Chinese Hua Xia Chamber Ensemble to Perform at Alice Tully Hall in New York

The Chinese Hua Xia Chamber Ensemble (pronounced hwa sha) will make its Lincoln Center Debut at Alice Tully Hall on Monday, May 7th at 7:30 pm. The ensemble is scheduled to perform a program titled Dialogue between the Traditional and the Modern, including folk and Chinese Opera works as well as contemporary works by both Chinese and Western composers such as Xie Wenhui, John Mallia, and Victoria Bond.

Founded in 1995, and currently touring the United States with performances in New York and Boston, the Chinese Hua Xia Chamber Ensemble of the China Conservatory has become one of the most vibrant and technically impressive chamber ensembles of China.

Under the robust leadership of Professor Zhang Weiliang and Maestro Tsung Yeh, the ensemble has achieved international acclaim. Its musicians, who are mainly young conservatory teachers, have won numerous instrumental competition awards in China and abroad.

Their repertoire ranges from traditional Chinese folk music and Chinese opera music to contemporary Chinese and international classical music. The ensemble has recorded several CDs and has performed in the United States, France, Portugal, Australia, and in Asia and Africa. For this performance, the program will feature six world premieres commissioned by the ensemble for this US tour.

The Program includes:

Lang Tao Sha (Traditional)
Feng Qiu Huang, by Liu Qing (World Premiere)
Five Impressions, by Gao Ping (World Premiere)
Wild Geese in the Sandbank (Traditional)
Graceful, by Wang Dan Hong (World Premiere)
Nodes, by John Mallia (World Premiere)
Deep Night (Traditional Chinese Opera)
Less, but More, by Xie Wen Hui (World Premiere)
Bridges, by Victoria Bond (World Premiere arrangement for this ensemble)

Performers include: Huang Mei (guqin); Wang Yidong (Chinese percussion); Mark Baekbum Yee (cello); Chai Shuai (erxian & erhu); Qiu Ji (zheng); Ge Yong (pipa); Chen Yue (flute); Wu Huanghuang (yangqin); Huang Mei (ruan); Chen Yue (flute); Tomoya Aomori, Justin Doute (western percussion); Zhang Weiliang (xiao); Han Shi (violin), Eric Umble (clarinet), Sun Pei (piano). Tsung Yeh, conductor, Zhang Weiliang Artistic Director. Zhao Talimu, President of China Conservatory, serves as leader of this delegation.

Hua Xia Chamber Ensemble Artistic Director Zhang Weiliang is a professor, graduate supervisor, Xiao and Di player, and educator at the China Conservatory. He is currently Dean of the Chinese instruments department of the China Conservatory, a member and Vice Dean of the Academic Committee of the China Conservatory, President of the Chinese Bamboo Flute Society, Vice-Chairman of the Beijing Musicians Association, and member of the Beijing People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries. He has published the monograph “Performance Practice of Flute”, “Performance Practice of Xiao”, and released a dozen teaching DVDs. His compositions have won many awards. He contributed solo performances for soundtracks of award winning movies such as Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern, Farewell My Concubine, and The Emperor and the Assassin.

Wenhui Xie is an emerging young composer and pianist from Beijing, China. Her music is international in style but retains a strong ethnic influence as a result of her cultural background and philosophy of life. Wenhui’s works cover many genres, including choral/vocal music, solo, chamber, orchestral works, music for dance and film. Her works were awarded prizes and honors in many competitions and have been performed at concerts and music festivals in China, the United States, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy and Croatia.

A major force in 21st century concert music, Victoria Bond leads a dual career as composer and conductor. Her compositions have been praised by the New York Times as “Powerful, stylistically varied and technically demanding,” and her conducting has been called “impassioned” by the Wall Street Journal and “full of energy and fervor” by the New York Times. She was recently honored with the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Walter Hinrichsen Award. Bond has served as Exxon/Arts Endowment Conductor with the Pittsburgh Symphony; guest conducted internationally and was profiled in the Wall Street Journal, NBC’s Today Show, People Magazine and The New York Times. The first woman awarded a doctorate in conducting from The Juilliard School, Bond has served as Music Director of the New Amsterdam and Roanoke Symphony Orchestras and Artistic Director of Opera Roanoke and the Harrisburg Opera, Music Adviser of the Wuhan Symphony in China and Principal Guest Conductor of Chamber Opera Chicago.

Composer John Mallia lives and works in Boston where he has been Director of the Electronic Music Studio and a member of the Composition faculty at New England Conservatory since 2005. His primary interests include chamber music with an electronic component, multichannel acousmatic work, and multimedia installation. Much of his work is informed by constructs and concepts involving real and implied physical spaces. John’s music has been performed internationally by organizations such as Musicacoustica (Beijing, China), Ensemble N_JP (Japan/US), L.A. Freewaves (California), Gaudeamus (The Netherlands), International Computer Music Association, Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States, Zeppelin Festival of Sound Art (Barcelona, Spain), Festival Synthèse (Bourges, France), Interensemble’s Computer Arts Festival (Padova, Italy), Society for New Music (New York), CyberArts, and Medi@terra`s Travelling Mikromuseum (Greece, Bulgaria, Germany, Slovenia).

Shanghai-born conductor Tsung Yeh has the distinction of being the first conductor ever to hold music directorships of both a western symphony orchestra and a major Chinese instrument symphony orchestra. He presently serves as Music Director of the Singapore Chinese Orchestra, and Music Director of the South Bend Symphony Orchestra in his 22nd season. In an age where conductors specialize in ever-narrowing niches within the musical world, Maestro Yeh repeatedly demonstrates the unique ability to transcend boundaries both musical and cultural on three continents.

Zhao Talimu, leader of this delegation, is President of China Conservatory. With a Doctorate in Literature, he is a professor of Musicology, Director of the Committee of the Theory of Chinese Musicians’ Association, and Vice-president of the Society for Chinese Ethnical Musicology. He has published over 40 articles. In 2005, he was selected by Chinese government as a visiting scholar to conduct research on ethnomusicology at the University of Illinois (UIUC).

Tickets are $20 and are available at www.lincolncenter.org and at Alice Tully Hall, 1941 Broadway (65th Street between Broadway & Amsterdam Avenue); For more information, call 212 671 4050.