The 24th BMF Closing Gala

A Premiere and A Memorial - Tan Dun Conducts China Philharmonic Orchestra in Conversation with Stravinsky

19:30 | Sunday | Oct 24 | Poly Theatre

Ticket (CNY): : VIP1080/680/380/180/80

The closing concert of BMF is tailor-made for the theme Masters and Celebrations. The composer and conductor Tan Dun performs works of Stravinsky and himself with the China Philharmonic Orchestra. As an important member of CCOM's legendary Class'77, Tan 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.

This performance is a dialogue between the two composers transcending time and space. 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.

Fire Ritual - War and Peace makes use of elements from traditional Chinese sacrificial music and court music to construct a ritual of five emotions in the form of contemporary music, imagining a dialogue between man and nature. It reflects on wars and pleads peace for human. This is Tan's first combination of the erhu and the symphony orchestra. With striking and varied effects, it pulls at our heartstrings in the age of pandemic.

Stravinsky: Fireworks  4'

Tan Dun: Erhu Concerto "Fire Ritual” - in Memory of the  30'

Victims of War (Premiere)

—Intermission—

Tan Dun: Double Concerto for Pipa and Guzheng (1995-98)  20'

I. Andante molto

II. Allegro

III. Adagio

IV. Allegro vivace&Adagio

Stravinsky: The Firebird Suite (1919 version)  23'

Erhu: Yiwen Lu 

Pipa: Han Yan 

Guzheng : Su Chang

China Philharmonic Orchestra

Conductor: Tan Dun