Students strike a chord with the past

Concert gathers array of talent from various music bodies to perform in harmony, Chen Nan reports.

A music work by the eminent Chinese American composer Chou Wenchung (1923-2019), Landscapes, for orchestra, was finished in 1949 and premiered by conductor Leopold Stokowski with the San Francisco Symphony in 1953. It employs three traditional Chinese melodies to create three landscapes with each accompanied by a poem — Under the Cliff in the Bay, The Sorrow of Parting and One Streak of Dying Light.

The piece was considered Chou's first mature work. He had abandoned his scholarship in architecture at Yale University to pursue his dream of composition at the New England Conservatory.

On May 18, the piece was performed by a newly formed orchestra of about 50 students from the Tianjin Juilliard Orchestra and 43 students from 14 music schools, including the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, the Juilliard School in New York, Singapore's Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music and the Korea National University of Arts in Seoul.