One way Cao Qijing innovates is by including such Western instruments as the violin, viola, cello and harp to the accompanying Chinese orchestra.
"I feel these instruments will add to the expressiveness of the original Chinese instruments, and can help convey the rich emotions of the work more vividly," she says.
The new orchestration went over well with some English audience members. Robin Haller, a 33-year-old Londoner, believes the music was the most successful part of A Dream of Red Mansions.
"In a way, it was the music that reached out to a Western listener, and it made a better bridge between the traditional Chinese music and what we, as European audiences, expected to hear in an opera," Haller says.
"In a way, the composer has done the most in reaching out to the Western audience."
Haller was also impressed by the English subtitles that were provided during the performances.
"The translator did a good job. I could more or less follow what was going on onstage, although I have never read the original novel," he says.
"As long as there is good translation, there are not really cultural barriers that prevent one from appreciating Kunqu Opera."
The cast of A Dream of Red Mansions includes not only award-winning actors and actresses from the Northern Kunqu Opera Theater but also performers, who auditioned, from Kunqu companies in Shanghai and Jiangsu province.
When adapted to other forms of Chinese operas, some parallel plots from the novel were made part of the narration. But the Kunqu version has some plots run simultaneously onstage - for example, that of Lin burning her scripts and Jia's wedding.
The New Legend of Pipa, which the Northern Kunqu Opera Theater recently revived after a script was found in the National Library of China, is closer to Kunqu Opera's traditional form.
The work tells about Cai Wenji, a Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) woman poet and composer, who was taken prisoner by the Xiongnu nomads and became a chieftain's wife but eventually returned home.
Wei Chunrong, who played Wang Xifeng in A Dream of Red Mansions and Cai Wenji in The New Legend of Pipa, says it's a great honor for her to perform in London just before the 2012 Olympic Games.
"Kunqu Opera is an ancient art of China that reflects the lives of Chinese people in the past, but it's understandable to today's audiences from all over the world because people's sensitivity to art and emotions are similar," she says.
Kunqu Opera dominated Chinese theater from the 16th to the 18th centuries and has influenced many other Chinese theater forms, including Peking Opera. In 2001, UNESCO listed Kunqu Opera among the Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.
Wei says she belongs to a generation of Kunqu Opera singers who are responsible for both inheriting the tradition and developing the old art.
"I hope I will have an opportunity to exchange and collaborate with UK theater workers next time," she says.
By Mu Qian
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