MUSICIANS from China and overseas staged a concert at the Nanshan District Hall last night to mark the opening of an international music festival in the district.

The local audience applauded pianist Nicholas Zumbro and other musicians at the show.

Zumbro played "Piano Concerto in E-flat Major" by Franz Liszt, which earlier won him a standing ovation at the Lincoln Center in New York. He performed a Chinese folk piece called "Quiet Stream in the Canyon."

Clarinetist Jane Ellsworth performed "Concerto in B-flat Major" by Saverio Mercadante in collaboration with the Pearl River Film Studio orchestra.

Tenor Wang Chuanyue sang from Puccini's "Turandot," and soprano Ke Luwa sang from Verdi's "The Lady of Camellias."

In the next four days, a dozen musicians will hold three more concerts.

"The event took me nearly a year to plan and make it happen," said Zhu Wenbo, manager of the company organizing the music week.

"We invited musicians from home and abroad, young and old, to perform on the same stage and offer them a chance to learn from and share with each other."

A year ago, Zhu organized a Liszt Music Festival in Longgang.

"That experience taught me that it's not local people don't love classical music, it's we have given them too little chances to access classics. Good things appeal to people universally, like beautiful music."

He said he was quite impressed by the size of the audience that flocked to the concerts last year.

"That's why I decided to do this one."

He also invited Chinese folk music artists, like erhu player Zhao Duoliang and konghou players from Shenyang, to the event.

Musicians with the Shenyang Conservatory of Music have reinvented konghou, a traditional Chinese music instrument. Resembling a harp, the konghou is very expressive and works well with an orchestra.

"In the ancient Chinese poem 'Peacock Flies to the Southeast,' there's a sentence describing a teenage girl learning to play the konghou. It's evidence that the music instrument was played more than 2,000 years ago in China," Zhu said.

The world's first konghou orchestra, founded in Shenyang in 2004, will perform a rendition of the Broadway musical "Cats" at the closing concert of the event.

"Isn't that amazing? We arrange for the East to meet the West here on local stage," he said.

Editor: Wing