Founded in 1998 by Maestro Long Yu, The Beijing Music Festival (BMF) is the premier event in China's cultural calendar and one of the leading classical music festivals in the world. The festival presents 30 concerts every October, offering a wide variety of classical and jazz music including opera, orchestral, chamber, solo, and choral concerts. BMF also hosts master classes, community outreach concerts, children's concerts, and educations activities. Notable performers who have appeared at the festival include Martha Argerich, Pinchas Zukerman, Jean Yves Thibaudet, Emmanuel Ax, Murray Perahia, Maxim Vengerov, Christoph Eschenbach, Tan Dun, Kathleen Battle, Jose Carreras, Sarah Chang, Augustin Dumay, Valery Gergiev, Mischa Maisky, Krzysztof Penderecki, Issac Stern, Melvyn Tan, Fou Ts'ong, the Kodály Quartet, and the New London Consort. The Festival has always been active in commissioning and presenting premieres of new works by great Chinese and international composers, and many works of the Western classical music canon had their Asian premieres at BMF. Zhou Long’s Madame White Snake, which was co-commissioned with Opera Boston, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2011. The Foundation also presented the world premiere of Ye Xiaogang’s opera, Song of Farewell (texted by Sun Gexuan) and the sensational China premiere of Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 (“Symphony of a Thousand”). In the opening concert of the 13th Beijing Music Festival, the Foundation commissioned Howard Shore for a new piano concerto commemorating the bicentennial of Chopin’s Birth. Entitled “Ruin and Memory” and performed by Lang Lang, this work received its world premiere at the festival.
