As an important member of CCOM's legendary Class'77, The composer and conductor Tan Dun has been famous home and abroad since the 1980s for his eclectic employment of ideas and techniques. For the 15th BMF, Tan was invited to create Youth, which is a mixture of rock-and-roll, Peking Opera and atonal music. It fully demonstrates the festival and the composer's mutual affirmation of fearless and uninhibited imagination.

Tan has admired Stravinsky, "the Picasso of music", since his apprenticeship. Stravinsky's rarely heard early work Fireworks and the classic Firebird Suite made folk, primitive music modern. Tan's Double Concerto of Guzheng and Pipa, and Fire Ritual - War and Peace, whose new version premiered at the festival, are inspired by Chinese history and Chinese cultural and musical tradition. In the latter, Tan expresses his concern, as the goodwill ambassador of UNESCO, for the world in the epidemic era.