Music Industry News Network: Festival D'Aix & Beijing Music Festival Sign Five-Year Agreement

Long Yu, Linda Davies, and Bernard Foccroulle in Beijing, October 2015

Music Industry News Network

Two of the world's most renowned music festivals have agreed an historic five-year artistic collaboration, orchestrated by the KT Wong Foundation.

Bernard Foccroulle, Artistic Director of the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, and Long Yu, Founder and Artistic Director of the Beijing Music Festival, signed an agreement on 10th October 2015 that will see an exchange of the finest classical and operatic productions between China and Europe.

This groundbreaking partnership will launch in October 2016 with a series of performances of Benjamin Britten's operatic masterpiece, A Midsummer Night's Dream. This 2015 revival of the legendary 1991 production, directed by Robert Carsen, will be staged at the Poly Theatre in Beijing as part of the Beijing Music Festival.

This unique cultural milestone was conceived by the pioneering KT Wong Foundation, an organisation that has led the way in delivering boundary-pushing cultural, artistic and educational exchanges between China and the West since its launch in 2007. As well as a commitment to promoting cultural relations, the Foundation has also established itself as a leading supporter of young musical talent in China, Europe and the US.

Under the leadership of Founder and Chairman Lady Linda Wong Davies, the organisation has been a longtime supporter of both the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence and the Beijing Music Festival, and worked tirelessly over the past three years to bring them together.

In France the Foundation has supported a range of productions presented at the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence including:

- Handel's Ariodante directed by Richard Jones
- JS Bach's Trauernacht directed by Katie Mitchell
- Britten's A Midsummer Nights Dream directed by Robert Carsen
- Tchaikovsky's Iolanta/Persephone directed by Peter Sellers
- Jonathan Dove's Monster in the Maze directed by Marie-Eve Signeyrole

In addition the Foundation has been introducing the work of the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence to Chinese audiences since December 2014 with a series of film screenings in Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin of some of the Festival's previous seminal productions. These extraordinary productions have included Patrice Chéreau's chilling production of Strauss' Elektra, The Robert Carsen sparkling revival of A Midsummer Nights Dream and Robert Lepage's water-filled production of Stravinsky's The Nightingale.

Lady Linda Wong Davies said: "The KT Wong Foundation are extremely proud to have played a key role in securing this historic partnership between the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence and the Beijing Music Festival.

"These two leading music festivals are recognised for showcasing the world's finest artistic and musical talent, and this argument will allow them to reach out to new audiences in both countries, create new artistic ventures, and provide opportunities for young artists, creators and performers.

"The KTWF has worked tirelessly over the past three years to bring these two festivals together. This collaboration represents a significant triumph for the Foundation's continuing commitment to building cultural bridges and creating the best environment for artistic exchange to thrive between China and the West.

"I commend my colleagues B Foucroulle and Maestro Long Lu on their individual and combined vision and courage to come together in their desire for greater artistic creativity and excellence.

"We must remember that in these uncertain times, where our societies are rocked by economic and political changes, that France‎ has continued to show the world that support of the cultural arts remain a priority. The leadership shown by the signing of this agreement is a testament to the strength of the relationship between France and China.'

"Since its launch in 2007, the Foundation has already produced a hugely diverse body of work, creating, producing and supporting boundary-pushing creative ventures across disciplines including opera, design, architecture and film.
"I am very excited to be part of this cultural milestone and look forward to helping make this unique collaboration truly an exciting creative platform for meaningful cultural exchange between China and France."

Reader's Digest: The Power of Music - Lara Downes reflects on the beautiful soundtrack to her life

Reader's Digest
By Lara Downes

Photo: Anthony Tremmaglia for Reader's Digest

Every Saturday morning, when I was a little girl, my sisters and I went to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music for what we called Saturday classes: piano lessons, theory, music history—serious classical music training for serious little musicians. After we got home, we had a ritual. We’d get out our “dress-up” from the vintage steamer trunk that housed a collection of my mother’s 1960s party dresses and my grandmother’s furs, go through my parents’ record collection—the Beatles, Sinatra, Charles Aznavour, Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday—and dance around the living room. The Billie Holiday records stopped me in my tracks. I was enthralled by Lady Day, her dark eyes shaded by a white gardenia, her world-worn voice, and the mood and phrasing, line and color that she brought to even the simplest tune.

In my diary, when I was eight, I made a careful list in perfect cursive of all my favorite things. My favorite song was Billie Holiday’s “I Cover the Waterfront”—such a sad song, about watching and waiting for a love that’s gone. That year was the last year of my father’s long, slow dying. After he passed away, I spent foggy afternoons at the window, looking out over the San Francisco Bay, waiting for the grief to lift. I pulled out the old records at night. “I cover the waterfront,” Billie sang. “I’m watching the sea / Will the one I love be coming back to me?”

My father was born in Harlem and grew up steps from the clubs where jazz blossomed in its golden age and where Billie Holiday was singing during his childhood. He loved jazz. In my earliest memories, he is listening to records, the long length of him stretched out in our living room. In the end, he left us the memories and the records.

Our family buried our loss in our music. My mother took me and my sisters to Europe, where we lived in the great capitals and studied at the great conservatories with the legendary artists of a quickly vanishing generation. It was a very different life, surely, than the one my father had imagined for us. American culture was something far away, accessed through overdubbed TV reruns, the occasional jar of peanut butter from an Army base commissary, and the cheap East Bloc bootleg jazz CDs we bought at open-air markets.

My sisters and I were growing up. I had my first love affairs. I spent one cold winter in Vienna practicing Schumann all day and listening to Billie Holiday records all night, missing a boy an ocean away. Schumann and Lady Day both knew a thing or two about heartache. “I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeing you,” she sang.

Ten years later, I moved back to the States. I made my way, very alone, through the unknown landscape of the New York music world. I was starting over, and it was hard. There were moments of despair and defeat. I practiced Ravel and Liszt all day in a windowless sublet and listened to Billie Holiday records at night. “Beautiful to take a chance,” she sang. I found new courage and took some chances and had some astonishing luck—a competition win, a Carnegie Hall debut recital, a recording contract.

I was hungry for American music, for a reconnection with what was home. I played music by Copland, Gershwin, Bernstein, Ellington. There was something I needed to find in a musical tradition “beyond category,” as Ellington put it—a musical sea made of waves of immigration and tides of change. This distinct sound, from the concert halls to the clubs, spoke to me because it is everything we are, coming from so many different places and people.

On my bedside table I have two posed studio photographs from the 1930s. My two grandmothers: Grandmother Fay, one of seven sisters born to Jewish immigrants from the town of Belz in Ukraine, who grew up in Buffalo, New York, and came out to San Francisco when my mother settled there, who lived just a few blocks away from us when I was little but whose story I wish I knew better. And my Jamaican grandmother, Ivy, who moved as a young woman to Harlem, who died when my father was very small, and whose story is lost to family history and memory except for the equation of nose and cheekbones that I see whenever I look in the mirror.

My story of race and roots is captured in these two faded portraits. Two women, looking out at me in the bloom of their youth, framed inside the parameters of a time in which a relationship between them would have been buried under layers of impossibilities and prejudices. Looking into their eyes, I see proof of how much change has come in two short generations, how very recently their granddaughter’s version of American life became possible.

My parents met at a sit-in in San Francisco in the mid-’60s, and they dreamed for their three caramel-colored girls of a future color-blind America in which race wouldn’t matter. But, of course, it did. From the beginning, I was well aware of the undercurrent of racial complexities and complexes that run through our culture. Being caramel colored in America comes with a burden of confusions, assumptions, and questions. Living abroad shifted that burden, but when I came back, I felt it again.

A musician is born and then made. Everything folds together: all the music you hear, study, practice, and perform, all the lessons you’re taught and the ones you learn on your own. So when I decided to pay tribute to Billie Holiday by recording a piano album of her songbook, I had to take a hard look at this lifetime I’ve lived with her music. I had to turn back to the nights when her voice had sung me out of sadness to sleep, back to those Saturday afternoons of my childhood, and to ask myself what I’d learned from her, as a musician and a woman.

She was one of the most innovative and distinctive musicians of any genre. She was a brilliant, mesmerizing, self-destructive woman whose life swung from tragedy to triumph and back again. Her voice spoke volumes about hard living and heartbreak and about improvising your way through it all. She took a song, any song, and made it immediately and forever her own. She didn’t follow anyone’s rules. “If I’m going to sing like anyone else,” she said, “then I don’t need to sing at all.”

When I was eight, Billie Holiday’s music taught me that something beautiful could be made from sadness. For a musician, that is one of the most powerful lessons to learn. It’s what saves us. She lived a short and troubled life, but the happiness and luck that she did find, she found through music. And finding your joy and strength in music is something I know. I know what it’s like, when things have fallen to pieces, to put on a satin dress and go onstage and find the secret power of a woman in a satin dress and make your listeners fall in love with the music. Just like I fell in love with Billie Holiday’s songs.

She gave away her heart boldly and foolishly, and every time it was bruised, she turned that pain into something graceful and moving, in a song. “Love is funny or it’s sad, it’s a good thing or it’s bad,” she sang, “but beautiful.” There have been times when I’ve given my heart at the wrong time to the wrong man. One spring I played Rachmaninoff during the day and listened to Billie Holiday at night. “I’m a fool to want you,” she sang, a phrase I echoed in my head.

It’s been hard to hold on to hope this year. I’m raising a caramel-colored boy of my own and would like to think that my parents’ dream can come true for him. But I am afraid it is still out of reach. I’ve been sad and turned to the music that taught me how to find the beauty in pain. I’ve been playing Billie Holiday songs across America with my musician’s voice reaching back to join hers. I’ve met people who heard her sing in Harlem when my father was a boy, people who were her friends and lost her too soon, people who have lived their whole lives with her records, as I have.

This music has made me new friends, told me new stories, brought back things I thought I’d lost a long time ago. It’s brought me home. After all the years, all the travels, all the music, I’ve understood the lesson I’ve learned from Lady Day: that the magic in making music, as in living life, is to forget about all the definitions and rules you ever learned, to lean back against the launchpad of your history and your experience, your losses and heartaches and joys, to look out into the future and to make something that is completely your own. Something that reaches deep to your center and pulls out a truth powerful enough to illuminate the moment and to shine far ahead, into memory. Something unexpected, something indefinable, perhaps complicated, but beautiful.

Listen to the music that inspired this essay here.

New York Classical Review: Long Yu Leads New York Philharmonic in Chinese New Year Program

Photo: Chris Lee

New York Classical Review
By Eric C. Simpson

The New York Philharmonic’s fifth annual Chinese New Year celebration on Tuesday night was something of a riddle. On the one hand, there was a ninety-minute program with a sought-after violinist, a stage address from United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, and no intermission suggested an emphasis on providing entertainment for the gala patrons whose tables were being set on the promenade outside the hall.

On the other, the most substantial item on the program by far was the New York premiere of a forty-minute piece from the last decade that proved as artistically and intellectually stimulating as anything the Philharmonic might present on a regular subscription concert.

The first music of the evening was certainly more in the former spirit, like any good concert overture: Li Huanzhi’s Spring Festival Overture, composed in 1955-56, is a peculiar product of the early years of Western-style composing in China. Li’s darting melodies and galloping energy, combined with a Romantic idiom, almost conjure reminiscences of something between the American West and a Parisian Can-can. Under the direction of guest conductor Long Yu, the music was dignified, but not humorless.

More substantial, though opaque in its own way, was the famous The Butterfly Lovers, a violin concerto written jointly by Chen Gang and He Zhanhao just a few years after the Spring Festival Overture. The soloist on this occasion was Maxim Vengerov, who a decade ago was at the top of an intensely competitive field before an injury forced his career into hiatus. Technical problems, such as murky passagework and wandering intonation, linger, but the most attractive elements of Vengerov’s playing are the ones that always stood out: the effortless warmth of his tone and keen expression of his interpretation.

The Butterfly Lovers offered the violinist ample opportunity to demonstrate these two qualities. The concerto has its stretches of showy virtuosity, but at its core it is an innocently lyrical piece, lightly orchestrated and unassuming, its solo part taking inspiration from traditional Chinese instruments rather than Romantic violinistic flair. Vengerov’s interpretation was poignant, finding moments of intense passion in the gleaming lines without ever hurrying them

Less successful was Vengerov’s performance of the Kreisler chestnut Tambourin Chinois, a fleeting bonbon that served essentially as a programmed encore. A master of pastiche, Kreisler in this brief showpiece combines Chinese musical idiom with violinistic fireworks of considerable difficulty—too much difficulty, apparently, for Vengerov, who rushed through the piece and failed to convey much its charm.

After the relative pleasantness of the first forty minutes, hearing Tan Dun’s The Secret Voices of Women was like stepping into an ice bath. Though the composer calls the piece a “Symphony for 13 Microfilms, Harp, and Orchestra,” there are no microfilm readers called for in the score; rather, “microfilm” is his name for a series of short films he has captured and edited of women in rural China singing traditional Nu Shu songs, cataloguing folk melodies in danger of being lost. Around these, Tan Dun constructs what is essentially a harp concerto, drawing inspiration from the songs and echoing them in his writing for orchestra and soloist.

At times, the writing takes the form of a simple and comfortably harmonious accompaniment, whether in the form of light pizzicato and percussion or burnished strings. At others, the echoed vocal melody becomes a maddening refrain, dissolving into interludes of shivering ice or harrowing fury.

The video scenes themselves are emotionally affecting, portraying mostly elderly women in a variety of activities, projected in three different frames above the stage. One in particular shows a song of ritual mourning, accompanied by frantic worrying in the solo harp. The songs are presented without any English text, a choice that avoids distracting from either the images or the music. One feels that Tan Dun made the correct decision here, though undoubtedly many audience members missed a layer of the work as a result.

The Philharmonic played brilliantly, sounding secure and powerful under Long Yu’s baton, and the performance of the solo part by the Philharmonic’s principal harpist, Nancy Allen, was exquisite. Tan Dun’s writing for harp is extremely demanding, not just in degree of difficulty, but in its length and relative continuity. More than equal to the technical challenges, Allen brought a strong voice to the varied solo line. Would that every gala concert left so strong an impression.

Washington Post: Julian Rachlin in Washington with Orchestre National de France

Washington Post
By Anne Midgette

I confess I wasn’t very excited about going to hear the Orchestre National de France play a program of chestnuts on Sunday afternoon. Evidently, a lot of other music-lovers shared my sentiments, because the Kennedy Center Concert Hall was only about half-full.

Why, after all, should we want to hear the Orchestre National de France? It’s partly the presenter’s job to let us know. And indeed, Doug Wheeler, the president emeritus of Washington Performing Arts, answered in his brief and on-point remarks from the stage before the show: because the orchestra was among the first that the organization’s founder, Patrick Hayes, presented in Washington even before Washington Performing Arts came to be, and the two institutions have had a long and fruitful collaboration ever since. [Ed: The previous sentence has been corrected; it originally misstated the date of Washington Performing Arts’s founding.] Maybe knowing that would have incited a few ticket-buyers; as it was, it was a bit of too little, too late.

Why else? Because their music director, Daniele Gatti, is a heavyweight in the conducting world, and will take over the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, one of the world’s greatest ensembles, when his contract with this group ends at the end of the current season.

But we couldn’t have known some of the other reasons beforehand. For instance: because Julian Rachlin, the violin soloist in the Shostakovich first concerto, is a veritable force of nature who turned out to be the centerpiece of a searing performance of that work. And because everything the orchestra played on Sunday was pretty remarkable — even for those of us who said beforehand that we had heard Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony done so often, and done so well, that we had no desire to hear it again any time soon. (An awful lot of my job these days seems to involve defending fine performances of over-familiar works.)

Gatti is a formidable presence on the podium: visually, he conveys a sense of physical power, so that his delicacy and restraint and detail take on a kind of implicit force. He used this to full effect throughout hte afternoon, starting with an exquisite, languid, idiomatic performance of Debussy’s “Prelude to the afternoon of a faun,” in which every instrument offered precision while maintaining the soft, fluid contours of this score.

But it was the Shostakovich that was the real tour de force. Rachlin, the violinist, is a small contained firebrand of a man onstage, and he eased his way into the opening movement with playing that was almost painful in its muted restraint, over the humid, brooding chords of the orchestra. The second movement then uncurled into some of the most biting fierce Shostakovich playing I can remember hearing. And when Rachlin got going into the final cadenza, he became a wild thing, a kind of inspired mad scientist in a monologue both profound and terrifying, until the orchestra finally chimed in with ferocious clashes of regretful understanding.

I didn’t even need to fight to lower my defenses against the Tchaikovsky; Gatti and the orchestra simply leveled them, with authoritative, urbane playing. Gatti even nodded to the piece’s familiarity by leaving off conducting entirely at times, keeping himself to the most minimal of gestures even in the final movement, which nonetheless seemed informed by the Shostakovich that had preceded it: more abrasive and aggressive than a triumphant resolution.

So those of us who went to this concert were pretty happy we had gone. Now, Washington Performing Arts is looking for ways to convince you that you want to go hear Ivan Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra, who arrive with Marc-André Hamelin and a slightly less overworked program on February 15th. You can get tickets at a 50% discount now.

Seattle Times: ‘All-Star Orchestra’ premieres classical music on TV

Composer Samuel Jones and violin soloist Anne Akiko Meyers after the TV filming of his new concerto for “All-Star Orchestra.”

The Seattle Times
By Tom Keogh

What do Gian Carlo Menotti’s 1951 one-act opera “Amahl and the Night Visitors,” Igor Stravinsky’s 1962 “The Flood: A Musical Play” and Samuel Jones’ 2014 “Concerto for Violin and Orchestra” have in common?

They are some of the only works of classical music whose world premieres were television productions, sans concert hall or live audience.

Those three are part of an exclusive club, with Tacoma resident Jones’ piece making history in its debut on public television’s Emmy-winning series “The All-Star Orchestra.”

Some have already seen Jones’ “All-Star” episode pairing “Concerto” with Mozart’s magnificent “Posthorn Serenade,” which was recorded at SUNY Purchase College in New York and is being broadcast over 80 PBS stations this winter. Seattle’s PBS station KCTS-9 has quietly tucked the program’s local debut (at 4 p.m., Sunday, Jan. 17) into the end of a four-hour marathon of the current “All-Star Orchestra” season.

That’s a somewhat indifferent presentation that doesn’t befit the broadcast’s regional significance or extensive roots in Seattle Symphony Orchestra history.

Jones, a founder and longtime dean of the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University, has a long and fruitful association with SSO. Beginning in 1997, he spent 14 years as the organization’s composer-in-residence (with a total of 13 premieres), 16 years as director of the annual Merriman Family Young Composers Workshop and two terms on the board of directors.

It’s no wonder Gerard Schwarz, while nearing the end of his own 26-year tenure as SSO music director, conducted a “Samuel Jones Celebration” in June 2011. The following night, Schwarz led the ensemble in the world premiere of Jones’ “Reflections: Songs of Fathers and Daughters,” commissioned by a group of donors led by Seattle real-estate businessman Charlie Staadecker.

These key relationships — between Jones, Schwarz and Staadecker — carried over to the “All-Star” presentation of “Concerto for Violin and Orchestra.”

Staadecker (who with his wife, Benita, had also commissioned Jones’ 2009 “Concerto for Trombone and Orchestra”) put together another consortium of donors to back the new work.

Meanwhile, Schwarz wanted his longtime collaborator to join him in working without a net. He offered a televised world premiere of the violin piece as an exciting — if nerve-wracking — special event, without the security of collective rehearsals, performed by the ready-for-anything All-Star Orchestra and renowned violin soloist Anne Akiko Meyers.

Schwarz’s post-Seattle passion project, “The All-Star Orchestra” debuted in 2014, bringing together 95 top orchestral musicians from across the country to perform no-audience, in-studio concerts, shot with 18 high-definition, roaming cameras. The series satisfies Schwarz’s lifelong desire to bring classical music to a broader audience.

Meyers learned the piece’s expressive and complex three movements over several weeks. The All-Star players prepared individually as well.

“On the day of taping,” Jones said, “the orchestra was right there. You would never believe this was being played for the first time.”

“It was a thrilling experience to have that kind of wonderful pressure,” said Schwarz.

“The concerto is about the life path of an artist,” Jones explained, “and runs parallel to Saint Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians, the line about faith, hope and love — the greatest of the three being love. I changed the order to hope, faith and love. The artist desires to do great things, grows a belief in the help of teachers, and in the third movement, love symbolizes the freedom and joy that comes from being an artist.”

Pianist Lara Downes Wins $50,000 Medal of Excellence

The Sphinx Organization announces Lara Downes as a recipient of the 2016 Medal of Excellence and $50,000 Artist Grant. Sphinx is a Detroit-based national organization dedicated to transforming lives through the power of diversity in the arts. The organization's annual awards honor outstanding artists of color who demonstrate artistic excellence, outstanding work ethic, a spirit of determination, and great potential for leadership. Lara Downes joins soprano Julia Bullock and cellist Gabriel Cabezas as 2016 honorees. For more information, visit http://sphinxmusic.org/sphinx-medals-of-excellence.html.

Strings Magazine: Shanghai Symphony Orchestra Announces Isaac Stern Violin Competition

Strings Magazine
By Stephanie Powell

"It has taken a little bit of time," David Stern, son of violinist Isaac Stern, modestly says of launching the Shanghai Isaac Stern International Violin Competition (SISIVC) that he will be co-chairing. In September, the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra announced the launch of the large-scale competition, which will offer $100,000 to the first-prize winner, making it the single largest monetary award for a violin competition. "I have to say that my father, in his lifetime, was not a great proponent of competitions," Stern says over the phone from Paris. "He didn’t believe in competitions very much and he didn’t believe in the concept of competing in music."

This was a belief that, when Long Yu (artistic director and chief conductor of the China Philharmonic Orchestra and music director of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra) approached David and his brother Michael with the idea of developing a competition to honor their father’s legacy and commemorate his relationship with China, left the pair of brothers in a quandary. "There’s the whole feeling that we are responsible for his legacy," David says, "and we want to do it as carefully as possible."

The brothers knew that China was a significant part of their father’s life. From Mao to Mozart, the Oscar-winning documentary highlighting Stern’s 1979 travels to China shortly after the end of the Cultural Revolution marked the beginning of a long love affair with the country and its musical community. In many ways, the trip served as the initial bridge between Western and Eastern music.

With their father’s ethos in mind—"thinking ahead, being on top of things, and not just doing what everyone else does"—the brothers decided to move forward with the competition. They were helped by an all-star cast, including advisor to the festival Yo-Yo Ma, whom David mentions during our call, "It’s his birthday today! I have to call him."

"We thought about today’s society and how difficult it is for young musicians to get themselves heard," David says, "and we thought if we could infuse this competition with aspects that reflected my father’s legacy and his principals, then it would not just be another competition.

"There will be a round where [finalists] will have to perform with a pianist and cellist and perform in a trio. That just tells you so much about the musician that a concerto doesn’t necessarily. Chamber music was so important to my father’s being." The competition will also include a Mozart round, where finalists will have to improvise their own cadenzas.

"As long as we maintain as much as possible that it’s not your ordinary competition," David says, "then we will be doing service to him. I feel like I’ve been connecting to him on a daily basis. Yu Long and the Chinese musical community have shown such understanding and respect for what my father stood for, and they speak about him in such a wonderful way," David adds, "I feel like we’re doing the right thing."

The application period is open now, for international violinists ranging in ages from 18 to 32, through January 31, 2016, and the competition is scheduled to run from August 14 through September 2, 2016, in Shanghai. A prize of $50,000 will be awarded for second place, and $25,000 for third with two additional awards available for the best performance of a Chinese work and the Isaac Stern Humanitarian Award.

For more information on the competition, visit shcompetition.com.

GQ Germany: Lang Lang Named "Man of the Year"

Lang Lang was named one of GQ's "Men of the Year" for his active and innovative social media presence.

See a related Süddeutsche Zeitung article by clicking here.

South China Morning Post: Chinese conductor Long Yu to get top honour for bridging East-West gap

South China Morning Post
By Kevin Kwong

Maestro Yu who recently set up Shanghai Orchestra Academy to receive prestigious prize from Atlantic Council next week alongside Henry Kissinger, Mario Draghi and Colombia's president.

Chinese conductor Yu Long is to receive the prestigious Global Citizen Award in New York on October 1. Yu, who is principal guest conductor with the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, will be honoured alongside veteran US statesman Henry Kissinger for his contributions to bridging the East-West gap through classical music.

“In 2008, for the first time in history, the China Philharmonic Orchestra performed under the baton of Maestro Yu Long at the Vatican in the Paul VI Auditorium. The concert was attended by Pope Benedict XIV and marked a giant step in bringing Eastern and Western cultures closer together,” says the Atlantic Council, a US think tank on international affairs, which gives out the annual awards.

Born into a musical family in Shanghai, Yu, 51, received his early musical education from his grandfather and composer Ding Shande and went on to study at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and the Hochschule der Kunst in Berlin. A musician with vision as well as a strong network around the world, Yu wears many hats and is the artistic director of the Beijing Music Festival and the China Philharmonic Orchestra, music director of the Shanghai and Guangzhou symphony orchestras, and the co-director of the MISA Shanghai Summer Festival.

Recognising the need for specialised orchestral training in China, Yu founded the Shanghai Orchestra Academy in September 2014 to offer a focus on ensemble work in Chinese musical education and training. The academy offers a number of courses that give students a chance to work with overseas orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic, Sydney Symphony Orchestra and North German Radio Symphony Orchestra. This collaboration further cements relationships between aspiring young Chinese musicians and their counterparts in the West.

"I can't say enough about our partners in the Shanghai team. Yu Long had a vision. [He is] incredible, amazing to work with,” Matthew Van Besien, president of the New York Philharmonic, said earlier this year.

Also being honoured at the event will be Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, and Juan Manuel Santos, president of Colombia. Past Global Citizen awardees include actor Robert De Niro, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and the first prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, who died in March 2015.

SSO to Mark Anniversaries in Performance at the UN General Assembly

In one of the largest concerts ever held at the General Assembly of the United Nations, August 28 will see Maestro Long Yu assemble his Shanghai Symphony Orchestra to represent China in a musical celebration to mark 70 years since both the ending of World War Two and the establishment of the UN itself. All of the chief Allied WW2 powers will be represented in the concert, which also will include America's MasterVoices choir (formerly the Collegiate Chorale, the choir which performed at the official opening of the UN building), Russian-born violinist Maxim Vengerov (playing Schindler's List), 12-year-old Chinese piano prodigy Sirena Wang, and singers Ying Huang (China), Sarah Fox (UK), Aurhelia Varak (France), Vadim Gan (Russia), David Blalock (USA) and Christopher Magiera (USA). The concert is part of a tour of the Americas by the orchestra, and will also take in two venues in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (Aug 30, 31), and one in Buenos Aires, Argentina (Sept 2).

"It is a concert in which the music we play is about memories and about new beginnings" says Long Yu, "World War Two was of course a great tragedy, as well as a victory over evil, which must be remembered, while the birth of the UN from out of the wreckage of that war was a new beginning for the world. So Tchaikovsky's Andante Cantabile is contemplative, healing, Barber's Adagio is a piece of hushed mourning, as of course is John Williams's Theme from Schindler's List. Then Beethoven's Choral Fantasy is a work of genesis, one that eventually culminated in the magnificent Ninth Symphony and its 'Ode To Joy' - but in this exuberant early work we can hear the seeds of that utopian vision, which is very appropriate for a forum created around the ideal of nations talking and collaborating, rather than fighting." The new work, Shanghai 1937, is by the Chinese composer Zou Ye (Long Yu recently initiated the Compose 20:20 project, to bring new Western works to China, and new Chinese works to the West).

Nor does the sense of history that attends this event elude its conductor. "Speaking for myself and the players as well as the management of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, to be able to represent our country in the spirit of the great things achieved by the allies and the founders of the United Nations seven decades ago, is an immense privilege. To be part of a cultural message from artists of China, the US, UK, France and Russia that we hope represents the renewal of those ideals is an honor to be cherished. And it also feels appropriate that this concert is part of our wider tour of the Americas - as much as we are bringing in artists from different nationalities to our concert halls, we musicians are also ourselves physically travelling from country to country, to help strengthen the bonds that bind nations, and people, together."

The orchestra will also be joined by nine students from the Shanghai Orchestra Academy, an initiative created with international cooperation with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.

Notes for Editors:

* The Shanghai Symphony Orchestra is China's oldest symphony orchestra, founded in 1879 as the Shanghai Public Band (under conductor and flautist Jean Remusat). Between these years and the end of World War Two, some European musicians came to the orchestra as section leaders, bringing with them their knowledge of European performance styles - after World War Two, however, the Europeans gradually left creating opportunities for the most talented Chinese musicians. In 1956 the orchestra, already informally known as "the best in the Far East", renamed itself the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra. Xieyang Chen took over the artistic leadership, creating and filling the role of music director. He was succeeded by the current incumbent, Long Yu.

The SSO has performed around the world. It was the first Chinese orchestra to play Carnegie Hall, in 1990, the first to play the Berlin Philharmonie (2004), the first to give a concert in New York's Central Park (2010). Last year, it inaugurated its new, world-class concert venue in Shanghai, Symphony Hall, ingeniously built underground for urban planning reasons. And it also recently created a major new popular classical music festival - MISA (Music in the Summer Air) - with joint artistic directors Long Yu and Charles Dutoit.

In 2014 the SSO and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra launched the NYPO's Shanghai Orchestra Academy and Residency Partnership, a joint endeavour of both orchestras that included the founding of the Shanghai Orchestra Academy (SOA) which opened in September 2014, and the NYPO's four-year performance residency in Shanghai.

* Maestro Long Yu is Music Director of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, also of the Guanzhou Symphony Orchestra, the Artistic Director and co-founder of the China Philharmonic Orchestra, and Principal Guest Conductor of the Hong Kong Philharmonic. He is also Founding Artistic Director of the Beijing Music Festival, co-founder of the Shanghai MISA Festival and incoming Principal Guest Conductor of the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra.

He helped spearhead the establishment of the New York Philharmonic's Shanghai Orchestra Academy and Residency Partnership (see above) and is an honorary member of the International Advisory Board of the New York Philharmonic. Other China ‘firsts’ include bringing the first-ever performances of Wagner’s Ring cycle in the country, presenting its first-ever Mahler cycle, releasing the first album of Chinese music on a major recording label (Dragon Songs, alongside Lang Lang, for DG), and bringing the first-ever Chinese orchestra to play at the Vatican. Last year, he led the China Philharmonic as the first Chinese orchestra ever invited to play at the BBC Proms. The Shanghai Symphony under his baton was the first orchestra other than the New York Philharmonic to perform on Central Park's Great Lawn.

He has commissioned new works from many of today’s leading composers, among them Tan Dun, Krzysztof Penderecki, Philip Glass, John Corigliano, Guo Wenjing and Ye Xiaogang and has created a five-year initiative, Compose 20:20, to bring new Chinese works to the West and new Western works to China.

He was recently awarded the Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur from the French governnment, only the third Chinese national ever to receive it. This award marked a highlight of an impressive 2014 season for Maestro Long Yu. Last July, starry concerts in Shanghai and Beijing coincided with his 50th birthday, and colleagues including Lang Lang, Alison Balsom and Maxim Vengerov performed, with new works composed by Tan Dun, Qigang Chen and John Williams. At the same time, he led the Shanghai Symphony into their new home, a state-of-the-art venue built mostly underground, acoustically designed by Yasuhisa Toyota.

Long Yu regularly conducts important orchestras and opera houses in the West such as the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Orchestre de Paris, Chicago Symphony, BBC Symphony, Teatro La Fenice, Hamburg Staatsoper and Philadelphia Orchestra. He was previously honored to be appointed a Chavelier dans L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France, and a L’onorificenza di commendatore from the Republic of Italy.

In August 2015 he led the China Philharmonic on a tour of the old Silk Road trade route, taking in coutries such as Athens, Turkey and Iran - making China the first of the P5+1 negotiating partners to send an orchestra to Tehran following the much-discussed nuclear agreement (they played Dvorak's New World Symphony, among other repertoire).