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Wu Wei premieres Donghoon Shin’s Sheng Concerto

Donghoon Shin has two world premieres this month. The first is with the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group:

Murmurs

Music dissolving borders, and the world premiere of BCMG Apprentice Composer-in-Residence Donghoon Shin’s Sheng Concerto
Thursday 21 March 2019, 7.30pm | Book tickets
CBSO Centre | Berkley Street | Birmingham B1 2LF | cbso.co.uk

Wu Wei plays Sheng

As the world grows closer together, our lives become ever more entwined. Borders between different cultures blur, broadening our understanding of the world – and the society we live in. Incorporating a musical instrument from a different musical tradition is just one way composers have reacted to our increasingly borderfree world – and so we invite Wu Wei, one of the world’s best players of the Chinese instrument, the Sheng, to join us. He will perform the world premiere of a specially-commissioned Sheng Concerto by Korean-born BCMG Apprentice Composer in Residence, Donghoon Shin.

The concert opens with Rebecca Saunders’ setting of Molly Bloom’s monologue from James Joyce’s Ulysses which triumphantly finished the work without stop or pause, and has become a cultural hallmark mirroring modern life: dissolving the borders between thought and reality in a stream of consciousness. Rebecca Saunders has spent her career in search of a true musical equivalent of experience, and we close the concert with her evocative 2009 work, Murmurs.

Wu Wei Sheng
Julien Leroy Conductor

Rebecca Saunders (b. 1967) CRIMSON – Molly’s Song 1 (1995), 24′
Donghoon Shin (b. 1983) Anecdote for Solo Sheng and Ensemble (2019), 15′ (BCMG Commission | World Premiere)
Jia Guoping (b.1963) The Wind Sound in the Sky (2002), 11′
Rebecca Saunders murmurs (2009), 28′

Donghoon Shin’s residence with BCMG as Apprentice Composer in Residence is part of the Embedded programme from Sound and Music, the national charity for new music, in collaboration with Birmingham Contemporary Music Group.

Translation: Isabelle Xia and Jenny Kwock

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