Guo Wenjing (郭文景) was born in 1956 in Chongqing, an ancient city of China’s mountainous Sichuan province. In 1978, Guo was one of a hundred students admitted out of 17,000 applicants to Beijing’s re-opened Central Conservatory of Music. Unlike many colleagues from this acclaimed class (Tan Dun, Chen Yi, Zhou Long), Guo remained in China after graduation except for a short stay in New York (on an Asian Cultural Council grant). Guo’s catalogue includes three chamber operas published by Casa Ricordi: Wolf Cub Village (1994), Night Banquet (1997-98/2001) and Fengyiting (2004). The former, based on Lu Xun’s Diary of a Madman, was premiered at the Holland Festival; after a subsequent performance in Paris, Le Monde compared his «masterpiece of madness» to Berg’s Wozzeck and Shostakovich’s The Nose. Night Banquet, on the other hand, was inspired by a painting about the Song dynasty court official Han Xizai and was first produced at the Almeida Theatre (London) and the Hong Kong Arts Festival. A second version of the work, premiered at the Paris Autumn Festival, was also given in Berlin, at the Lincoln Center and in Perth. In October 2003, both Wolf Cub Village and Night Banquet received their Chinese premieres at the 6th Beijing Music Festival, directed by Lin Zhaohua at the Beijing People’s Art Theatre. In 2004 Guo composed the chamber opera Fengyiting (2004), written for a tenor of Beijing opera and a soprano of Sichuan opera, and premiered at the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam. Critics from many countries have responded to Guo’s «unparalleled musical beauty and dramatic power» (Le Monde), and found his work «pungent and vivid» (The Guardian), «uninhibited and pure» (Het Parool) and «subtle and unusual» (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung). He has also been credited with «a highly original sense of operatic possibility» (The Independent). His music first became known in the West in 1983, when Suspended Ancient Coffins on the Cliffs on Sichuan was premiered in Berkeley, California. The piece clearly pays tribute to Bartók, highlighting two solo pianos with a battery of percussion instruments, but the strong imprint of Guo’s own Sichuanese roots is unmistakable in the orchestral writing. Shu Dao Nan [Hard are the ways of Sichuan] (1987), a symphonic poem with voices, is a setting of Li Bai’s poetry, which the official People’s Music Publishing House selected as part of its series “Twentieth-Century Distinguished Chinese Classics”. Chou Kong Shan [Sorrowful, Desolate Mountain] (1992, rev. 1995), a concerto for Chinese bamboo flute, was premiered by the Göteborg Symphony Orchestra in Sweden under the baton of Neeme Järvi. Guo’s other orchestral works include concertos for violin, cello, and harp. One of his most recent works, written for soprano and orchestra, is Journeys, first performed by the Hong Kong Philharmonic conducted by Edo de Waart in October 2004. The text for Journeys was taken from epic poetry by contemporary Chinese poet Xi Chuan. Apart from his chamber music for traditional western string quartets and percussion ensembles, Guo also has composed Late Spring (1995) for Chinese ensemble and Sound from Tibet (2001) combining instruments from China and the West. Among his most performed chamber works are Drama (1995, a trio for three percussionists who also speak and sing), Inscriptions on Bone (1996, for alto singer and 15 instruments), She Huo (1991, for eleven players) and Parade (2004, a sequel to Drama, for three percussionists). Guo has also composed music scores for 20 feature films and 25 television films in China. At home, Guo has been honored among the Top 100 Living Artists of China. Abroad, his works have been featured at festivals in Amsterdam, Berlin, Glasgow, Paris, Edinburgh, New York, Aspen, London, Turin, Perth, Huddersfield, Hong Kong and Warsaw, and at venues like Frankfurt Opera, the Berlin Konzerthaus, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw and New York’s Lincoln Center. He has written works for internationally distinguished ensembles like the Nieuw Ensemble, Atlas Ensemble, Cincinnati Percussion Group, Kronos Quartet, Arditti String Quartet, Ensemble Modern, Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra, Göteborg Symphony Orchestra, China Philharmonic Orchestra, Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra, and Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra. The former head of the composition department of the Central Conservatory, where he still remains on the faculty, Guo maintains a busy schedule as composer and educator. His forthcoming works include: a concerto for erhu (Chinese two-stringed fiddle) co-commissioned by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra (worldpremiered on 19 January 2007) and the Bavarian Radio’s longstanding concert series “Musica Viva”; the opera Poet Li Bai (upon the most famous Tang dynasty poet) the world premiere of which was on July 2007 in Denver (Colorado) during the Summer Festival of the Central City Opera. European premiere took place in Rome, May 2008.