Daniel Harding Named Music Director of China's Youth Music Culture The Greater Bay Area
British conductor Daniel Harding will be the next Music Director of China's Youth Music Culture The Greater Bay Area (YMCG) for an initial term of five years, beginning in 2024. Harding is only the second Music Director appointed to the role and succeeds cellist Yo-Yo Ma.
YMCG is a collaboration between the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, the Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra, and the Macao Orchestra. They come together with the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra in the Xinghai Concert Hall to strengthen musical ties across those four cities, all of which are in the Greater Bay Area.
Harding's role at the organization will include working alongside its founder Long Yu to develop the symphonic program. He will also be responsible for seeking out some of the world's best orchestral players to act as tutors, mentors, and chamber musicians for the program.
THE VIOLIN CHANNEL
British conductor Daniel Harding will be the next Music Director of China's Youth Music Culture The Greater Bay Area (YMCG) for an initial term of five years, beginning in 2024. Harding is only the second Music Director appointed to the role and succeeds cellist Yo-Yo Ma.
YMCG is a collaboration between the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, the Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra, and the Macao Orchestra. They come together with the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra in the Xinghai Concert Hall to strengthen musical ties across those four cities, all of which are in the Greater Bay Area.
Harding's role at the organization will include working alongside its founder Long Yu to develop the symphonic program. He will also be responsible for seeking out some of the world's best orchestral players to act as tutors, mentors, and chamber musicians for the program.
Gramophone: Video: 'Music Without Borders', with Yo-Yo Ma, Long Yu and Michael Stern
On January 21, 2022, the sixth annual Youth Music Culture Guangdong (YMCG) hosted a gathering of musician friends for a virtual panel called 'Music Without Borders: Musicians and Music for the Present and the Future,' led by host Zhai Jia.
Gramophone
In a fascinating discussion Yo-Yo Ma, Long Yu and Michael Stern reflect on the meaning of music creation, performance, and listening
On January 21, 2022, the sixth annual Youth Music Culture Guangdong (YMCG) hosted a gathering of musician friends for a virtual panel called 'Music Without Borders: Musicians and Music for the Present and the Future,' led by host Zhai Jia.
With renowned guests joining from four cities across the world – Yo-Yo Ma in Boston; Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra (GSO) Music Director and Chairman of the YMCG Artistic Committee Long Yu in a quarantine hotel; celebrated conductor Michael Stern in Kansas City; and members of the YMCG Orchestra, GSO President Mr Chen Qing, conductor Jing Huan, and others in Guangzhou – the discussion centres around the meaning of music creation, performance, and listening.
Read more here.
Limelight: Yo-Yo Ma and The Art of Living, Youth Music Culture Guangdong
Angus McPherson speaks with Yo-Yo Ma midway through the 2020 Youth Music Culture Guangdong in the Chinese city of Guangzhou, an event presented by the Guangdong Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism and organized jointly by the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra and Xinghai Concert Hall, bringing together young musicians from all around the world. Ma is the event’s Artistic Director and a major drawcard for the participants, who have come to the city on the Pearl River in southern China from across the country as well as from the USA, Japan, Italy and Hungary – and even one musician from Australia.
Limelight Magazine
Angus McPherson
We’re speaking midway through the 2020 Youth Music Culture Guangdong in the Chinese city of Guangzhou, an event presented by the Guangdong Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism and organized jointly by the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra and Xinghai Concert Hall, bringing together young musicians from all around the world. Ma is the event’s Artistic Director and a major drawcard for the participants, who have come to the city on the Pearl River in southern China from across the country as well as from the USA, Japan, Italy and Hungary – and even one musician from Australia.
Read the full article here.
Limelight: Yo-Yo Ma Caps Off YMCG 2020 with Bach Marathon
Limelight
Angus McPherson
“The only way to play music is: when we are on stage, we are all equal,” Yo-Yo Ma told the audience after emerging from the nether regions of the orchestra’s cello section. The superstar cellist addressed the audience in Xinghai Concert Hall in both English and Chinese at the closing concert of Youth Music Culture Guangdong, a ten-day event which saw young musicians from around the world – from countries including Australia, Hungary, Italy and Japan – gather in Guangzhou, China, for an intensive period of musical and cultural exchange centered around the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.
To read more about the concert, click here.
Limelight: Yo-Yo Ma to Lead Bach Youth Project in Guangzhou
Limelight Magazine
Angus McPherson
Superstar cellist Yo-Yo Ma will lead a Bach youth project in Guangzhou, China, this January as part of the annual Youth Music Culture Guangdong. The workshop will last for nine days with the cellist and international colleagues, and is open to young musicians from all over the world. To read more about the project, click here.
Finnish Music Quarterly: Grappling with Sibelius in China
“Could a certain distance from Western symphonic thought have contributed to the surprising qualities of the performances I heard in China?” Andrew Mellor reviews performances of Sibelius’s Symphonies Nos 2 and 5 in Shanghai and Guangzhou.
Finnish Music Quarterly
Andrew Mellor
“Could a certain distance from Western symphonic thought have contributed to the surprising qualities of the performances I heard in China?” Andrew Mellor reviews performances of Sibelius’s Symphonies Nos 2 and 5 in Shanghai and Guangzhou.
The Shanghai Symphony Orchestra – 140 years old this season – presented Sibelius’s Symphony No. 2 at a concert on 13 January conducted by Li Xincao. Sibelius is not a regular part of the SSO’s diet, I was told by Doug He, the orchestra’s Vice President. Sometimes the Violin Concerto crops up in a season. There might even be, as in this season, a symphony included. But there was zero Sibelius in the season before. Like the Orchestre de Paris, however, this is a flexible modern symphony orchestra with strength in all sections and high levels of discipline.
Li Xincao and the SSO’s Sibelius was exceptional, perhaps because it grasped some of the basic principles mentioned above. It appeared to take rhythm as a starting point, understanding that a focus on the rhythmic devices presented from the very start of the score will allow those devices to take on the kinetic significance they need. Intentionally or otherwise, the orchestra spoke relatively plainly but still with a sure sense of colour (the solo trumpet playing was deliciously peaty). The performance acknowledged the strain in the music, as in the final movement when building disquiet metamorphoses into natural release.
Read more here.
Violin Channel: Youth Music Culture Guangdong Instagram Takeover
VC recently caught up with the Youth Music Culture Guangdong Festival for a behind-the-scenes Instagram takeover – direct from Guangzhou, China. Takeover featuring violinist Johnny Gandelsman from Brooklyn Rider, cello luminary Yo-Yo Maand conductor Michael Stern.
Violin Channel
VC recently caught up with the Youth Music Culture Guangdong Festival for a behind-the-scenes Instagram takeover – direct from Guangzhou, China.
Takeover featuring violinist Johnny Gandelsman from Brooklyn Rider, cello luminary Yo-Yo Ma and conductor Michael Stern.
Follow more posts from the takeover here.
South China Morning Post: Yo-Yo Ma China Music Camp - Youth Music Culture Guangdong
Nine days of classes in Guangzhou take students out of their comfort zone – and Ma, the event’s musical director, is always on hand to encourage, advise and inspire them to experiment and try the unknown
South China Morning Post
Bernice Chan
Nine days of classes in Guangzhou take students out of their comfort zone – and Ma, the event’s musical director, is always on hand to encourage, advise and inspire them to experiment and try the unknown.
Yo-Yo Ma and Australian-Chinese cellist Rachel Siu high-five. Photo: Xiaomei Chen
They all wear sweatshirts bearing the letters YMCG, which stand for “Youth Music Culture Guangdong”. Amid the sea of black shirts it is difficult to spot the music camp’s artistic director, renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma, until he stands up on the conductor’s podium.
The aim of the music camp is “deep learning”, Ma says, in which the students make connections with the people they meet, but also discovering what links classical music composers such as Beethoven and the improvisational Silk Road Ensemble that Ma founded in 1998.
It is the second such annual musical camp hosted by Ma in the southern Chinese metropolis. Participation is free for those who pass video auditions, as is food and accommodation. Students’ only expense is the cost of their travel to Guangzhou.
Read the full article and watch a video about Youth Music Culture Guangdong here.
The Strad: Yo-Yo Ma on making artistic connections and raising balanced musicians
This month Yo-Yo Ma returns as artistic director of his Chinese education initiative Youth Music Culture Guangdong, a programme that aims to create balanced, astute and connected musicians. Charlotte Smith explores the ideas behind the cellist’s approach
The Strad
Charlotte Smith
This month Yo-Yo Ma returns as artistic director of his Chinese education initiative Youth Music Culture Guangdong, a programme that aims to create balanced, astute and connected musicians. Charlotte Smith explores the ideas behind the cellist’s approach
Photo ©Li Lewei, courtesy of YMCG
‘Classical musicians today have moved away from improvisation, but it’s an essential part of owning the music,’ he says. ‘In the classical tradition, pretty much all musicians played, arranged and composed. Clara Schumann composed and Heifetz made arrangements and Kreisler wrote all those little pieces. It’s today’s insistence on professionalisation and specialisation that has separated those skills. It’s the commoditisation of music. We are told to stick with what we do well, as opposed to develop the whole individual. But what’s valuable is the musician who can do all of those things. Of course there will be some skills that stand out, but musicians should continue to feed themselves with all aspects of musical life. It’s an idea that was cherished by the Enlightenment – that we should treasure the person who can be a generalist, the conduit for a world of wonder and awe.’
For Ma, making connections – between people, cultures, artistic modes and genres, and musical skills – is the key to developing into a complete and healthy artist and, crucially, to tapping into the flexibility necessary to negotiate difficult and changing times. ‘That’s why at this year’s YMCG we are focusing on the music of Beethoven,’ he continues. ‘Beethoven was a pivotal personality in a rapidly changing world, both as a culmination of the Classical era and a herald of the Romantic. He was an improviser, a virtuoso pianist and a composer, and shows us that being many things produces the great creativity we need to understand change.’ Just as the young Ma reacted to the huge upheaval of his family’s move to the US with a desire to learn, consume and, ultimately, to express himself creatively, 21st-century musicians can also follow Beethoven’s lead in using instability and unrest as fuel for their own imaginations, and by doing so, making sincere and meaningful connections with audiences and fellow musicians.
To read the full article, get the January 2018 issue.
The Spectator: Mao's Music
It’s early in the year but there is unseasonal heat as hundreds of earnest young musicians gather to learn from artists of the Silk Road Ensemble... Fostering innovation in China, a country hindered by an educational system that encourages rote learning and discourages asking questions, is not always easy. Some classical musicians have broken through: concert pianist and child prodigy Lang Lang is a celebrity here, commanding sell-out concerts and legions of fans. But Long Yu, the man who has helped spearhead China’s classical music renaissance (he is artistic director and chief conductor of the China Philharmonic Orchestra and music director of the Shanghai Symphony) wants more.
The Spectator
By Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore
Smog is making me cough and I feel my eyelids smart and redden. High-rises are swaddled in a soupy haze and locals scuttle about their day, huddled against the cold, faces down. Has Beijing done nothing to improve pollution since I last lived there three years ago? This is a city that changes fast. There are the same old scruffy nail bars and lamb hot pot restaurants, the windows smudged with steam from boiling vats of oil and meat. But in the ancient hutongs or alleyways there is also a smattering of Scandinavian-style design stores. Hidden around the back of one is a tranquil café, at odds with the dirt and dust outside, classical music wafting into chilly air. Here are the locals you never see on the street: men in elegant cashmere coats, scarfs slung around their necks; women propping Louis Vuitton bags against long, poised legs. I stop for a hot chocolate and avocado cheese cake; it costs nearly twenty dollars.
‘There is in fact no such thing as art for art’s sake,’ Mao Zedong said. Under the ‘Great Leader’, during the tumultuous tragic years of the Cultural Revolution, classical Western music was particularly despised as ‘bourgeois’. Instruments were smashed, concertos ripped up, and conductors punished, sometimes with death. When facing execution for tearing up Mao’s Little Red Book, Lu Hongen, conductor of the Shanghai Symphony, said to his cellmate. ‘Visit Austria, home of music. Go to Beethoven’s tomb and lay a bouquet of flowers. Tell him his disciple is in China.’ Would Lu laugh or cry if he went to Guangzhou now? I’ve taken the long train ride south to see the very first Youth Music Culture Guangdong (YMCG) in action, the pet project of Chinese-American superstar Yo-Yo Ma and the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra. It’s early in the year but there is unseasonal heat as hundreds of earnest young musicians gather to learn from artists of the Silk Road Ensemble. Among the educators is symphony conductor Michael Stern. When his father, violinist Isaac Stern, made history by touring China in 1979, just three years after Mao’s death, he found not one playable piano left in Shanghai. His son has arrived in a new era: China is now the largest piano producer in the world, and the largest consumer too with some forty million students learning to play. Beethoven, it seems, is not short of disciples.
Yo-Yo Ma, a believer in art for art’s sake, relishes the redemptive qualities of creation. I ask him why here, why now? Why China? ‘When the flood gates open there’s this moment of receptivity. There’s a small window in this society where you can do so much,’ he says. He looks down at his hands, adjusts his shirtsleeves rolled half way up his arms. ‘I think if that window closes it’s going to be harder to start things, to create habits, cultural habits. For me, it’s planting seeds that we may not see the resultsof for twenty, thirty years.’
‘I want you to have enough courage to stand up,’ Yo-Yo Ma later tells a room of shy young musicians, bent over their instruments, anxious to do well and to please. ‘Who’ll be the first victim?’
Fostering innovation in China, a country hindered by an educational system that encourages rote learning and discourages asking questions, is not always easy. Some classical musicians have broken through: concert pianist and child prodigy Lang Lang is a celebrity here, commanding sell-out concerts and legions of fans. But Long Yu, the man who has helped spearhead China’s classical music renaissance (he is artistic director and chief conductor of the China Philharmonic Orchestra and music director of the Shanghai Symphony) wants more. ‘Asian parents, they force the kids to learn instruments not to introduce arts to them but they want to train them to become a star, the next Lang Lang, or to add some points when they apply to university. But this is totally wrong,’ he insists. ‘We don’t need only one or two champions. We need a new generation to understand creativity.’ Some are rising to the challenge. Back in an improvisation workshop, under the cold glare of classroom lamps, a plump girl in a yellow frilly dress shakes her hips, forgetting the glasses that fall down her nose, while a percussionist taps out an addictive beat. Yo-Yo Ma is happy. His charges are starting to stand up, no longer victims. As he confides with a grin, there is a little known secret: ‘You can practise imagination’.