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Lullaby for a hectic world
2019-09-24 
The Mahler Chamber Orchestra will present three concerts at Poly Theater during the upcoming Beijing Music Festival, led by Russian pianist-conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy.[Photo provided to China Daily]

The Beijing Music Festival will open with an outdoor staging of a groundbreaking Max Richter piece that literally encourages the audience to fall asleep, Chen Nan reports.

It's not altogether usual for visitors to spend the whole night out on the Great Wall, but that's just what is about to happen at the opening concert of the Beijing Music Festival on Oct 4-when German-born British composer Max Richter performs his groundbreaking eight-hour work, Sleep.

The performance will begin on Friday, October 4, at 10 pm and will wrap up at 6 am the next morning. Providing beds, the event organizers will encourage the audience to sleep out at the foot of the Shuiguan section of the Badaling Great Wall in Beijing and soak up the music.

A string quintet from the American Contemporary Music Ensemble and British soprano Grace Davidson will perform the piece with Richter, who is making his first performance on the Chinese mainland accompanying them on the piano.

"The piece, Sleep, has been performed all around the world but this will be the first time that it will be played at the Great Wall. I will sleep there myself. It will be a unique listening experience to fit a full night's rest," says conductor Yu Long, who founded the Beijing Music Festival in 1998.

conductor Yu Long, founder of the festival.[Photo provided to China Daily]

According to Tu Song, program director of the festival, Sleep premiered in 2015 in Berlin. Last year, the piece was staged outdoors for the first time in Los Angeles' Grand Park for two nights.

"Performing Sleep at the Great Wall, such an iconic location, is a very special opportunity," says Tu. "On Oct 5, the sun will rise at around 6:13 am and the final hour of the composition accompanies the sunrise when the audience wakes up."

He also notes that the piece was actually designed to send the listener to sleep and the composer adopted a scientific approach to writing it. The composer worked with neuroscientist David Eagleman to align the music with the human brain and the body's natural sleep rhythms.

"This performance is more than a normal long concert or any other form of entertainment. It's about music, which becomes something else. It's an eight-hour lullaby," Tu says.

Celebrating its 22th year, the 2019 Beijing Music Festival, with the theme of "timeless music into the future," will stage 22 performances over Oct 4-28, including operas, symphonic concerts, recitals, chamber music concerts and virtual reality music experiences. The festival will also present more than a dozen free educational events, from children's concerts to master classes and lectures.

German-born British composer Max Richter.[Photo provided to China Daily]

Over the past two decades, Yu has established a rich artistic foundation for the Beijing Music Festival. Beginning in 2018, the new artistic director Zou Shuang has succeeded in incorporating more inclusive and avant-garde artistic elements into the festival to impress audiences.

"Every year, as we develop the festival program, we try to introduce something rarely seen," says Tu, a former clarinet player who joined the festival in 2008. "Exploring a new style of classical music with today's most cutting-edge expressive forms is part of our mission to incorporate new ideas with new concepts into the festival."

This year, a young generation of internationally acclaimed composers will take to the festival's stage, including Du Yun, the first Chinese winner of the Pulitzer Prize for music, who will perform her opera Angel's Bone, and composer Michel van der Aa, who will perform his latest work of mixed-reality musical theater, Eight, which will be making its Asia debut.

As a leading figure in China's new generation of internationally acclaimed composers, Du won the prize for Angel's Bone, which took her seven years to accomplish.

Jointly commissioned by the Beijing Music Festival and the Holland Festival, Eight is a fusion of music, theater, visual art and virtual reality. From Oct 10 to 27, the Beijing Music Festival will present nearly 900 performances of it over 18 consecutive days, each one for a single audience and only lasting for half an hour, to celebrate its Chinese premiere.

"Eight is a super adventurous idea, which combines the firsthand experience of virtual reality with music. We are pushing the boundaries of music and technology," says Dutch composer Van der Aa in a video shared by the Beijing Music Festival on social media.

"The form of musical expression has developed very quickly-and faster than we ever imagined. The audience will get a glimpse of how music has developed up until today through this piece. It will be a surprise," says Yu.

With 2019 marking the 260th anniversary of the death of German-British baroque composer George Frideric Handel and the 150th anniversary of the death of French composer Hector Berlioz, the Beijing Music Festival will pay homage to the two legends with their operas, Xerxes and La Damnation de Faust.

On Oct 17, conductor David Stern, son of the late legendary violinist Isaac Stern, will lead a concerto of Handel's opera Xerxes with the French ensemble, Opera Fuoco.

American soprano Renee Fleming will perform at the festival.[Photo provided to China Daily]

On Oct 20, 23 and 25, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra led by Russian pianist-conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy will give three concerts at the Poly Theater, with a repertoire that includes two pieces by the British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and Songs of Travel.

On Oct 21, Charles Dutoit will conduct the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra and the Philharmonic Chorus of Tokyo in a performance of La Damnation de Faust by Berlioz, 17 years after the Chinese debut of the work was performed under the baton of Yu in 2002.

Other highlights will see Slovak coloratura soprano Edita Gruberova make her debut during the Beijing Music Festival on Oct 9 at the National Center for the Performing Arts, along with the China Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Peter Valentovic, and a special arrangement of the opera Tales of Hoffmann by Jacques Offenbach performed entirely by children on Oct 19.

The festival will close with a concert given by American soprano Renee Fleming, alongside maestro Yu Long and the China Philharmonic Orchestra at the Forbidden City Concert Hall.

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