perform at UBC’s Chan Centre for the Performing Arts in Vancouver,” said Maestro Long Yu. “Vancouver has a reputation as a world-class city and I can think of no better place to launch our 2016 North American tour.”

The program will open with the symphonic poem, Good News from Beijing Reaches the Frontier. It was composed in the mid-1970s, originally as a band work for Chinese wind instruments. The “frontier” of which it speaks is the southern province of Yunnan, which shares borders with Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam. Its creators, Zheng Lu and Ma Hong-yeh, had visited the towns and villages there many times, absorbing the ethnic traditions of the Miao and Yi people. The folk tunes of the area influence and inspire this piece, which captures the jubilation and celebration that accompanies the arrival of news from the Chinese capital. The symphonic version of the piece was created in the autumn of 1976—timed perhaps with the announcement of the denunciation of the Gang of Four (including Madam Mao) for the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution. The “Good News” marked the end of an era of political turbulence in China, and initiated major celebrations from the streets of Beijing all the way to the borderlands.

We’re familiar with Beethoven’s reputation as a curmudgeonly, creative genius. It’s easy to forget that as a boy of 12 he was trotted out as a piano playing prodigy, the heir apparent to Mozart. By 1792, Beethoven had settled in Vienna with the desire to “receive the spirit of Mozart at the hands of Haydn.” As Master and Pupil however, “Papa” Haydn and the young Beethoven weren’t the best match, with Haydn frequently away on tour. However, it was for a concert in Vienna in December 1795 (meant to showcase Haydn’s recent London Symphonies) that Beethoven was offered to chance to play a concerto of his own. Beethoven chose his newly composed Piano Concerto in C Major. It was in fact the third piano concerto that Beethoven had written, but when it became the first to be published, it acquired its designation as the Piano Concerto No. 1.

Beethoven’s performances delivered “tremendous … character, unheard of bravura and facility … great velocity of finger, united with extreme delicacy of touch and intense feeling.” So it is with the young piano soloist Serena Wang (aka Wang Yalun). Born in October of 2004, by the age of 5 she had become the youngest winner of the Bach Competition at the University of California, Berkeley. Before she was 10 she graced the stage of the Orpheum with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and conductor Long Yu for a special Lunar New Year program in February of 2014. Now she makes a welcome return to Vancouver for this tour with the renowned China Philharmonic, to perform Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in C Major.

For the final work of this programme, Maestro Long Yu brings music From the New World, back to the shores of its origins. Antonin Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 in E minor was written during the composer’s 1890s sojourn in New York as the head of the National Conservatory of Music of America. Almost immediately following the symphony’s hugely successful premiere in December of 1893, its subtitle From the New World was the source of considerable confusion. Dvořák had advised his students “that the future music of this country must be founded on what are called Negro melodies …These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil. They are the folk songs of America and your composers must turn to them.” Given that, many listeners detected in the New World symphony hints of Negro spirituals and Native American melodies, something the composer would later dismiss as nonsense. Others sensed a nostalgic longing for the composer’s Czech homeland, which he assuaged by taking a summer vacation in Spillville Iowa, with its large community of Czech immigrants. Perhaps one of Dvořák’s students struck the right balance, years later, when he added the now famous lyrics to the plaintive English horn melody of the second movement. For Dvořák, “I am goin’ home…” was where he wished to be while in the U.S. For budding North American composers, it was inspiration to look in their own backyard for melodic inspiration. Whatever the case, the symphony paved the way to a more global view of the world and the possibility of wider musical influences.

Concert tickets range from $51.50 to $134.00, and are available through the VSO.