Performance: Suzhou Symphony Orchestra

Li Huanzhi’s Spring Festival Suite, written for orchestra from 1955-1956, depicts scenes of people in the Shanbei region of China celebrating the Spring Festival, or Chinese New Year. The first movement of the Suite is the most widely known and is often performed on its own as the Spring Festival Overture.

Information on Spring Festival Overture:

“The Spring Festival Overture is a work strongly influenced by the efforts of Xian Xinghai – composer of the Yellow River Cantata on which the famous Yellow River Concerto is based – to interpret Chinese folk music in Western musical styles. It was composed in 1955-1956 by Li Huanzhi, who studied at the Lu Xun College of the Arts while Xian Xinghai was directing the music program there. The Spring Festival of the title is the Chinese New Year, and the themes of this overture come from folk music from the Shanbei region. Like the Yellow River Concerto, it exists in various versions, some employing more traditional Chinese instruments than others. A recording of the Spring Festival Overture was sent into space with China’s first moon probe in 2007; other music sent out on the probe included ‘Ode to the Yellow River’ and ‘The East Is Red.’”

— John Henken, LA Philharmonic (laphil.com/musicdb/pieces/678/spring-festival-overture)

Information on Li Huanzhi:

“The life of Li Huanzhi (1919-2000), one of China’s most revered composers, can be seen as a microcosm of the turbulent history of Chinese ‘art’, or ‘classical’, music across the 20th century. After his early conservatory years in the 1930s studying composing and conducting in tenuous relationship with European classical forms, in the ‘40s and ‘50s Li composed legendary patriotic workers’ songs and folk-influenced works to support the new Republic, then fell to persecution and repression during the Cultural Revolution in the ‘70s, and was finally released to a rebirth of creativity and national pride in the ‘80s and beyond.”

– Portland Youth Philharmonic (portlandyouthphil.org/blog/blog/li-huanzhi-one-of-chinas-most-revered-composers/574)