Music In the decade or so since Zhang Yimou’s groundbreaking Turandot in the Forbidden City, China has stepped up its campaign to perfect the Great Chinese Opera – not simply westernised versions of their own brassy stage tradition, but works of unambiguously Chinese sensibility written in a musical language easily digestible by the rest of the world.
The Shanghai Opera House, with its outward-looking awareness and a history of incubating new works, used to have that field largely to itself. But old funding streams have shifted priorities and the opening of Beijing’s cash-rich National Centre for Performing Arts last year has changed the playing field yet again.
