Centuries-old Chinese poetry is brought vividly to life in a new recording from Long Yu and the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra. We announce their second album for DG The Song of the Earth, recorded in Shanghai with soloists Michelle DeYoung, Brian Jagde, Zhang Liping and Shenyang. It pairs Gustav Mahler’s symphonic song-cycle Das Lied von der Erde (“The Song of the Earth”), based on German translations of six ancient Chinese poems, with the world-premiere recording of Xiaogang Ye’s settings of the same texts in the original Mandarin. Ye’s ambitious new work expresses the grandeur and beauty of the original Tang Dynasty poems that Mahler set in German translation, fusing a contemporary style with centuries’ worth of traditions from both east and west. Long Yu, who commissioned Ye’s work, conducts the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra in this fascinating meeting of histories and cultures.

“Our countries have moved further apart. Most people are so immersed in their own life experience that they don’t even try to understand the culture of other societies … but by comparing these two works people can see the double picture – how Europeans feel about love, pleasure, and death, and how the Chinese feel about the same things.” – Long Yu