KLASSIKOM=Innovations in classical music

Rudolph Tang

By award-winning music critic Rudolph Tang direct from China. Salty maybe, boring never. klassikom.substack.com

  1. 17h ago

    Qin Wenchen Receives Austrian Music Theatre Prize in Vienna

    Qin Wenchen, professor and deputy dean of the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, has been awarded the Special Prize for International Cultural Engagement at the Austrian Music Theatre Prize (Österreichischer Musiktheaterpreis), presented on 8 September 2026 at the Votivkirche in Vienna. The neo-Gothic church on the Ringstraße, one of Vienna’s most recognisable landmarks, served as the ceremonial backdrop for the 14th edition of the prize, with guests from politics, culture, and the media gathered in what press accounts described as its monumental, sacral atmosphere. Winners received a statuette created by the Austrian ceramics house Gmundner Keramik, taking the form of a feather combined with a panpipe of seven pipes — an allusion to Mozart’s Magic Flute — with each piece individually fired to ensure its uniqueness. Founded in 2013, the Austrian Music Theatre Prize is an annual award presented by a jury of eleven Austrian and German music journalists and critics, with co-chairs Heinz Sichrovsky of ORF and Joachim Leitner of the Tiroler Tageszeitung, alongside members from publications including Der Standard, Die Presse, Kronen Zeitung, Kurier, and Deutschlandradio. The prize covers opera, operetta, musical, dance, and contemporary music theatre, with categories ranging from individual performance awards to production prizes and special recognitions. Qin’s award falls under a special category presented in association with the Confucius Institute, recognising individuals or institutions whose work bridges cultures through music. Previous Asian recipients under related categories include conductor Pang Ka-pang, who received the Special Award for International Music and Cultural Engagement in 2021; the Suzhou Chinese Orchestra, which received the Special Award for International Orchestra the same year; the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, which received the Special Award for International Cultural Programme in 2023; and Claudia Yang, who received the Special Prize for International Cultural Engagement in 2020. The 2026 ceremony also honoured soprano Anja Silja with a Lifetime Achievement award, Markus Hinterhäuser with the Grand Prix of the Jury, baritone Leo Nucci with a Special International Award, and soprano Asmik Gregorian for best female leading role in Bellini’s Norma at the Theater an der Wien. Qin’s award came during a broader Vienna visit marking the 55th anniversary of diplomatic relations between China and Austria. On 10 September, two days after the ceremony, he appeared at the MuTh concert hall in Vienna for an evening co-organised by International Culture Cooperations, the Confucius Institute at the University of Vienna, and SONATA Book Verlag, supported by the Central Conservatory of Music and the SICHTweisen Festival. The event combined a concert of his chamber works, performed by five musicians from the Central Conservatory on pipa, zheng, piano, cello, and bamboo flute, with a presentation of a newly published book on his life, written by Yuan Mei and titled Selbst zu den höchsten Wolken führt eine Leiter (Even to the Highest Clouds a Ladder Leads). The book recounts Qin’s childhood in sixty episodes. Guests included mdw Rector Ulrike Sych and the Kenyan ambassador to Austria, Valerie Rugene. Qin Wenchen was born in 1966 in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, where he began studying Chinese folk music as a child. He studied composition with Xu Shuya and Zhu Jianer at the Shanghai Conservatory from 1987, and after graduating in 1992, began teaching at the Central Conservatory in Beijing. A DAAD scholarship enabled him to study with Nicolaus A. Huber, and he received his diploma with distinction from the Folkwang Hochschule Essen in 2001, after which he returned to Beijing. He is currently professor of the composition department and and deputy dean at the Central Conservatory and a distinguished professor at the China Conservatory of Music. His works have been performed by more than seventy ensembles internationally, including the Ensemble Intercontemporain, Ensemble Recherche, the Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin, the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, the St Petersburg Philharmonic, and the Helsinki Philharmonic. Major works include Lonely Song for strings (1990), Yi Yun for orchestra (1991), Drumming in the Cold (1996), Wind-Moon Consonance for sheng, recorder and orchestra (2004), Nature’s Dialogue for orchestra and audio tape (2010), Across the Skies for pipa and strings (2012), Echoes from the Other Shore for zheng and orchestra (2015), Seeking Sound for orchestra (2018), and Poetry of the Land for zheng, sheng and orchestra (2020). His works are published by Boosey and Hawkes / Sikorski. Qin turned 60 this year. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit klassikom.substack.com

  2. 5d ago

    Yan Huichang Pays Lifelong Tribute to Shaanxi Hometown

    Yan Huichang, one of the most prominent figures in Chinese orchestral music, conducted the world premiere of his Xianqiang Rhapsody at Xi’an Concert Hall Tuesday evening, with the Shaanxi Broadcasting National Traditional Orchestra and a one-man-band featuring 25-year-old Xianqiang virtuoso Wang Kun performing under the composer’s baton. The programme and the Orchestra’s commission is funded by the China National Arts Fund (CNAF). The work is a five-movement full-length suite drawing on Xianqiang, the string puppet theatre tradition native to Heyang county of Shaanxi province, incorporating its characteristic percussion and string idioms. Xianqiang takes its name from the form itself: xian meaning string, qiang the incidental music that accompanies the theatre. The premiere carries personal weight for Yan, who was born in Heyang county of Shaanxi, a region long associated with some of China’s most distinctive theatre genres and folk traditions. Contributing a major orchestral work to his hometown has been a longstanding ambition, and the result — built around a tradition he grew up with — represents the fulfilment of that goal. Yan Huichang is best known internationally as longtime artistic director and chief conductor of the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra, a post he has held since 1997 and through which he has been among the most consistent advocates for Chinese orchestral music on the world stage. A seminar was held the following morning participated by leading scholars and composers weighing in on the suite, an internal review and evaluation protocol. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit klassikom.substack.com

  3. Sep 6

    Shanghai Opera House opens 26/27 season

    Shanghai Opera House opens its 26/27 season with a gala at the Shanghai Concert Hall conducted by Zhang Liang. The gala features tenors Shi Yijie and Wang Hongwei, sopranos Huang Ying and Wu Lie'ri, as well as soloists from the house.Shanghai Concert HallSeptember 5, 2026 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit klassikom.substack.com

    Shanghai Opera House opens 26/27 season

  4. Aug 30

    Chamber Opera by Li Zi'ao Brings Ruan Lingyu Back to Stage

    She was the most celebrated actress of Republican-era China, and she died at 24 with a note that read: “Gossip is a fearful thing.” Ninety years after Ruan Lingyu’s death, she remains an irresistible subject, for filmmakers, for biographers, and now, for a new generation of composer. Ruan Lingyu, a chamber opera composed by Li Zi’ao with a libretto by Li Xuanru — both Gen Zs — arrived at the West Bund Grand Theatre in Shanghai on 28 August, following its 2025 premiere in Beijing, and offered a portrait of the actress that was as psychologically probing as it was musically assured. Ruan Lingyu’s story is inseparable from the men who defined and destroyed her. Born in 1910 in Shanghai to a working-class family, she entered the film industry as a teenager and rose swiftly to become the pre-eminent screen presence of her era, a Chinese equivalent of Greta Garbo in emotional range and magnetic intensity. She starred in landmark silent films including Little Toys, The Goddess, and New Women, often playing characters trapped by social convention, poverty, or male exploitation — roles that mirrored her own circumstances with uncomfortable precision. Her private life was a catalogue of misfortune. Her first partner, Zhang Damin, a chronic gambler whom she supported financially for years, sued her for adultery when she left him for the tea merchant Tang Jishan. Tang, equally controlling and unfaithful, dragged her into a public legal dispute that the Shanghai tabloids seized upon with gleeful savagery. The press, which had built her into an icon, now dismantled her with the same energy. On 7 March 1935, the eve of International Women’s Day, she took an overdose of barbiturates. She was 24. Lu Xun, in his eulogy, wrote that it was not Ruan Lingyu who killed herself, but the society that consumed her. The production at West Bund’s black-box Square Theatre offered a stark contrast to the commercial bustle of the surrounding complex. The lobby was dim and airless, security desks unmanned, the building feeling more afterthought than destination. Inside the intimate space, however, a spare stage and an atmosphere of quiet tension announced that the evening meant business. Performed without interval, the opera takes two interlocking threads as its backbone: Ruan Lingyu’s relationships with three men, and her most significant film roles. The structure is tight and the psychology detailed, tracing how a woman who embodied suffering on screen was gradually consumed by it offstage. Four young singers carry the piece, with soprano, tenor, and baritone voices distributed with care across solo arias, monologues, duets, and a quartet that each find their own character. The gender geometry — one woman against three men — recalls the inverse configuration of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, in which one male protagonist is pursued and ultimately judged by three women. Here the dynamic is reversed, and the weight of that reversal is the opera’s central argument. Li Zi’ao’s score is the production’s most distinctive achievement. The libretto’s slightly schematic, stream-of-consciousness structure gives the composer room to move freely, and he uses it well. The music is immediately accessible, at times closer to musical theatre than classical opera, but the Republican-era sonic palette — dance-hall rhythms, pentatonic inflections, the ghost of Shikumen jazz — is woven in with subtlety rather than nostalgia. Character delineation follows knowable conventions: the villains are telegraphed, the heroine luminous and doomed. The orchestration occasionally overreaches, pressing harder than the drama requires. But the theatrical instinct is sound, and the dramatic momentum rarely falters. Ruan Lingyu joins a growing body of work reclaiming Republican-era women for the contemporary stage. Lin Huiyin and Zhang Ailing have both received musical theatre treatments in recent years; that Ruan Lingyu now joins them, in a form that takes her psychological complexity seriously, feels overdue. That the work was conceived and written by two Gen Zs makes it more striking still. Pre- and post-show talks, a format more common in a repertory theatre than opera, added welcome context. The audience, modest in number but attentive in spirit, seemed grateful for both. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit klassikom.substack.com

  5. Aug 23

    A French-Taiwanese Pianist on Nerves, War and Music First

    She admits it freely, without embarrassment: she was super nervous. Not the polite, performative anxiety that competition pianists sometimes confess to in interviews, but the real thing, the kind that drains sound from your fingers and leaves you playing in a kind of internal silence. Anqi, a French-Taiwanese pianist competing in the 2023 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, was giving herself no illusions about where she stood. She knew she was not among the frontrunners. She knew she had not played the Chopin étude as well as she wanted to the day before. And she knew, as everyone in that building knew, what was happening to the west of the country in which she was sitting. None of it, in the end, was enough to make her stay home. Q&A Tang: Did you manage to do any sightseeing here? Anqi: Not really, because we’re in competition. It’s quite intense. Tang: How is your competition experience so far? Anqi: Well, I’m super nervous. Of course, everyone can see it. When I play, it’s like super nervous. But it’s a great experience to play in that hall. The acoustics are good, I think. Tang: Which piano did you choose? Anqi: Kawai, which is rarely chosen this time. Actually, it’s funny, because there are four pianos, and I had the Chopin étude, which I didn’t play very well the day before. I tried every piano on the opening of the Chopin étude, the chromatic one, and I found Kawai works the most with me. And after, I found it louder a bit, because when I’m nervous I usually just have no sound. Tang: Do you still feel nervous now? Anqi: No, not really, since I’ve finished. Tang: How did you travel to Moscow? Anqi: From Paris. We changed at Istanbul, Turkish Airlines. In total, without the layover, it’s about seven or eight hours. But the connection was four or five hours, and we arrived very late — we got our flight at eleven in the morning and were here at about one or two in the morning. Tang: Did you make any new friends here? Anqi: Some, yes. I have a roommate, and there is also a Russian I sometimes meet. Tang: You are competing on behalf of France, but I understand you are also Taiwanese. Are you the only Taiwanese competitor here? Anqi: As far as I can tell, yes. But I feel no real difference from the others. There is another French candidate, so I feel the same as him. Tang: Are you concerned about what is going on here, in the western part of Russia? Anqi: Yes, I know. Everyone knows it. But the Tchaikovsky Competition has always been a dream since I was young. And I know I’m not a very strong candidate — obviously I know I won’t win prizes and things like that — but I think it’s still a great experience to participate, and that’s why I still applied. Tang: Do your parents worry about you being here? Anqi: Well, my mother is actually here with me, so I think it’s fine. Tang: There are people who argue that by participating in this competition, you are in effect endorsing the Russian government. Do you agree with that? Anqi: Personally, I don’t really agree. I think a competition is always a competition. I know it’s state-sponsored, but I don’t think participating in a competition means we support the President of Russia. It’s a prestigious competition, and that’s the reason. Music first. Tang: About the repertoire — how much of it is prescribed and how much is your own choice? Anqi: In the first round, they give you a framework — you need a classical sonata, but you can choose whether it’s Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven or something else. You need a Chopin étude but you can choose which one. So basically everything is within a category: you need Bach, you need a classical sonata, you need three études, and you need Tchaikovsky. Everyone plays the same categories, but with their own choices within them. Tang: How do you feel about your performance so far? Anqi: Of course I don’t like it, since I didn’t play well. But it’s still a great experience to stand on that stage. Tang: How does this competition compare to others you’ve participated in? Anqi: I feel much more nervous with this one. I don’t know why — maybe because the hall is so big, and it’s one of the biggest competitions I’ve ever participated in. That makes me feel super nervous. And with Tchaikovsky up there above you, and all the other composers looking at you — Tang: They’re all watching you. And the audience — how do you find them? Anqi: They are kind. They clap. Very kind. Interviewed in June 2023 in Moscow. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit klassikom.substack.com

    A French-Taiwanese Pianist on Nerves, War and Music First

  6. Aug 21

    From Mezzo to Soprano

    Episode Two Song Qian arrived in Shanghai as a stranger. She had grown up in another city, and when she first walked the streets of the metropolis to buy something from a local shop, she found herself unable to follow the accent, unable to penetrate the particular pride that Shanghainese carry in their voices. The conservatory was famous, and getting in felt like an achievement. But belonging to the city was something else entirely, a process that took the better part of three years. She had not intended to be a mezzo-soprano. Before her entrance examination at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, her teacher had not trained her strictly as one voice type or another. She sang some soprano repertoire. But when the audition panel assembled for the final round, her voice — broad, wide in colour — read as mezzo to most of the judges. There was also the matter of timing. That year, mezzo applicants were scarce. The panel needed to balance its intake. And so it was decided. Song Qian received the news without much in the way of strong feeling. She was not sure of the difference, not really. Her main thought, she admits with some amusement, was that at least mezzos do not have to sing so high. High notes required daily drilling. This seemed, at the time, like a reasonable arrangement. The five years that followed were pleasant enough. She won scholarships, partly because she policed her dormitory with a ferocity that her classmates still remember — threatening anyone who left the room untidy with the loss of the communal grade-point average on which the scholarship depended. Her teachers were pleased with her. She ranked well among her peers. But looking back, she recognises that she did not yet understand what she was singing. The music and the soul, she says, had not yet collided. After graduating she joined the Shanghai Opera House, then as now her institutional home, though in those years it was taking on young singers only into the chorus. Her motivation was at least partly practical: that cohort of graduates was the last for whom a Shanghai work unit could sponsor a permanent household registration, the coveted hukou. She wanted to stay in the city she had finally come to love. The Opera House was the obvious answer. Being a mezzo helped. Sopranos lined up to audition every year. Mezzos of quality were always in shorter supply. The turn came a year into her posting, at one of the Opera House’s routine annual assessments. Sitting on the panel that day was Luan Feng, a celebrated bass who had spent more than two decades in Italy and had recently returned to China. He noticed a mezzo-soprano in the chorus. He asked to meet her. As it turned out, he had already seen her once before: she had attended a masterclass he gave at the conservatory during her fourth year, and her face had stayed with him without his quite knowing why. Luan Feng was taking a small group of singers to compete in Italy and invited Song Qian to join. She was the only one from Shanghai; three others came from Beijing, two tenors and a baritone. They travelled to Pavia, Mantua and Busseto. Both tenors reached the finals but won nothing. Song Qian won merit prizes at two competitions. Being the youngest competitor, she also received a special encouragement award at one of them. She had spent the weeks beforehand drilling her Italian rolled r every morning the moment she woke up, having been told in no uncertain terms by Luan Feng that without it she would not get far. After the competitions, Luan Feng was invited to give a concert at the Italian Embassy in Beijing. Song Qian performed. The Italian ambassador, watching her sing, turned to those around him and said this young woman should come to Italy to study. She had a future. He would give her a scholarship. She could not understand him — she spoke no Italian beyond ciao and buongiorno — and Luan translated after the fact. The scholarship turned out to be a joint arrangement between the Italian cultural ministry and the Chinese Ministry of Education, covering tuition, with a monthly stipend of 1,000 euros. Her father was not entirely happy. He was not worried about money. He was worried about safety, about distance, about a daughter beyond his reach in a foreign country. Her mother took the opposite view: the opportunity was there, she was young, she had to take it. The family talked it through. In the end they agreed she should go. She arrived in Milan on December 31, 2005. The next morning was New Year’s Day 2006. She enrolled as a visiting scholar at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory of Music, the institution the public exchange programme had designated. A year later, having fallen in love with the city, the buildings, the air, the sound of the language, the coffee, and the particular elegance of the way Italians carry themselves, she realised she had barely scratched the surface. She resigned from the Opera House, severed the practical ties that would otherwise have required her to keep paying into the Chinese social insurance system from abroad, and went back to Milan to sit the entrance examination for a full master’s degree. It was in that first year, buying student standing-room tickets at La Scala for about 15 euros a time — a fraction of tthe 100 or 200 euros a regular seat could cost — that something shifted in her understanding of what she was doing with her voice. She would queue at four or five in the afternoon for an eight o’clock curtain, collect her numbered ticket, and stand at the top of the house listening to singers whose sound she had never encountered anything like at home. The resources available to students in China at that time, she says, were simply not the same: fewer visiting artists, fewer concerts, little of the daily immersion in live opera that the Milan years gave her. Standing in that auditorium, she made herself a promise. If she could one day sing on a stage like that, even once, it would mean something. It was also during those years, not at the Shanghai Conservatory but at La Scala, that she began to understand what bel canto actually was. And it was in Italy, in the third year of her time there, that she stopped being a mezzo-soprano and became a soprano. To be continued… This is a Chinese language programme without subtitles. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit klassikom.substack.com

    From Mezzo to Soprano

  7. Aug 20

    Fifteen, Fearless and Halfway Round the World

    Xu Leyi is 15, from Guiyang, and a flute major at the Secondary School Affiliated to the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. She was originally destined for piano until a stern teacher frightened her into switching instruments. A gentler flute teacher sealed the deal, and she has never looked back. This summer she spent nearly a month in the United States on her own, taking masterclasses at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester and at the home of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s principal flutist, who also teaches at Curtis and Juilliard. She watched Brazil versus Norway at the World Cup in New York, caught an Augustin Hadelich and Seong-Jin Cho recital at Ozawa Hall in Tanglewood after a rainstorm drove the lawn audience inside for free, and improvised a duet of the New World Symphony and Danny Boy with a Harvard mathematics professor she met at a roadside motel with a grand piano in the lobby. She is also a serious aviation enthusiast who has visited the cockpits of eleven international flights, sat in the pilot’s seat, and that glasses once ruled her out of a piloting career. Her ambition is to earn a private pilot’s licence alongside her music. She reckons that during cruise altitude, there ought to be time to sneak in a few notes on the flute. This is a Chinese language programme with bilingual subtitles.Filmed and interviewed in Shanghai on August 7, 2026. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit klassikom.substack.com

    Fifteen, Fearless and Halfway Round the World

  8. Aug 19

    Jane Eyre Turned into Musical

    Jane Eyre the Musical was staged in Shanghai over the weekend at the AIA Grand Theatre. This is a Chinese language musical sung with pre-recorded music. Here're the encores. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit klassikom.substack.com

    Jane Eyre Turned into Musical
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By award-winning music critic Rudolph Tang direct from China. Salty maybe, boring never. klassikom.substack.com

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