Debra Li

debra_lidan@163.com

THE Little Golden Tree Children’s Choir of Shenzhen Concert Hall will make its debut at the National Center for the Performing Arts (NCPA) in Beijing this month.

The choir, consisting of the elite members of the concert hall’s Flying Over the Rainbow Multiethnic Children’s Choir, will give a performance Aug. 10, collaborating with ethnic minority musicians and young singers. The 150-member ensemble will include singers and instrumentalists from seven ethnic minorities, namely Naxi, Yi, Tibetan, Kazak, Mongolian, Lahu and Lisu. Hu Manxue, founder and director of Shenzhen Lily Girls Choir, will conduct the concert.

Among the soloists will be Moxi Zishi, a singer-songwriter of Yi ethnic minority, whose “Ajielo” (“Don’t Be Afraid”) went viral after he sang it on the TV show “Voice of China” in 2012.

The guest performers will play the lusheng (a mouth organ pipe played by several ethnic minorities in Yunnan), the horse head fiddle, the moon guitar and other instruments to accompany the songs.

In addition to the ethnic minority songs and beloved art songs, the concert will also feature the live-performance premiere of an original song “Pian Pian Shao Nian Xing” (“The Young”), dedicated to the children and young people in Shenzhen. The track made the list of top 10 best new songs of the second quarter of 2021 as voted by local radio DJs in Shenzhen.

The Little Golden Tree will be only the second children’s choir from Shenzhen that has been invited to perform at the NCPA Chorus Festival in August. The Lily Girls Choir, Shenzhen’s pride that has won numerous awards at international singing competitions, graced the chorus festival in the summer of 2012.

The festival, an annual event first initiated in 2009 that aims to promote the art of chorus singing among Chinese audiences, was suspended last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This year’s events, with the theme of “The Sound of Nature” and scheduled between Tuesday and Aug. 21, will feature choruses from different ethnic groups to celebrate the variety of colorful Chinese folk cultures.

Shenzhen Concert Hall co-founded the Flying Over the Rainbow Multiethnic Children’s Choir in association with the Futian District Cultural Center in the beginning of 2019. The troupe has performed multiple concerts in the two short years of its history, collaborating with singer Gong Linna and others.