Swiss orchestra celebrates Chinese composer's work

The Basel Symphony Orchestra of Switzerland will tour China with two concerts in Beijing and Shanghai this week. Under the baton of its chief conductor Dennis Russell Davies, the orchestra will perform Mozart, Beethoven and Stravinsky classics plus Chinese composer Chen Yi's Ge Xu Antiphony.

In an e-mail interview, the US-based Chen said, the US conductor Davies had supported her throughout her professional career. He was the first foreign conductor to commission her to write a piano concerto, when he was the music director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra in New York.

Chen's doctoral dissertation work at Columbia University, a piano concerto, was premiered by Davies and the Brooklyn orchestra in 1994, and was subsequently performed in Carnegie Hall and Kennedy Center by other orchestras.