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Kansas City, Missouri
Friday, 1 March 2013 - 8:00 PM
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Single-ticket prices $25 $45 $50 $60 $75
China National Symphony Orchestra will perform at 8 p.m. Friday, March 1 at Helzberg Hall, Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts (1601 Broadway St.), in downtown Kansas City, Mo. Founded as the Central Philharmonic Orchestra of China in 1956, the orchestra was restructured and renamed in 1996. China’s national orchestra performed under its previous name on the Harriman-Jewell Series in 1987. The Orchestra will perform Xia Guan’s First Movement of Earth Requiem; Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7; and Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 featuring Peng Peng Gong, an exceptional pianist who played a Harriman-Jewell Series Discovery Concert in 2006 when he was 14.
For more than half a century, the China National Symphony Orchestra (CNSO) has introduced Chinese audiences to a vast repertoire of classical, romantic, modern and contemporary orchestral works by both Western and Asian composers. The CNSO’s concerts are frequently broadcast on radio and television throughout China and the world. Many recordings of the CNSO’s performances have been published worldwide with the cooperation from the China Record Company, the French Record Company, Philips Record Company, and the Channel Classics Records of Netherlands.
Principal Guest Conductor, En Shao, will lead the orchestra. En Shao is also the music director and principal conductor of the Taipei Chinese Orchestra. He began playing the piano and violin at an early age. After graduating from Central Conservatory of Music, he became the second Principal Conductor of the Chinese Broadcasting Symphony Orchestra, a post he held for five years. As a winner of the 6th Hungarian Television International Conductors’ Competition in 1989, he conducted several performances with the Hungarian Radio Orchestra and the State Symphony Orchestra.
Chinese pianist, Peng Peng Gong, will perform as a soloist. At the age of five, he began studying piano performance. Accepted by the Shanghai Music Conservatory Primary School at the age of nine, he went on to win several major piano competitions. He was later accepted by the Juilliard School’s pre-college division and currently enrolls as an undergrad student at Juilliard.
The Chinese National Symphony Orchestra has toured throughout the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Australia, Mexico, Japan, DPR of Korea, Rep. of Korea, Malaysia, and Thailand, giving successful performances to critical acclaim by the international press. In London, a music critic for The Times praised the CNSO as “a mature group with a vital sound.”
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