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The 27th edition of the Beijing Music Festival (BMF) ran from October 5 – 13, 2024. This year the international classical music festival took the theme “Voices From Afar.” It presented nine concerts and events with performances by artists from all over the world, blending centuries-old musical traditions with contemporary classical music.
The weeklong celebration of arts and culture offered live concerts at four venues: the National Center for the Performing Arts, Poly Theatre, Forbidden City Concert Hall, and the Temple of Heaven. Poly Theatre hosted a major highlight, the China premiere of the Gershwin opera Porgy and Bess. Directed by Noa Naamat and conducted by Kazem Abdullah, this semi-staged production continued a long tradition at the BMF, which has presented almost 60 operas over the years. Co-produced by the Beijing Music Festival, Cape Town Opera, and KT Wong Foundation, Porgy earned Cape Town Opera the BMF Artist of the Year award.
Worlds of Music
A truly international event, the 2024 Beijing Music Festival featured renowned artists from four continents, representing countries including China, France, the United States, Austria, South Africa, Germany, and others.
Celebrated Chinese composer and conductor Tan Dun opened the festival, leading the China Symphony Orchestra in music that included Chinese traditional instruments along with the Western-style orchestra.
The Cape Town Opera Chorus presented a concert of African choral music. Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra played nine movements from Marsalis’ The Shanghai Suite at the National Center for the Performing Arts. At the Poly Theater, French pianist Hélène Grimaud and chamber orchestra Camerata Salzburg performed Beethoven and Mozart.
Pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet and cellist Gautier Capuçon joined the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra conducted by Huang Yi in Eros Athanatos, Double Concerto for Cello and Piano by contemporary French-Swiss composer Richard Dubugnon. Thibaudet and Capuçon also participated in a Meeting the Maestros conversation series that included Marsalis and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Zhou Long. The pair also performed in Zhou Long’s Jiu Ge-Concerto for Erhu and Orchestra.
The BMF included programming for children too. Hu Shengnan & Friends presented Percussionist Resounds, a concert for children featuring music ranging from Johann Strauss and Mozart to Rodrigo Y Gabriela and Chick Corea.
Seven Pillars
Another top attraction was the Asian premiere of Andy Akiho’s Seven Pillars, a percussion opus that the New York Times called “as pure as music gets.” Sandbox Percussion’s recording of the work earned two GRAMMY® nominations, for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance and for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. The piece was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in music.
Adding to the plaudits, Akiho received the BMF’s 2024 Young Artist of the Year award.
Sandbox Percussion performed the 11 movements of this virtuosic piece at Forbidden City Concert Hall. Sandbox’s Ian Rosenbaum talked to us recently about the “innumerable threads that connect the movements together – overlapping palindromic structures, a pattern of orchestration that grows and grows as the piece progresses, and many smaller harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic concepts that are introduced, developed, and matured throughout the piece.”
With its intricate internal connections, Seven Pillars was an exemplar of the BMF itself, where the links between musics of countries and cultures around the world are always in focus, providing a model for international cooperation.
The Beijing Music Festival: Bridging the Continents
Conductor Long Yu founded the Beijing Music Festival in 1998. It has since become one of Asia’s premiere arts and culture events. Led by Artistic Director Shuang Zou, the festival turns Beijing into an international music hub every fall, sustaining a bridge between China and the rest of the world. It spurs the creation of new Western and Chinese music while giving young Chinese musicians a global platform to showcase their talents in the company of esteemed international artists.
