Silk and Bamboo Quartet

Lingling Yu comes from the nine-million-strong metropolis of Hangzhou, south of Shanghai, a centre of the silk and tea industry and also China’s own Silicon Valley. Even as a teenager, she was considered a child prodigy on the pear-shaped pipa, a necked bowl lute originally fitted with silk strings. In 1998, Yu moved to Switzerland in order to establish ties between Chinese and Western music, broadening her horizons by studying orchestration, counterpoint and composition.

In addition to the pipa, her Silk and Bamboo Quartet brings together other traditional instruments: Wenqi Gu plays the guzheng, a 21-string, 2,500-year-old arched zither. The internationally experienced Guo Gan brings the erhu and gaohu violins to the quartet; he is also well versed in Western classical music and jazz. The quartet is completed by the young Hongze An, who has a command of the bamboo transverse flutes dizi and xiao, the mouth organ sheng and the bawu with its clarinet-like sound. Alternating between solo and ensemble performances, the group’s repertoire includes pieces from the south-east of China and the provinces of Canton and Yunnan as well as from the cities of Chaozhou and Hangzhou.