China National Centre for Performing Arts Orchestra

China NCPA Orchestra is the resident orchestra of National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA), Beijing. Established in March 2010, the orchestra performs in more than a dozen opera productions presented by its home venue every year as well as in regular orchestral concerts in its own season.

Artists associated with the orchestra included Zubin Mehta, Valery Gergiev, Myung-Whun Chung, Christoph Eschenbach, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Fabio Luisi, Lang Lang and Yuja Wang among many others.

The orchestra has gained critical acclaim for its performances in the NCPA’s opera productions of not only classical repertoire, but works such as Tosca, Die Fledermaus, Lohengrin, Aida, Nabucco, but also newly commissioned works like The Chinese Orphan and The Rickshaw Boy. Their performance of the mammoth Ring Without Words with its creator, Lorin Maazel, was released on SONY Classics worldwide, the only recording the great maestro ever made with a Chinese orchestra.

The orchestra has also explored extensively incontemporary music. It gave the Chinese premieres of works by Toru Takemitsu and Giya Kancheli and the world premieres of many works by Michael Gordon and Augusta Read Thomas.

The NCPA Orchestra flexed its wings on the international stage, receiving widespread international praise for its performances at the Kissingen Summer Music Festival and the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival and concerts in many cities throughout Germany as well as in Sydney, Singapore, Seoul, Daegu, Taipei and Macau.

During the 2014/2015 season, the orchestra undertook its first North American tour, where it performed in many major cities in the US and Canada, including Carnegie Hall, under their Chief Conductor Lü Jia. Most recently, in April 2019 the orchestra travelled to Seoul to perform the closing concert of Seoul Arts Center’s annual Orchestra Festival, celebrating its 30th anniversary.