Lunar New Year Celebrations at SOAS | With Cheng Yu and Beibei Wang

Join us for celestial and explosive music on traditional instruments from China to welcome the year of the Dragon.

Programme

7:30pm-8:15pm Cheng Yu's Silk Breeze

8:30pm-9:15pm Beibei Wang and friends

9:15pm-9:30pm Finale

About the artists

Beibei Wang is a uniquely vibrant percussion talent. With a background in both Classical and traditional Chinese percussion, she brings characteristic flair and dynamism to her performances, presenting repertoire as diverse as contemporary classical to free improvisation with equal elegance.

Born in Beijing and formerly a pipa soloist with the Central Orchestra of Chinese Music in China, Cheng Yu is a renowned pipa lute and guqin zither virtuoso, ethnomusicologist and specialist in Chinese music. She studied the pipa from the age of 7 from her father (a Pudong pipa master) and the guqin zither from the age of 14, graduated with distinction from the Xi'an Conservatory of Music and won several top prizes for her pipa performances. Based in London since the 1990s, she gained scholarships for her MMus and PhD degrees in ethnomusicology at SOAS, University of London. She is a co-founder of the UK Chinese Music Ensemble (1998), the London Youlan Qin Society (2003) and the award-winning Silk String Quartet (2007).

• Organiser: SOAS Library