Xi'an Symphony Orchestra

Among the professional orchestras created during China's rapid expansion of civic musical life in the early twenty-first century, this one shoulders an unusually old city. It is resident at the Xi'an Concert Hall in the Qujiang district, and has become known well beyond Shaanxi for taking its players out of doors — among the excavated foundations of Tang-dynasty palaces and beneath the Ming city wall, where an orchestra must contend with open air and stone. Indoors the programming runs to the German and Russian symphonic canon, set beside new Chinese orchestral writing and music drawn from the region's own traditions.