Finally, A Visit to the Egg
I know, bad composer. I’ve totalled 5 months in Beijing and haven’t attended a concert at the National Center for Performing Arts (the Egg) until recently. On the program: a men’s military chorus and a girls choir.
I was skeptical at first, especially when the men’s chorus started off the program with some traditional Chinese songs, but the girls choir - they sang a pretty difficult, diverse, and sometimes avant-garde program. And when the two choirs sang together, we got a pretty ambitious program including music from Argentina, Italy, America, Russia, and various Eastern European countries. It really speaks to how much Beijing is artistically trying to open up to the world and vice versa. I certainly wouldn’t have guessed that the concert would have included, among other things, Eric Whitacre’s Lux Aurumque or Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings.
