Xuefei Yang is a new guitar star of China. When asked why she chose to learn guitar, she said, “It was all an accident, maybe fate. I was seven years old, very energetic, and my parents, both teachers, felt I should play an instrument. It was the end of the Cultural Revolution and the accordion was needed to accompany choirs. But the accordion was too heavy, I was so little. So my mum got me into a guitar class, where everyone else was 11 or 12. My father recorded John Williams for me from the radio and I couldn’t stop playing.”
As we know, there are rare women playing guitars. Everything she has done, from infancy on, was a first. She was the first to study guitar at a Chinese music school, the first Chinese to win a guitar scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in London, the first Chinese guitarist to land a record deal. Fei, her preferred English name, has spent her life playing against formidable odds. At 10 years old, her debut was attended by the Spanish ambassador. Against parental objections, she turned down the best secondary school in Beijing at 12 to enter the Conservatory. Conditions were so rudimentary that she would never have found a credible sound had not Williams, in 1995, left her his own instrument at the end of a China tour.
What’s striking about the new recording is the care she takes with two disparate idioms, each with an ancient culture of plucked instruments. She plays Sevilla, Cordoba and Castilla, from Albéniz’s Suite Espanola, with plausible virtuosity and wide-eyed discovery. In Chinese melodies she does little to soften pentatonic austerities for Western ears, opting rather to show off the aptitude of her instrument for indigenous tunes. Her parents live in Beijing and she remains true to her roots, intent on conquering China for the guitar.
“Half of all students in Chinese universities have tried the guitar,” she reports. “I want to be a role model to that generation, the way that Lang Lang has been for the piano.”
The one thing she will not weaken is stylistic integrity. She plays four guitars on the new album, each suited to idiom. The project is titled Forty Degrees North, which needs some explanation. It appears that Fei looked at the globe and found that Beijing and Madrid share the same latitude. Why not, she demands, the same instrument?
Around 60 per cent of the world’s guitars are now made in China and something in excess of 100,000 instruments a month, acoustic and electric, are sold in the domestic market. That’s a million new players a year, not so much a revival of guitar fortunes as a subcontinental revolution.
Go and have a look at China wholesale guitars at txmyge.com.