Chinese composer and conductor Tan Dun was born in Hunan Province and grew up with traditional Chinese folk music, learning to play the erhu and dizi (bamboo flute). The Cultural Revolution disrupted his musical education: like many youths from the “educated” classes, he was forced to perform agricultural labor on a rice field. In 1976 he managed to join a Peking opera company, playing violin and arranging music for them. In 1977 Tan Dun was accepted into the Central Conservatory in Beijing, and between 1986 and 1993 he continued his studies at Columbia University in New York, where he found crucial inspiration in his encounters with musicians in the world of experimental art and the avant-garde. As a composer he has cultivated intercultural dialogue ever since through works that waver between various musical idioms from East and West. Among other works his œuvre includes the operas Marco Polo (1992–96), Peony Pavilion (1998), and The First Emperor (2006), which was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera. In 2000 his Water Passion after the Gospel of Matthew received its world premiere in Stuttgart. Tan Dun has become familiar to a wider public through his film music, especially Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, for which he won an Oscar and a Grammy; in addition, his Internet Symphony (2008) has reached 15 million people online around the world. Tan Dun’s creative achievements were recognized in 1998 with the Grawemeyer Award; in 2003 he was named Musical America’s Composer of the Year. As a conductor Tan Dun has led renowned orchestras around the world, including the New York and Berlin Philharmonics, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Filarmonica della Scala, the Orchestre National de France, and the London Symphony Orchestra.
During the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA’s tour of China in October 2009, Tan Dun led the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in Beijing in a concert containing his own composition as well as works by Haydn, Mozart, and Takemitsu.
August 2011