Top British orchestra returns to delight Chinese audience

The United Kingdom's Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, or RPO, has announced it is to embark on its first tour of China since 2017 next week.

"It's a tremendous honor for the RPO to be returning to China after quite a long absence, and it's particularly exciting," Huw Davies, the orchestra's acting managing director, said at a media briefing in London on Friday.

Davies said that the tour hoped to bring the joy of orchestral music to a much wider audience and rekindle those friendships and relationships with China.

Since making its debut in China in the early 1970s, the London-based RPO has performed regularly in the country. The RPO's last tour in China was in 2017.

This year's 11-day, seven-city tour will commence in Beijing and also include performances in Shanghai, Wuhan and Nanjing. There will be nine concerts in total.

During the tour, 94 musicians will perform a specially-curated repertoire, including pieces from two renowned Chinese composers, the Crouching Tiger Cello Concerto by Tan Dun and Mulan Psalm: Potpourri by Guan Xia.

The program also features masterpieces such as Benjamin Britten's Four Sea Interludes, Shostakovich's Symphony No.5, and Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade.

Vasily Petrenko, the RPO's music director, expressed his hope to showcase connections and interchange between different music genres and cultures through this tour.

"It's very important to bring cultures together and let us know more about Chinese culture, and the Chinese know more about British classical music culture," Petrenko said, adding that understanding each other's cultures and values will help nations work and live better together.

"The world is in a very turbulent situation, and we still hope that culture can serve as one of the tools to unite the world, to calm connections, and to harmonize the way humanity lives," he said.

Jiang Duo contributed to this story.