China Now Music Festival at Bard to Honor American Transcontinental Railroad Workers

Saturday, October 10, 3pm | Annandale-on-Hudson, NY | $15

Conductor Jindong Cai leads The Orchestra Now, the China Now Chorus, and vocal soloists in Pulitzer Prize winner Zhou Long's symphonic oratorio "Men of Iron and the Golden Spike" on October 10 at the Sosnoff Theater at the Fisher Center at Bard College. It is the Hudson Valley concert of the ninth annual China Now Music Festival, which this year is themed "Chasing Dreams" and tied to the country's 250th anniversary.

The oratorio honors the thousands of Chinese laborers who came to America in the 1860s to build the Transcontinental Railroad. The festival's US–China Music Institute at Bard Conservatory and Stanford University's Center for East Asian Studies commissioned the work, and it premiered at Carnegie Hall in 2019 for the railroad's 150th anniversary. The libretto is by Su Wei, a Yale lecturer who adapted it from an opera he'd written about 30 years earlier. Zhou's score runs to nine movements, including "Coolie Work Chant," "Avalanche," and "The Golden Spike." It threads through two traditional Cantonese melodies, a children's nursery rhyme and a laborers' work song.

Zhou was born in Beijing in 1953 and was sent to a state farm in northeastern China during the Cultural Revolution. He later studied at Beijing's Central Conservatory and at Columbia, and won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for his first opera, "Madame White Snake." "In this divisive moment in our country, I hope this piece reminds audiences that America has always been shaped by diverse ethnic communities," he has written, "and that the stories of Chinese laborers deserve their rightful place in our shared history."

The program also includes the U.S. premiere of Li Shaosheng's "Chasing the Sky," a five-movement symphonic suite on humanity's fascination with the heavens, from ancient imagination to space exploration. A suona, a Chinese double-reed instrument, is the soloist in the second movement, "Questioning the Sky," and tenor Li Yi sings the finale.

The Orchestra Now is Bard's graduate orchestra. Cai directs the US–China Music Institute, is associate conductor of The Orchestra Now, and founded China Now after coming to Bard from Stanford in 2017.

A free concert comes the day before, Friday, October 9 at 2pm at the Chapel of the Holy Innocents on Bard's campus. Singers from the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, the festival's co-presenter, perform Chinese and American folk songs and contemporary works.

The rest of the festival is in New York City and Kingston. It opens October 2 at Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall with "The Rift," a chamber opera by Huang Ruo and David Henry Hwang about Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The Bard East/West Ensemble plays at TEMPO Performing Arts Center in Kingston on October 4, and the oratorio program repeats October 11 at Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Sosnoff Theater, Fisher Center at Bard College, 60 Manor Avenue, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. Tickets and full schedule at barduschinamusic.org.