Music in the Summer Air festival hits the right notes
This year's Music in the Summer Air festival opened on July 7 with an audaciously young and creative cast for the "Light in the Universe: MISA 2023 Opening Concert."
Known for supporting young talented musicians, the summer festival moved further this year to have 23-year-old Jin Yukuang conducting the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra for the opening concert.
"This is my third year participating in MISA, and the first time to conduct the opening concert, as well as conducting the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra," Jin said just before the opening.
"Three years of MISA have completely changed me ― in a good way ― meaning I have made so much progress.
"I'm glad to see some of my friends and classmates, around the same age, are also on the stage, but it's also such a scary experience that I haven't slept well recently."
Jin Yukuang conducts the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra for the first time.
The opening piece "Three-Body Fantasy" is composed by another young musician Fay Kueen Wang, based on the scores of the top-rated TV drama "The Three-Body Problem," adapted from Liu Cixin's bestselling sci-fi novel.
Wang impressed many at last year's MISA, where one of the duet opening concerts featured her "The Wheel of Time." The bicycle, once the major mode of transportation in China, became a musical instrument on stage.
This time, the young composer integrated a diversity of music genres as well as Chinese folklore elements to reconstruct cosmo, life and consciousness with sound to depict the romanticism and grandeur of the three-body world.
It was followed by symphonic poem "Metacosmos," composed by Icelandic musician Anna Thorvaldsdottir, who was the 2012 winner of the Nordic Council Music Prize.
"Metacosmos" was premiered by the New York Philharmonic under the baton of Esa-Pekka Salonen in 2018, followed by an European premier performed by the Berliner Philharmoniker and Alan Gilbert.
MISA 2023's futuristic theme "sound in the world, light in the universe," is inspired by the popular concept of the metaverse.
Elliot Leung's "Symphony No. 1 The Metaverse" follows before the concert ends with selected excerpts from the classic set "The Planets" by Gustav Holst.
"The world is constantly changing," Leung explained.
"We can now doing many things at the same time, such as operating ten mobile apps simultaneously, thanks to technology. This was unimaginable even only ten years ago. I want to display it through music."
The rather unusual opening of the festival highlights this year's futuristic theme inspired by the popular concept of the metaverse ― "sound in the world, light in the universe."
The festival, to run from July 7 through July 20 with 30 performances, will see both well-established returning friends like musicians from the New York Philharmonic, and young talented musicians including percussionist Zhang Fang, BBC's "Young Musician 2020," and violinist Rino Yoshimoto from the latest Shanghai Isaac Stern International Violin Competition.
The closing concert, under the baton of the orchestra's artistic director Yu Long, will see 82-year-old legendary pianist Yin Chengzong play the famous "Yellow River" piano concerto, a piece that Yin arranged based on the "Yellow River Cantata" (1939) and that has been performed in many Western theaters since the 1980s.
The festival will see both well-established musicians to return and young talented musicians debut.
