Guangdong Chinese Traditional Orchestra will give a concert at
the Olympic Museum in Lausanne for the International Olympic
Committee tomorrow to celebrate the Spring Festival as well as to
welcome the Beijing Olympic Games in August.
Under the baton of Hu Bingxu, who enjoys fame by conducting
traditional Chinese music and Peking Opera, the 80-member Guangdong
orchestra will play a program including Cantonese music Dragon Boat
Race and Autumn Moon over a Placid Lake, the guqin piece Flowing
Water, the pipa concerto Spring and Autumn and orchestral piece
adapted from Peking Opera Mu Guiying Takes Command.
It is one of the concerts in the orchestra's European tour
during the Spring Festival. They embarked on the one-month-tour
from Lucerne in Switzerland on January 25 and perform in Munich,
Antwerp, Bremen, Hanover, Prague, Vienna and Lausanne.
The National TV of Austria sent a crew to join the tour to shoot
a 90-minute documentary about the concerts. The documentary will
broadcast in Europe before the Beijing Olympic Games in August.
"I enjoy conducting Chinese traditional music and hope the
European audience will love it. When more and more Chinese fans
start to listen to the Western music, I wish the Western people
would know about our music," says conductor Hu.
"While the Olympic Games will draw guests from around the world
to Beijing in summer, the Guangdong Chinese Traditional Orchestra's
concert tour brings a piece of China to Europe," says Wu Jiatong,
managing director of Wu Promotion, the company which presents the
tour.
Wu Promotion started to present Chinese traditional orchestra to
tour Europe every Spring Festival from 1998 and this year is the
turn of the Cantonese music, which is popular in South China's
Guangdong and neighboring provinces along the Pearl River.
(China Daily February 5, 2008)