Debra Li

    debra_lidan@163.com

    A FOUR-DAY marimba festival featuring world-class marimba and percussion artists has come to Shenzhen.

    Nancy Zeltsman, a leading marimba performer, and five other musicians performed the first concert of the festival in a small theater on the fifth floor of Shenzhen Concert Hall last night.

    Zeltsman, also a recording artist and author, is a professor at the Berklee College of Music and the Boston Conservatory. She has premiered more than 125 solo/chamber marimba works, including compositions by Paul Simon, Michael Tilson Thomas, Gunther Schuller, Carla Bley, and Louis Andriessen.

    In 2001, she started the Zeltsman Marimba Festival at Princeton University in New Jersey. Since then, the festival has been an annual two-week seminar and concert series held in a different location each summer.

    This is the first time that Zeltsman has brought the festival to China thanks to her student Rachel Zhang, a graduate of Shenzhen Arts School.

    More than 50 marimba enthusiasts from around the world are gathering in Shenzhen during the four-day event. Apart from seminars in the mornings and afternoons, some are given the chance to perform at concerts together with Zeltsman and Zhang and fellow marimba player Christos Rafalides, percussionists Mike Truesdell and Laurent Warnier, as well as special guest Petros Klampanis, a bassist and composer.

    The concerts feature not just classical music, but also more modern genres such as jazz and country music.

    “It’s important that music students make contact with a wide variety of music genres,” Zeltsman said. “I hope that they become aware of the possibility of performing music other than classical. The more they come to learn, the bigger potential they may realize in the future.”

    To attract more students to the concerts, the organizers have set ticket prices from 80 to 380 yuan (US$12.9-61.3), but students can take advantage of discounts, paying only 40 to 120 yuan for the shows.