Setting out a new score

The Beijing Forum for Symphonic Music gets together many of the world's most accomplished practitioners to steer a new path for the genre, Chen Nan reports.

When a program built around Wagner's last opera, Parsifal, was announced, conductor Valery Gergiev started to worry.

The opera, which runs for five and a half hours, premiered on July 26, 1882, at the Bayreuth Festival Theatre in Germany. Performed by Mariinsky Orchestra, it made its debut in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, on Nov 24 and the concert version was staged at the National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing on Tuesday. In 2013, the opera was staged in China for the first time with a performance given by the China Philharmonic during the Beijing Music Festival.