China NCPA Orchestra
Music Director: Lü Jia
Conductor Laureate: Zuohuang Chen
China NCPA Orchestra is the resident orchestra of the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA), Beijing. Established in March 2010, the orchestra performs in more than a dozen opera productions presented by its home venue every year as well as in regular orchestral concerts in its own season.
Artists associated with the orchestra included Zubin Mehta, Valery Gergiev, Myun
g
-Whun Chung
, Christoph Eschenbach, Vladimir Ashkenazy,
Fabio Luisi,
Lang Lang, Stephen Kovacevich, Leo Nucci,
and
Yuja Wang, among many others. Lorin Maazel worked closely with the orchestr
a
before his passing and praised the musicians for their "amazing professionalism and great passion in music".
The orchestra has
gain
ed
critical acclaim for its performances in NCPA's opera productions
of
not only classical repertoire works such as Tosca
,
Die Fledermaus
, Lohengrin, Aida, Nabucco, but also newly commissioned works
like
The Chinese Orphan
and
The
Rickshaw Boy
. In its own orchestral concert season,
it
has consistently presented creative and diverse programs. Their performance of the mammoth Ring without Words with its creator, Lorin Maazel, was released on SONY Classics worldwide, the only recording the great maestro ever made with a Chinese orchestra
. T
he orchestra has
also
explored extensively i
n
contemporary music.
It gave
the Chinese premieres of
works by Toru Takemitsu and Giya Kancheli
, et al
,
and
the world premieres of
many
works by Michael Gordon,
and
Augusta Read Thomas,
et al.
The NCPA Orchestra has flexed its wings on the international stage, receiving widespread international praise for its performances at the Kissingen Summer Music Festival and the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival and concerts in many cities in Germany, as we
ll as in
Sydney, Singapore, Seoul, Daegu, Abu Dhabi
,
Taipei and Macau. During the 2014/15 season, the orchestra undertook its first North American tour, where it performed in 7 major cities in the US and Canada, under the baton of LÜ Jia. Musical America praised its "joyful confidence and youthful strength". Concerto Net described it "a polished, first rate ensemble".
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