Music director and conductor of Forbidden City Chamber Orchestra, he is also professor at the China Conservatoire of Music in Beijing. He studied at the Central Conservatoire of Music and the China Conservatoire of Music. He has conducted many orchestras, including the Chinese Youth String Orchestra, Chinese Youth Plucked-String Orchestra, China Conservatoire, New Music Orchestra, as well as the Singapore Chinese Orchestra, Guangdong Traditional Music Ensemble, and Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra. He has recorded and produced numerous CDs and music programmes on TV, as well as conducting concerts throughout Asia and Europe.

Tadeusz Wielecki:

– What motivated you to create the orchestra?

Shun Liu:

– Our aim in founding the FCCO was to promote Chinese music tradition and to overcome the difficulties connected with the preservation of traditional culture. We asked ourselves such questions as: What do we need tradition for? What can tradition offer us today? Can we continue our tradition? Our work with FCCO is an attempt to answer these questions. There have also been two other important considerations. Firstly, for many centuries Chinese culture was separated from the rest of the world, and it still remains virtually unknown outside China. We began to devise ways in which people from other countries could become familiarised with Chinese musical tradition—which is, after all, part of the world’s cultural heritage! Secondly, for us, as modern people living in the modern world, it is important to cultivate tradition in ways that contemporary men can relate to and communicate with. This is one of the reasons why we collaborate with foreign composers, who can help us find a new place for that music. The point is not to isolate traditional music in its own narrow circle, but to let contemporary artists draw on this tradition.

Tadeusz Wielecki:

– By using traditional Chinese instruments? Or by referring to traditional music itself?

Shun Liu:

– We do not ask composers to seek inspiration in the music of the past. Music evolves... Even the instruments we use today have undergone some kind of evolution. But they still preserve and convey a large part of our history. When I say that we want to continue the tradition and be part of it, what I mean is that the music we create today will also become part of tradition for the future generations. And this is what we aim at. We want to help create works that will be new and attractive for the modern man, but which in a hundred years’ time are bound to become part of tradition. I believe that tradition and modernity are not opposed or contrasted to each other. They are rather like days in the life of the same river that encompasses all of us, including you and me.