The Valencian Community Orchestra embarks on its first tour of China

The resident orchestra of the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía will perform a total of twelve concerts from December 25 to January 12 in the Asian country.
· On the music stand are scores by Chapí, Falla, Giménez and Granados, and works by Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Johann Strauss as a calling card.
The Asian tour includes the cities of Xi'an, Tianjin, Guangzhou, Changsha, Shanghai, Wuhan, Hangzhou, and Beijing

Valencia. The Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana embarks this December on its first tour of China with Zubin Mehta leading the resident orchestra of the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía.

After combining the musical direction of Verdi's La Traviata and Wagner's Die Walküre , and offering a concert with fragments of Spanish music and works by Johann Strauss Jr., the maestro from Bombay takes the reins of the OCV in this intense journey, which includes twelve concerts in eight cities of the Asian country.

For its first trip to China, the OCV is offering a double program as its calling card, which it will alternate in its various performances. The first program is very similar to the one Maestro Mehta conducted on November 17th at the Palau de les Arts, featuring compositions by Chapí, Falla, Giménez, and Granados, as well as works by Johann Strauss. The second program includes Beethoven's Leonore Overture No. 3 and Symphony No. 8 , and Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 4 .

The musical ensemble will give its first performance on December 26 in Xi'an, the capital of Shaanxi province in northwestern China, at the Xi'an Concert Hall, the city's new auditorium with a capacity of 1,250 people. Inaugurated in 2009, its stage has hosted the China Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic, and the Mozart Symphony Orchestra.

Tianjin, the second stop on this tour, borders Beijing and is China's fourth most populous metropolis. Maestro Mehta, leading the OCV, will conduct two concerts on the 27th and 28th at the Tianjin Grand Theatre, the main building of the Tianjin Cultural Center, a new arts complex that opened in 2012.

After these initial performances, the Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana, with Zubin Mehta, heads south to make a stop at the Guangzhou Opera House, the imposing auditorium designed by the Anglo-Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid, with a capacity for 1,800 spectators, where the OCV will perform on the last two days of 2013.

This double concert marks the second collaboration between the Palau de les Arts and the Cantonese opera house. In May 2010, the artistic director of the Chinese theater chose the Valencian production of Puccini's Turandot , directed by Chen Kaige, to inaugurate the venue, the third largest in the Asian country.

The resident ensemble of the Valencian arts center begins the year 2014 in the city of Changsha, the capital of Hunan province, in the southwest of the country, with a single concert at the Hunan Grand Theater.

The municipality of Shanghai is the next stop for the OCV on its tour of China. The city, considered the true economic capital of the country, boasts one of the world's largest artistic infrastructures, the Shanghai Grand Theatre, designed by the French architect Jean-Marie Charpentier.

The Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana, under the direction of Zubin Mehta, will perform at the opera house, the largest venue in the complex (1,800 seats), on the 2nd and 3rd.

The cities of Wuhan and Hangzhou are the next stops on this tour. In Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province and the most populous metropolis in Central China, the orchestral group will debut on January 5 at the Qintai Grand Theater, the main building of the city's cutting-edge cultural center.

Two days later, the OCV lands in Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province on China's southeast coast, to perform at the Hangzhou Grand Theatre, designed by Uruguayan architect Carlos Ott, who also designed the Opéra Bastille in Paris. This cultural space, one of the largest in the country, boasts 55,000 square meters of venues for a variety of artistic events.

The country's capital, Beijing, closes the tour of the resident orchestra of the Palau de les Arts, which, with Maestro Mehta at the helm, offers two concerts, on Wednesday 10 and Thursday 11 of January, in the imposing National Centre for the Performing Arts, designed by the French architect Paul Andreu, capable of accommodating up to 6,500 people in its 200,000 square meters of surface area.

Since its inauguration, the cultural complex has hosted leading figures in the world of opera and symphony, as well as the most prestigious orchestral ensembles. Maestro Mehta himself conducted the Vienna Philharmonic in this very auditorium in March 2008.

Conductors of the stature of Valeri Guérguiev, Bernard Haitink, Mariss Jansons, Lorin Maazel, Kurt Masur, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Daniel Oren, Seiji Ozawa, Christian Thielemann, soloists such as Yo-Yo Ma, Anne-Sophie Mutter and Maurizio Pollini and singers such as José Carreras, Plácido Domingo, Angela Gheorghiu, Anna Netrebko, Leo Nucci have paraded through the stage of the National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing.

OCV's second major international tour

The tour through China represents the second major international tour of the Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana since its creation.

The main ensemble, which gave its first concert outside of Spain in March 2007 under the musical direction of Lorin Maazel at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice, returned to perform in Italy in the summer of 2008 with Alberto Zedda as conductor at the Rossini Festival in Pesaro.

In March 2009, the band embarked on its first international tour with Lorin Maazel at the helm, an intense tour with stops in the capital of the United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi, as well as in the German cities of Essen, Mannheim, Regensburg and Munich.

The first international trip of the Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana with Zubin Mehta took place at the end of June 2011 to perform at the Ravenna and Armonie d'Arte festivals in Italy.