📝 usncan Note: MetLiveArts Kicks Off New Season With Pipa Concert By VirtuosoWu Man
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MetLiveArts, the Metropolitan Museum of Arts’ performing arts series, will kick off its 2025-2026 season tomorrow night with a program featuring pipa virtuoso, Wu Man.
The pipa is a pear-shaped, Chinese lute dating back over 2,000 years.
The Knights and Wu Man performing at Asia Society on Thursday night, February 7, 2013.This image:Wu Man on pipa performing Lou Harrison’s “Concerto for Pipa and Strings” with the Knights. (Photo by Hiroyuki Ito/Getty Images)
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The concert’s centerpiece will be Lou Harrison’s Concerto for Pipa and String Orchestra, a work written for Wu Man and premiered at Lincoln Center in 1997. She will be joined by the Brooklyn-based ensemble The Knights .
The program also will include the traditional pieces White Snow in Spring and Xi Yang Xiao Gu (Flute and Drum Music at Sunset), a hand-written score discovered in 1875. It will also feature solo works composed and arranged by Wu Man, including the folk tune “San Liu (Three & Six)” (arr. Wu Man), my composition “River Flows Towards the Sky”, and the traditional work “küi — Song of Kazakh Traditional Kazakh” (arr. Wu Man).
The Harrison concerto was the first pipa concerto by a Western composer and the last major work he completed before his death. The piece blends Western string textures with Chinese, Javanese, and Korean musical influences.
In 2008, Wu Man recorded the concerto with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for their Grammy-nominated album Traditions and Transformations: Sounds of Silk Road.
During the pandemic, Wu Man and members of The Knights created a filmed version of the second movement, Bits and Pieces, featuring dancer Maile Okamura and filmed at Harrison House, the composer’s desert retreat near Joshua Tree.
In an email interview with Forbes.com, Wu Man said, “In the late ‘90s, my longtime friend and conductor Dennis Russell Davies introduced me to Lou. In 1997, he composed the concerto for me, and I remember practicing it while I was pregnant with my son. He had extensive knowledge of Asian music and could imitate traditional Chinese music, translate his own style, and create a distinct blend of Western and Eastern sounds. While composing the piece, we would talk on the landline phone (since emails and cellphones didn’t exist yet), and fax pages of music to ask me if it was playable. When it premiered the following year at Lincoln Center with the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, my son had been born. To this day, the concerto symbolizes birth and commemorates my son’s entry into the world, and it marks the first Western composer to write a piece for a pipa in history.”
Wu Man also said that “working with the Met has been deeply meaningful to me. I first performed at the Met in 1992 during an Asian concert series hosted by the department of musical instruments and the World Music Institute. From then on, I also returned in 2016 to perform and record in the Astor Chinese Garden Court, playing pieces on the museum’s exquisite Ming-dynasty pipa decorated with over 110 ivory plaques. When I performed in the Astor Chinese Garden Court, I felt the centuries of history resonating in that Ming-dynasty pipa—its silenced strings on the front, its triumphant, symbol-laden back.
“To perform in their galleries and in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, to bring the pipa’s voice to spaces where its ancestors quietly rest, is a dialogue across time and culture. Together, we are bridging eras—inviting listeners to feel the living pulse of an ancient instrument in a modern world,” she concluded.
Colin Jacobsen, concertmaster and co-artistic director of the Knights, called the Harrison work “a piece of modern music that just attains this joyful, visceral, evocative sense. (And) you just love working with Wu Man.”
