SUMMER OF HARMONY
2047
Music lovers will be able to enjoy the Music in the Summer Air (MISA) concerts this year through online streaming.
The festival of classical music with a youthful twist will take place in Shanghai from July 1 to 16. This is the ninth installment of the annual music festival founded by Yu Long, artistic director of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra.
The festival program consists of 24 concerts, which will be performed at the Shanghai Symphony Hall and at the Urban Music Lawn.
Fourteen of the concerts will be live streamed online, via multiple platforms such as Tencent, Youku and the Paper. Concerts can be viewed live using mobile applications, or through a web browser.
“The concert hall has limited capacity, but music lovers will have a new way to participate in the festival by watching the concerts online, wherever they are,” says Zhou Ping, the director of SSO.
As for how the idea of online streaming came about, it all boils down to a sporting encounter.
Last year there was a soccer game between the SSO musicians and those from the Berlin Philharmonic, when the latter toured in Shanghai. And the live streaming of the match was viewed by 4.71 million viewers, to the great surprise of SSO.
This is what encouraged the SSO to broadcast its concerts live on the internet.
“We hope our audiences, many of whom are mobile web users, enjoy these streaming services, and will participate in the online interaction with MISA,” says Zhou.
This year for the first time, the MISA festival will feature the use of an animated film in a live concert.
On July 7 and 8, SSO will present a film music concert, Secrets of the Heavenly Book, alongside a live projection of the restored film made in 1983.
The original music of the film composed by Wu Yingju has had no score sheet, and so Shen Yiwen, a young composer with the SSO, had to transcribe the music from the original soundtrack.
In the past, the SSO has hosted a number of multi-media concert productions from abroad at the MISA festival.
“The concerts involving new media are expensive, and it’s not just the copyright, but also the equipment and personnel that add to the cost,” says Zhou.
Importing an overseas multi-media production can cost up to US$1 million, she says.
“That’s why we thought of creating our own new-media concert productions to tell China’s stories to overseas audiences.”
Secrets of the Heavenly Book was made by the Shanghai Animation Film Studio in 1983.
Qian Junda, the film director, who is now 90, says: “I am pleased to find people still remember the film and the characters.”
The film is about a conflict between a boy born from an egg and three foxes, who steal a book from heaven and gain supernatural abilities from it.
Giving details about the production, Qian says that the film features a series of traditional Chinese folk tales strung together in a fun way like “sugar-coated haws on a stick”.
As for Zhou, she says: “It is a film full of wild imagination and innocent fun.
“While we were looking for a potential subject to work with, we found the film, which sparked lots of beautiful memories for our team members that we hope to share with the public.”
Meanwhile, other highlights of the MISA festival include performances by two-time Oscar award winning composer Alexandre Desplat, and the Velvet Underground, according to Wang Xiaoping, the programming director of SSO.
This year, Desplat won the award for the best original score at the Academy Awards with his composition for The Shape of Water, his second win after The Grand Budapest Hotel in 2015.
He will conduct the SSO and present a concert of his masterpieces on July 15.
The Velvet Underground 50th anniversary memorial concert will be done by some of the original band members on July 11, says Wang, though he declined to give any names.
Separately, the New York Philharmonic will be participating in the MISA festival for the fourth time.
Jaap van Zweden, who is to take the job as the new artistic director of NYP, will make his debut with the orchestra at the MISA opening concert.
Totally, the NYP will play four concerts at the festival.
In the past nine years more than 200,000 people have taken part in the activities of MISA.
Speaking about the audiences and how they have benefitted from MISA, Jiang Tingfang, a representative of the municipal educational administration, says: “A large number of them are young people, a rare phenomenon in the international music scene. Through the years some of the young students who used to work at MISA as volunteers have become artists and started their own music careers at the festival.”