Shanghai Opera House's production of "The Wager," one of the very few modern Chinese operas to win international acclaim, has been hailed for its avant-garde stage design and costume.

Shanghai Daily News

"Home" is suddenly a not-so-sweet word when artists from the Shanghai Opera House stepped onto the stage of Shanghai's Grand Theater on Monday. They were presenting "The Wager" - their own original avant-garde production - as part of the Sixth Shanghai International Arts Festival. The cast and crew had just returned from a successful appearance at the ongoing Seventh Beijing International Music Festival but once back home, their hopes for a reprise of the sensation they caused in Beijing went unfulfilled.

As the only Chinese opera house to be invited to the Beijing festival - which is emerging as China's only world-ranked music festival - the Shanghai company's tour cost the organizers up to 600,000 yuan (US$72,300), most of which was due to slashing ticket prices. The cheapest tickets cost only 10 yuan and the low prices were designed to attract greater audiences to see "The Wager," whose music and performance style are abstruse to fans of Chinese opera. However, it was reported that the production was probably the most audience-friendly performance ever seen in the Beijing Poly Theater.

"As a music festival based in China which aims to become the professional summit for musicians from all over the world, we take it as our responsibility to provide the opportunity for domestic music troupes and companies to demonstrate their expertise to local audiences and to the whole world," says Beijing-based, Shanghai-born conductor Yu Long, who was a founder of the Beijing festival in 1998. Yu is also the festival's artistic director.

"The Shanghai Opera House is the only opera company in China that has never stopped trying to be innovative while, at the same time, introducing Western operatic masterpieces to Chinese audiences," he says.

A further source of the artistic director's confidence and generousness is "The Wager" itself. Adapted from writer Gao Xiaosheng's eponymous novel, the opera revolves around a beggar who goes from rags to riches by surviving freezing weather for a whole night and thus winning a bet with a wealthy noble. Two years later, when the same bet is made, the former beggar dies.

The features of Chinese traditional musical instruments and French "rap" elements labeled "The Wager" as a rare and somewhat "awkward" subject in the eyes of some local critics, but it was an instant success at its debut as the opening item of the Amadeus Festival in Geneva, Switzerland in September last year.

Back in Shanghai where the arts festival is entering its sixth year as a "platform for artists from home and abroad to communicate," the company is taking the same risk as that in the story of the bold wager.

Treasuring the opportunity to perform at such a large-scale multi-genre arts festival in its own hometown, the opera house company was active in applying to perform the opening show on the festival's program (which was finally given to the dance drama, "A Dream of Red Mansions" staged by the Beijing Comrade-in-Arm Song and Dance Ensemble).

The reputation of "The Wager" as an original local production did not earn it any preferential treatment from either the festival's organizers or the owner of the Grand Theater. The festival's organizing committee put almost all its promotional resources behind another big-budget performance - the open-air production of Bizet's "Carmen," whose admission-free dress rehearsal received overwhelming media acclaim even if two-thirds of the audience left before the interval.

More dishearteningly, when the local opera house company wanted to put a introductory notice board in the lobby of the Grand Theater, it was asked to pay several thousand yuan for the space. Even though it received no sponsorship support, tickets for the play were available at a mere 100 yuan.

"As an international arts festival held in a metropolis like Shanghai, the festival should allow innovative creations a greater chance to become known to the public," says director Zhang Guoyong, who is also president of the Shanghai Opera House.

"The artistic tastes of the festival organizers should be at least one-step ahead of that of the mass audience which, I believe, is a prerequisite for the sustainable development of the festival and the local arts market," Zhang says.

Lack of innovation and strategic promotion has been a long-term major drawback that has bugged the international arts festival. Perhaps the experience and success gained by the Beijing International Music Festival will be an example to learn from.

According to Zhang, the key element to the success of any arts or music festival - apart from decisive factors like powerful sponsorship and the audience's level of artistic evaluation - is finding a capable and qualified artistic director. Even after six years, the Shanghai International Arts Festival still doesn't have one. The artistic director should be a person who has a thorough knowledge of the arts, who is able to keep a keen eye on the performing arts market and who has high administrative skills.

In bringing the equally young Beijing International Music Festival up to its present world ranking, Yu and his fellow committee members have been unremitting in their efforts to build up the festival as the city's cultural "name card."

"Musicians and artists are not coming from afar to see Chinese versions of classic Western works," says a serious Yu. However, his conducting of the orchestra and 1,000-member international choir for Mahler's majestic "Symphony No. 8" ("The Symphony of a Thousand") at the Fifth Beijing festival in 2002 won him public and critical acclaim.

Overseas-based composer Guo Wenjing, whose "Diary of a Madman" and "The Night Banquet" made their Chinese debut at the festival last year, says: "The Beijing festival has been functioning effectively in enhancing the quality of cross-cultural communications between Chinese musicians, music companies and their foreign counterparts as well as providing China's own composers with the chance to prove ourselves."

In its short history, the Beijing festival has presented important concert pieces such as the world premiere of Philip Glass' "Viola Concerto" featuring violist Julian Lloyd Webber as well as a "Who's Who" list of figures from world music including the late Isacc Stern, Krzysztof Penderecki and Sarah Zhang.

More impressively, the Beijing festival enjoys a high level of independence with its major sponsorship coming from local-based enterprises who see its great potential. However, the Shanghai festival seems to put more effort into bargaining with performers' agents and venues to slash fees and ticket prices to ensure a "looks prosperous" event.

"When the 2010 World Expo comes and tourists pour into the city, what can we present to them at night that they can understand and admire? The hardware and infrastructure of the city has been developing dramatically but that's not the whole story contained in the meaning of 'development'," Zhang says.