This disc inaugurates a new Channel of China series from the Netherlands' Channel Classics label, and engineer and co-producer
C. Jared Sacks claims in the booklet that the series will offer the first SACD recordings made in China. The sound of this one is gorgeous -- superior in every way to the ethnographic recordings that clog university libraries and that have offered many Western listeners their only exposure to the classical instrumental music of China. Chinese music tends to occupy the quieter end of the world dynamics spectrum, and audiophile engineering tremendously benefits the subtle ornaments and overtones of the music. This album of music for the erhu, a two-stringed Chinese bowed instrument (it's likely the violin-like instrument you think of when you think of Chinese music), is noteworthy in other ways as well; it is stylishly presented (the use of color only for the glamorous picture of the soloist is especially sharp), and it seems to be aimed equally at Chinese and Western audiences (notes are in Chinese and English). It is, one might say, not a Chinese export of the old-fashioned kind so much as an assertion of the place of Chinese music in the international musical economy.