Lullaby for a hectic world

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.