Beijing Music Festival: Opera for All

The Beijing Music Festival, an annual music festival held in Beijing, “continues to solidify its position as an international hub for classical music,” reports Lauren Mcquistin for Opera Now. Creating a culture where classical music is for everyone is very much at the forefront of the illustrious festival’s goal.

The latest edition of the Beijing Music Festival, founded in 1998 by conductor Long Yu and today one of the world’s most important cultural events, welcomed the Chinese premieres of Handel’s Rinaldo in a concert performance by the London-based baroque orchestra The English Concert, and of Berg’s Wozzeck, in a fully staged production. The latter was “bold in its nuanced exploration of the universal human feelings of alienation, despair and struggle,” according to Mcquistin.

An important component of the Beijing Music Festival is to nurture future talent. Shuang Zou, the current artistic director, who is helping create a new wave of opera in China, says that she aims to “fit in as many young musicians to appear in our festival as possible,” including bringing Chinese composers from overseas to China to “share their vision, how they see themselves as Chinese composers in the world map.”

Read the full feature here.

Wozzeck at Beijing Music Festival, 2025