Today (June 15), Tan Dun Conducts Shanghai Symphony in World Premiere of Igniting the Magical Dream – New Symphony Commissioned by Disney – at Internationally Televised Grand Opening of Shanghai Disneyland
Today (Wed, June 15), Grammy, Academy, and Grawemeyer Award-winning composer-conductor Tan Dun serves as Music Director of a gala concert highlighting this week’s grand opening celebrations for Shanghai Disney Resort, which includes the long-awaited Shanghai Disneyland. Alongside a performance by superstar pianist Lang Lang, Tan Dun will lead the Shanghai Symphony and a trio of China’s foremost celebrity singers in the world premiere performance of his new visual symphony, Igniting the Magical Dream. This was commissioned for the occasion in an unprecedented move by the Walt Disney Company, which has never previously commissioned an original symphony to commemorate the opening of one of its resorts. Blending Chinese and Western musical motifs with iconic Disney themes, the multimedia symphony draws on “Ignite the Dreamer Within,” Tan Dun’s own original new theme song for the resort. Also featuring fireworks, acrobatics, and technology, the grand-scale gala concert takes place at Shanghai Disneyland’s centerpiece, the Enchanted Storybook Castle, before an audience of nearly 3,000. It will be televised live in China before airing tomorrow on the Disney Channel, Disney Junior and Disney XD in countries including the U.S. (Thurs, June 16, at 8pm EST), in a telecast narrated by TV’s Sofia Carson.
A world leader in the fields of music, theater, and the visual arts, Tan Dun has been recognized with music’s most prestigious honors, including Academy, Grammy, and Grawemeyer Awards, Musical America’s Composer of the Year, the Bach Prize of the City of Hamburg, and Moscow’s Shostakovich Award; he has conducted the world’s foremost orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw, and London Symphony Orchestra; and he is a prominent intercultural leader, who serves as a global Goodwill Ambassador for UNESCO. As described by the Los Angeles Times,
“Tan Dun is a composer of many sounds. He has coaxed birdsong from cellphones and is intimate with the pipa, the ancient Chinese lute. At once global and local, he is an old soul tuned to modern fascinations, mixing Asian and Western styles that fit as well into cinema as they do the concert hall.”
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© 21C Media Group, June 2016
