CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Kronos Quartet
Wu Man

Zankel Hall
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 7:30 PM

Pre-concert talk starts at 6:30 PM in Zankel Hall: David Harrington and Wu Man in conversation with Jeremy Geffen, Director of Artistic Planning, Carnegie Hall.

Kronos Quartet
·· David Harrington, Violin
·· John Sherba, Violin
·· Hank Dutt, Viola
·· Jeffrey Zeigler, Cello
Wu Man, Pipa
Chen Shi-Zheng, Director and Visual Designer

TAN DUN Ghost Opera
A Chinese Home (World Premiere, co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall)
Conceived by WU MAN, DAVID HARRINGTON, and CHEN SHI-ZHENG

Program is approximately 2 hours, including one intermission

Perspectives: Kronos Quartet

This tour of Kronos Quartet is made possible by a grant from Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts Regional Touring Program.

Program Notes:

GHOST OPERA (1994)
Music, text, and installation by Tan Dun (b. 1957)


Cast

Now: String quartet and pipa
Past: Bach, folksong, monks, and Shakespeare
Forever: Water, stones, metal, and paper


Libretto

Bach: [Prelude]
Monks: Ya O Ya
Folksong: Little Cabbage, ah)
(The earth is yellow, ah)
(Two or three years old, ah)
(No more father, no more mother, ah)
(Ah)
Shakespeare: We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
Bach: [Prelude]
Monks: Ya O Ya
Folksong: (Cabbage…)
(Earth…)
(Three…)
(Without…)
(Ah…)
Shakespeare: Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.
Monk: Ya O
Bach: [Prelude]



About the Composer

Conceptual and multifaceted composer-conductor Tan Dun has made an indelible mark on the world's music scene with a creative repertoire that spans the boundaries of classical, multimedia, Eastern, and Western musical systems. Central to his body of work are distinct series of works that reflect his individual compositional concepts and personal ideas—among them, a series that brings his childhood memories of shamanistic ritual into symphonic performances; works that incorporate elements from the natural world; and multimedia concertos.

Opera has played a significant role in Tan Dun's creative output throughout the past decade, mostly recently with the premiere of The First Emperor by the Metropolitan Opera in 2006 with a title role created for Plácido Domingo. In 2008, Tan composed Internet Symphony No. 1: "Eroica", commissioned by Google/YouTube as the focal point for the world’s first collaborative online orchestra. Of his many works for film, Tan Dun’s score for Ang Lee's film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, received an Oscar for Best Original Score.


About the Work

Ghost Opera, the first work commissioned from the composer by an American ensemble, was developed by Tan Dun through discussions with Kronos Quartet and Wu Man, and the work received its premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1995 after a weeklong residency with the performers at the BAM Majestic Theater (now the BAM Harvey). Since then, Ghost Opera has been performed by Kronos and Wu Man more than three dozen times around the world, including a noteworthy performance at the Beijing Concert Hall in 1996. In March 2010, Kronos and Wu Man will coach portions of Ghost Opera with young quartets and pipa players as part of the Professional Training Workshop presented by the Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall.

The roots of Ghost Opera may be found in the nuoxi, or exorcism plays, of ancient China. The nuoxi were one part of the rituals performed by a village community to ward off evil spirits and to gain the protection of benevolent ones. The ceremonies were conducted by a wushi (shaman), able to communicate with the ghost world. Though held in disdain by Chinese intellectuals for centuries, and repressed as “undesirable” by the Chinese government from the 1950s to the ’70s, these age-old traditions survived in the countryside, including the area around Hunan’s Changsha where Tan Dun grew up. Tan Dun’s Ghost Opera is not an ethnographic recreation of the nuoxi. It is rather a sort of invented ritual belonging to a world out of time, where the modern, the archaic, and the merely old mingle hazily.

In addition to the atmosphere of mystery that pervades Ghost Opera, several elements of the work evoke primeval rites. In place of the incantation nuo (“exorcism”), which was repeatedly shouted during nuoxi, participants in Ghost Opera frequently call out yao—not only a typical exclamation uttered by excited Hunanese, but the syllable that may also refer to the Chinese word for demon. The elemental “Earth Dance,” which unifies the five musicians onstage, evokes the community seeking aid by and from ghosts. The fourth movement, “Metal, Rocks,” creates music that Stone- and Bronze-age Chinese might have recognized. 
 
The shamanistic dialogue with the spirit world is made palpable by means of an old Chinese theatrical tradition: the yingxi, or shadow puppet play. The very first such play conjured ghosts: The Han Emperor Wu, pining for his favorite dead concubine Li Furen, had the magician Shao Weng summon her spirit by means of shadows cast on white cloth. Upon seeing the shadow puppet theater, Tang dynasty poet Liang Huang reflected: “Human life seems as though it were in the middle of a dream,” a sentiment echoed by Tan Dun when he has the shadow cellist intone Shakespeare’s lines, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.” 
 
At the center of the work are two enigmatic ghosts, wispy and insubstantial: a quotation from Bach’s c-sharp minor prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier and the Chinese folk song “Little Cabbage.” The two pieces present a study in contrasts: one minor, polyphonic, European, composed by a man and performed by the male quartet; the other pentatonic, monophonic, Chinese, sung here by a woman recollecting her dead parents. And yet in the vaporous mists of Ghost Opera, these distinctions seem not to matter. In the third movement, the two songs merge, blended into an androgynous phantasm that is neither clearly one nor the other.

With a crash of the gong, the ghosts are banished. Their voices fade into silence beneath the rustle of paper. White as death, the paper unfurls from the shadow-spirit world into our own. The form of the paper suggests the long hand-scrolls of Chinese landscapes. Singing for the dead, Wu Man rattles the left edge of the scroll, the portion of the painting where the journey ends and the world dissolves. 

—Greg Dubinsky


For Ghost Opera:
Staging and lighting realized by Laurence Neff
Production management by Kronos Performing Arts Association

Ghost Opera was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet and Wu Man by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, National Endowment for the Arts, and Hancher Auditorium / University of Iowa. Kronos and Wu Man’s recording of Ghost Opera is available on Nonesuch.



A Chinese Home (2009, World Premiere)
Conceived by WU MAN, DAVID HARRINGTON, and CHEN SHI-ZHENG


Part I. Return
 
The first part of A Chinese Home, “Return,” looks back to the early years of Yin Yu Tang, the 19th-century Qing-dynasty Huang mansion of Anhui province. The songs and dances of this section were collected from the rugged mountains of China’s southwest and north, in Yunnan, Guizhou, and Shaanxi provinces. Remote from the lowlands of the Han Chinese, the music of the many minority groups of these regions preserves some of the oldest musical traditions in China.

Startling vocal ensembles can be heard in the south, most spectacularly among the Dong people. The da ge, or Big Songs, of the Dong contain up to eight parts. Rich in dissonances, the sound of these songs (which include this evening’s “Song of Cicadas”) is reminiscent of the thick harmonies produced by the Chinese mouth organ, the lusheng, the sound of which opens A Chinese Home. The Buyi minority also has a notable tradition of polyphonic songs sung fireside by the household’s older women—elaborate ballads that can last up to a week.

The countryside’s rich variety of instruments and dance music is also represented. The musicians try to evoke the timbre of the Sani people’s lehu, a three-string fiddle, that bombards double- and triple-stops in octaves and fifths. It is the most popular instrument of the Sani, played by old folks in the evening and by young men courting even later at night. The hypnotic, curious melodies of the Lisu are often played on the qibu’e, a small lute of three or four strings. Lacking frets and often retuned in the course of performance, it easily adapts to the many scales found in Lisu music. The “Left Foot Tune” is the centerpiece of many Yi celebrations—a great circular dance drawing in several dozens of participants from several villages. The boisterous Shaanxi song “The Round Sun and Crescent Moon in the Sky” was taken from the repertoire of the shadow puppet theater of the northern Huashan region.

The first portion of A Chinese Home closes with evocations of Buddhist rituals old and new. The “Namu Amida” is a funeral chant. It is believed that even a single act of pronouncing the name of the Amida Buddha is enough to ensure salvation and rebirth in the Pure Land. The quartet also employs Buddha Boxes, small devices the size of a transistor radio, which play infinite loops of sacred chant.


Part II. Shanghai
 
“Shanghai,” the second part of A Chinese Home, portrays the arrival of mass culture in the Chinese home. A city built up at the point of a gun to accommodate European and American commercial interests, Shanghai in the 1930s and ’40s was the Chinese hub of capitalist glamour and capitalist misery—the birthplace of Chinese cinema and pop music, and the birthplace of Chinese communism. The words of Chen Gexin’s “Shanghai Night” captures the ambivalence felt by many: “City with no night, colorful lights, cars honking, putting on a false show of prosperity. Look at her smiling, welcoming face—no one knows the sadness in her heart, living at night to keep on living.”

Hollywood, Tin Pan Alley, and Paris entered China through Shanghai. The clothes of stars were copied, hairstyles changed, and movies such as The Thief of Baghdad were turned into Chinese operas. Young Shanghai composers, educated in the newly founded music schools and apprenticed in the new jazz ensembles, poured forth a stream of music that flooded China’s gramophones, radios, and movie theaters. Sometimes the assimilation was complete: “Listen Up” by Yan Zhexi is a blues such as Billie Holiday might have sung. Sometimes the imitation was a little too apparent: for “Stop Singing,” Li Houxiang “borrowed” the melody of Margarita Lecuona’s Cuban hit “Tabu” and Sinicized it by adapting it to the Chinese pentatonic scale.

While many of these songs spoke of love, a striking number were overtly or covertly political. The absent lover in Liu Xue’an’s hit “Will You Ever Come Back” is clearly fighting off Japanese invaders in the War of Resistance. The ominous undertones of “Shanghai Night” might be attributed to the fact that Chen Gexin himself was imprisoned for three months in Japanese-occupied Shanghai.


Part III. The East Is Red
 
With the communist “liberation” of China in 1949, the country’s musical landscape abruptly changed yet again. Every hour, Shanghai’s clock tower intoned “The East Is Red,” a Shaanxi folk tune originally called “Sesame Oil” that was given a Maoist text by Li Youyuan in 1941. Nie Er’s “March of the Volunteers” became the new national song, and the pop music of the 1930s and ’40s was banned as “decadent” and “pornographic.”

Liang Leyin and Li Houxiang fled to Hong Kong, which would become the new entertainment capital of the Chinese world. Liang Leyin’s 1957 song “Plum Blossom” is a souvenir of this period. The composers who stayed behind were much less fortunate. Liu Xue’an spent 22 years in disgrace because “Will You Ever Come Back” was associated with a pop star who defected to the Japanese. Yan Zhexi stopped composing altogether, and turned to painting and children’s books. This did not keep him from being declared an “Enemy of the Revolution” in 1966, nor did it keep his house from being ransacked by Red Guards. Chen Gexin was declared a “rightist” in 1957, sent to a labor camp, and died a few years later.

The massive production titled The East Is Red was one effort by the Chinese Communist party to establish its own musical voice. Produced in 1964 to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the liberation, this monumental historical pageant used some 3,000 participants to portray the history of the Chinese revolution. Assembled in just three months, the production was a collaboration of dozens of the day’s leading artists, all overseen personally by Premier Zhou Enlai.

The music of tonight’s “Revolution Suite” is taken from the final tableau of the 1965 film: Representatives of China’s largest ethnic groups assemble in Tiananmen Square to celebrate the revolution and thank Mao Zedong. While the scene seems a clumsy attempt to symbolize Chinese hegemony over the restive border areas of Tibet, Xinjiang, and Mongolia, it did provide an unprecedented opportunity to disseminate the work of Chinese minority singers and dancers on the widest scale. Zhou Enlai took a personal interest in the promotion of Chinese minority artists, supervising the formation and staffing of the Eastern Song and Dance Ensemble, which provided the personnel for the closing of The East Is Red. At Zhou Enlai’s request, the Manchurian Hu Songhua composed the “Paean” in a single night. The bouffanted Hu (later known as “The Horseback Singer”), the alluring and athletic Ayi Tula, and the indefatigable dancer and choreographer Mode Gema were launched on successful careers, seen throughout China and touring the world.

Part III closes as the Cultural Revolution did, with the death of Mao Zedong. In the weeks following the Chairman’s passing, the Sichuanese one-hit wonder Wang Xiren commemorated him with “The Sun is Reddest, Chairman Mao is Closest.” In Bian Xiaoshen’s recording, it was an unexpected success, giving voice to the grief and bewilderment of those mourning the absence of the formerly omnipresent Mao.
 

Part IV. Made in China
 
“Made in China” reflects a tumult in the country that resists all efforts at harmonization. The older music tenaciously survived the blasted decade of the Cultural Revolution, but its audiences are dwindling. Newer traditions have yet to establish themselves: Mainland pop and rock is stifled by conformity, and pales beside the work of Hong Kong and Taiwanese artists. At the moment, China’s most widely diffused cultural products are toys. The characteristic sounds of today’s Chinese apartment are ones of economic prosperity. As millions flock from the countryside in one of the greatest mass migrations in human history, the noise of construction and urban life is inescapable. Though the new freedoms and new affluence are to be welcomed, “Made in China” sounds a cautionary note. The toll of development on the environment is unsustainable. How it will end, nobody knows ...

—Greg Dubinsky

© 2009 The Carnegie Hall Corporation



A CHINESE HOME
Production Credits

A Chinese Home was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet and Wu Man by Carnegie Hall and the University of Notre Dame's DeBartolo Performing Arts Center. The work was co-commissioned by the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, University of Maryland at College Park, with funds from The Leading College and University Presenters Program of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation; Florida State University's Seven Days of Opening Nights; Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and Stanford Lively Arts, Stanford University. Additional support was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Conceived by Wu Man, David Harrington and Chen Shi-Zheng

Director and Visual Designer: Chen Shi-Zheng
Lighting Designer: Laurence Neff
Sound Designer: Scott Fraser
Video Photography: Camilla French
Video Editing: flora&faunavisions
Costume Designer: Laurence Xu

Assistant Director: Lisa Iacucci
Associate Sound Designer: Calvin Ll. Jones
Production Assistant: Julie Yip

Producer: Janet Cowperthwaite
Production Management: Kronos Performing Arts Association

Intermission sound collage created by David Harrington and Calvin Ll. Jones. Constructed from field recordings by Wu Man, Chen Shi-Zheng, Greg Dubinsky, Janet Cowperthwaite, and additional sources

Kronos Quartet and Wu Man play tuned benches and electric pipa, designed and constructed by Walter Kitundu

Toy selection by David Harrington, Calvin Ll. Jones, and Chen Shi-Zheng

For Kronos Quartet / Kronos Performing Arts Association:
Janet Cowperthwaite, Managing Director
Laird Rodet, Associate Director
Sidney Chen, Artistic Administrator
Scott Fraser, Sound Designer
Christina Johnson, Communications Manager
Calvin Ll. Jones, Production Associate
Asheton Lemay, Intern
Nikolás McConnie-Saad, Administrative Assistant
Laurence Neff, Production Director
Lucinda Toy, Business Operations Manager
Julie Yip, Administrative Assistant

Kronos Quartet / Kronos Performing Arts Association
PO Box 225340
San Francisco, CA 94122
kronosquartet.org
facebook.com/kronosquartet
myspace.com/kronosquartet
Twitter: @kronosquartet #kronos

The Kronos Quartet thanks Jenny Bilfield, Mike Ross, Susie Farr, Ruth Waalkes, Paul Brohan, Anna Thompson, Steve MacQueen, David Lieberman, Greg Dubinsky, Michael Hearst, Hannah Neff, Jill Neff, Kehren Barbour, Dr. Rembrandt Wolpert, Archeophone Records, Clarion Music, Albert Behar, and Yuanlin Chen.

Wu Man thanks Earl Blackburn, Wang Shukai, Nancy Berliner, Ying-hsin Chen, and Jennifer Scott.

Chen Shi-Zheng thanks Steven Holl Architects, Beijing; The Beijing Planning Museum; MAD Architects, Beijing; MAO Livehouse, Beijing; The Village Sanlitun, Beijing; Yi Liming, Beijing; Susu, Dali, Yunnan province; Lao San, Dali, Yunnan province; Cobbler’s Hill Old Inn, Shangrila, Yunnan province; Guo Jian Hong, Shangrila, Yunnan province; Gabriella Chen, Shanghai; Caitlin Ward; and Zhang Liping.

More Information:

A Chinese Home, a staged work with video for string quartet and pipa, takes its inspiration from Yin Yu Tang, a large home from a southeastern Chinese village that was meticulously dismantled, transported to Massachusetts, and reconstructed in the Peabody Essex Museum. The work explores shifts in Chinese cultural identity, and the modernization of rural life through music and sonic environments. Tan Dun's epic Ghost Opera, drawing from shamanistic peasant traditions dating back more than four millennia, also delves into China’s expansive cultural timeline, in a staging with water, metal, stone, and paper.

Kronos Quartet
·· David Harrington, Violin
·· John Sherba, Violin
·· Hank Dutt, Viola
·· Jeffrey Zeigler, Cello
THE ARTISTS

KRONOS QUARTET

For more than 30 years, the Kronos Quartet—David Harrington and John Sherba (violins), Hank Dutt (viola), and Jeffrey Zeigler (cello)—has pursued a singular artistic vision, combining a spirit of fearless exploration with a commitment to expanding the range and context of the string quartet. In the process, Kronos has become one of the most celebrated and influential ensembles of our time, performing thousands of concerts worldwide, releasing more than 40 recordings of extraordinary breadth and creativity, collaborating with many of the world’s most eclectic composers and performers, and commissioning hundreds of works and arrangements for string quartet. Kronos’s work has also garnered numerous awards, including a Grammy for Best Chamber Music Performance (2004) and “Musicians of the Year” (2003) from Musical America.

Since 1973, Kronos has built a compellingly eclectic repertoire for string quartet, performing and recording works by 20th-century masters (Bartók, Shostakovich, Webern), contemporary composers (Aleksandra Vrebalov, John Adams, Alfred Schnittke), jazz legends (Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk), and artists from even farther afield (rock guitar legend Jimi Hendrix, Azeri vocalist Alim Qasimov, avant-garde saxophonist John Zorn).

Integral to Kronos's work is a series of long-running, in-depth collaborations with many of the world's foremost composers. Kronos has worked extensively with composers such as "Father of Minimalism" Terry Riley, whose work with Kronos includes Salome Dances for Peace, the multimedia production Sun Rings, and 2005's The Cusp of Magic; Philip Glass, recording his complete string quartets and scores to films like Mishima and Dracula; Azerbaijan’s Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, featured on the 2005 release Mugam Sayagi: Music of Franghiz Ali-Zadeh; Steve Reich, whose Kronos-recorded Different Trains earned a Grammy; Argentina's Osvaldo Golijov, whose work with Kronos includes both compositions and extensive arrangements for albums like Kronos Caravan and Nuevo; and many more.

In addition to composers, Kronos counts numerous artists from around the world among its regular collaborators, including Chinese pipa virtuoso Wu Man, legendary Bollywood "playback singer" Asha Bhosle; Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq; Mexican rockers Café Tacuba; genre-defying sound artist and instrument builder Walter Kitundu; Romanian gypsy band Taraf de Haïdouks; renowned American soprano Dawn Upshaw; and the unbridled British cabaret trio, the Tiger Lillies. Kronos has performed live with the likes of icons Allen Ginsberg, Zakir Hussain, Modern Jazz Quartet, Tom Waits, David Barsamian, Howard Zinn, Betty Carter,and David Bowie, in addition to appearing on recordings by such diverse talents as Nine Inch Nails, Amon Tobin, Dan Zanes, DJ Spooky, Dave Matthews, Nelly Furtado, Rokia Traoré, Joan Armatrading, and Don Walser.

The quartet spends five months of each year on tour, appearing in concert halls, clubs, and festivals around the world, including BAM Next Wave Festival, Carnegie Hall, the Barbican in London, WOMAD, UCLA's Royce Hall, Amsterdam's Concertgebouw, Shanghai Concert Hall, and the Sydney Opera House. Kronos is equally prolific and wide-ranging on disc. The ensemble's expansive discography on Nonesuch Records includes collections such as Pieces of Africa (1992), a showcase of African-born composers, which simultaneously topped Billboard's Classical and World Music lists; 2000's Caravan, whose musical "travels" span North and South America, Europe, and the Middle East; 1998's 10-disc anthology, Kronos Quartet: 25 Years; Nuevo (2002), a Grammy- and Latin Grammy-nominated celebration of Mexican culture; and the 2003 Grammy-winner, Alban Berg's Lyric Suite.

Wu Man, Pipa
WU MAN

Since moving to the United States from China in 1990, pipa virtuoso Wu Man has not only introduced the traditional Chinese instrument and its repertoire to Western audiences, she has successfully worked to give this ancient instrument a new role in today’s music. As a result, she has made the pipa accessible to a larger audience, including musicians and composers who value the instrument for its unique tonal qualities and virtuosic character. These efforts were recognized when Wu Man was made a 2008 United States Artists Broad Fellow.

Wu Man continually collaborates with some of today’s most distinguished musicians and conductors. She has performed as soloist with many of the world’s major orchestras and her touring has taken her to the major music halls of the world. Wu Man is a principal member of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project, and often performs and records with the groundbreaking Kronos Quartet.

Wu Man begins her 2009–2010 concert season at Carnegie Hall as part of Ancient Paths, Modern Voices. Her travels throughout China to select musicians for the festival have been documented on film, Discovering a Musical Heartland: Wu Man’s Return to China.

This November, Wu Man and the Kronos Quartet present the world premiere of a new staged work with video, A Chinese Home, directed by Chen Shi-Zheng. In May of next year, she is scheduled to perform in Moscow with Yuri Bashmet and the Moscow Soloists, with whom she was nominated for a Grammy Award in 2009 for Best Small Ensemble Performance (world premiere recording of Tan Dun’s Pipa Concerto). She also has plans to tour Europe and Asia with the Silk Road Ensemble, in addition to performing with the Taipei Chinese Traditional Orchestra.

Recent recordings include Terry Riley’s The Cusp of Magic with the Kronos Quartet on Nonesuch; Traditions and Transformations: Sounds of Silk Road Chicago, featuring Wu Man’s performance of Lou Harrison’s Pipa Concerto with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on the CSO Resound label; and New Impossibilities with the Silk Road Ensemble on Sony/BMG.

Born in Hangzhou, China, Wu Man studied at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, where she became the first recipient of a master's degree in pipa performance. Wu Man was selected as a Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard University, and was selected by Yo-Yo Ma as the winner of the City of Toronto Glenn Gould Protégé Prize in music and communication. She is also the first artist from China to have performed at the White House. Visit wumanpipa.org for more information.

Chen Shi-Zheng, Director and Visual Designer
CHEN SHI-ZHENG

Chen Shi-Zheng is a China-born, New York-based director who is internationally renowned for his innovative and provocative staging of operas as diverse as Monteverdi’s Orfeo, Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer, and Tang Xianxu’s The Peony Pavilion. He recently conceived, wrote, and directed a stage production of Monkey: Journey to the West, executed in collaboration with creators of the virtual rock band Gorillaz. Mr. Chen made his film directorial debut with Dark Matter, starring Meryl Streep and Liu Ye, and winning Sundance Film Festival's Alfred P. Sloan Award.

As a child growing up without parents during the Cultural Revolution in Changsha, Hunan Province, he was taken under the wing of traditional funeral singers, who were among some of the great out-of-work masters of Chinese opera. He later became a leading young opera actor, performing until his mid-20s in many productions throughout China, simultaneously recording albums of folksongs and contemporary pop music. He emigrated to the United States in 1987, and has since developed his own artistic expression that transcends the boundaries between East and West, as well as between music, theater, dance, and film. In 2000, Mr. Chen was named Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.

In 1999, his landmark 19-hour production of The Peony Pavilion was hailed as one of the most important theatrical events our time. The Peony Pavilion premiered as the centerpiece of Lincoln Center Festival in New York and at Festival d’Automne in Paris, and toured to Piccolo Teatro in Milan, Perth International Arts Festival, Aarhus Festival in Denmark, Berlin Festival, Vienna Festival, and at the Esplanade Centre in Singapore. It has been filmed for home video distribution by RM Associates.

A selection of Chen’s other directing credits includes Mercury Light World (Berlin Festival); My Life as a Fairy Tale (Lincoln Center Festival, New York, and Aarhus Festival, Denmark); a trilogy of contemporary theater works based on Chinese classics—Orphan of Zhao in two versions (Lincoln Center Theater and Lincoln Center Festival), Snow in June (American Repertory Theatre), and Peach Blossom Fan (RedCat); Dido and Aeneas in two versions (Handel and Haydn Society, Spoleto Festival USA); Der fliegende Holländer (Spoleto Festival USA); Night Banquet (co-commissioned by Festival d’Automne à Paris, Kunstenfestival des Arts Brussels, Hebbel-Theater Berlin, Ensemble Modern Frankfurt, and Lincoln Center Festival); the documentary film Cultural Warriors of the Revolution (TV France 3); Cosi fan tutte (Aix-en Provence Festival and Théâtre des Champs Élysées); and Alley (New Zealand Festival of the Arts). He made his directorial debut in 1996 with The Bacchae (China National Beijing Opera Company, Hong Kong International Arts Festival, and Athens Festival).

He invented a new genre called “circus opera” with Monkey: Journey to the West, which premiered at Manchester International Festival and Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris in 2007. It toured to Spoleto Festival USA, on to Covent Garden last summer, and has completed an extended run at the O2 Theatre in London this winter. He also premiered L'incoronazione di Poppea for English National Opera in fall 2007 as part of a complete Monteverdi cycle that he began with Vespers of 1610 and continued with Orfeo (nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Opera Production in 2006). During the season 2008–2009, he directed the world premiere of The Bonesetter’s Daughter at San Francisco Opera and La traviata at Lithuanian National Opera in Vilnius.

Future projects include a Chinese opera Legend of the White Snake for the Lincoln Center Festival; a new opera by composer Judith Weir, commissioned by Bregenzer Festspiele and Royal Opera House, Covent Garden; a collaboration with viol player Jordi Savall; and a musical film production in China.