Composer Bright Sheng has won MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships.

Two decades ago, Chamber Music Northwest was looking for a new chamber opera. David Shifrin, the nonprofit's artistic director and a clarinetist, thought of composer Bright Sheng, who had written a clarinet quintet for him. Shifrin asked Sheng to compose a music theater piece for Chamber Music Northwest and several other classical music presenters.

Sheng's "The Silver River," inspired by a legend from his native China, premiered at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival in 1997 and went on to acclaimed performances in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, London and beyond.

But not in Portland - until now, with the composer in town to see it. Chamber Music Northwest is also using "The Silver River" as the tentpole for a five-day celebration of Chinese-influenced music, "Beyond the Cultural Revolution."

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A scene from Bright Sheng's opera "The Silver River" at the John Jay College Theater on July 15, 2002, presented by the Lincoln Center Festival 2002. (Stephanie Berger)

Back in the '90s, Chamber Music Northwest administrators blanched when they looked at the forces required for Sheng's opera: singers, dancers, actor, choreographer, stage director, classical chamber ensemble, someone who could play the pipa (the banjo-like Chinese lute), props including a huge heated water tank in which the actors performed, costumes and more. For an organization then accustomed to no more staging than a few chairs, music stands and maybe a piano, making "The Silver River" flow was a stretch.

"We determined we couldn't afford to produce something that large," said Chamber Music Northwest's executive director, Peter Bilotta.

But the piece remained on Shifrin's "bucket list." This year, with the organization expanding and diversifying as never before, said Bilotta, "we decided to make the resources available and do it." This version runs just over an hour, with lower-cost props (no water tank). "Sometimes having less of a budget stimulates the imagination more," Sheng said, chuckling.

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Composer Bright Sheng.

Sheng is used to delayed gratification. During China's Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and '70s, the Shanghai native, then a teen, was among numerous promising young composers shipped to the outer provinces as conservatories and universities were closed. He performed and studied the folk music of Northwest China's Tibetan border region, which would influence his own compositions.

By the time Shanghai's conservatory reopened, he was 22 and part of an extraordinary class of pent-up composers who all arrived at the same time, including Tan Dun, Chen Yi and Zhou Long. Their music fueled an unprecedented explosion of contemporary Chinese classical music.

Sheng's "Silver River" combines musical influences from the Chinese opera he heard growing up and from Western opera. The classical musicians double on Chinese percussion and even sing a bit. The pipa player also plays a goddess onstage; the flutist appears as a cowherd; the singer also speaks and interacts with other performers. "It's musical theater in the old sense, not the Broadway kind," Sheng said.

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Composer Kai Young Chan.

The Tony Award-winning Chinese American playwright David Henry Hwang wrote the one-act story, narrated onstage by a celestial golden buffalo. It recounts an ancient Chinese tale about the tragic love between the goddess and the cowherd. The lovers produce two offspring, Night and Day, and cross the Silver River -- what Westerners call the Milky Way -- to meet only once a year. Like the lovers' reunion, Chamber Music Northwest's production of "The Silver River" at last unites two entities that were meant for one another.

Sheng, who now lives in the U.S., attributes Chinese music's popularity here to "the West's long fascination with the East, and vice versa," and the abrupt ending of China's long isolation from the West in 1979. And he notes that Chinese music, like American music, is itself a product of many hybrids and influences from Central Asia and beyond.

That variety is evident in "Beyond the Cultural Revolution's" other concerts, which include Sheng's piano trio "Tibetan Dance," with Shifrin on clarinet; Chinese-American composer Zhou Long's "Taiping Drum"; University of Oregon percussion professor Pius Cheung's solo "Nian 3"; solo pipa music; and young composer Kai-Young Chan's string quartet "Ignis fatuus," all at noon Friday, July 20, at Portland State University's Lincoln Hall.

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Violinist Cho-Liang Lin performs on either a 1715 Stradivarius or a 2000 Samuel Zygmuntowicz. (Sophie Zaai)

That night at Lan Su Chinese Garden, celebrated Taiwanese American violinist Cho-Liang Lin plays Sheng's "The Stream Flows" and clarinetist Romie de Guise-Langlois joins Daedalus Quartet for Chinese Canadian composer Vivian Fung's "Frenetic Memories," a Chamber Music Northwest commission. Both pieces are based on folk tunes the composers heard in China. Chinese composer Chen Yi's trio "Ning," commemorating Japanese soldiers' 1937 massacre and mass rape of Chinese civilians in Nanjing, closes the show.

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Grammy-nominated Wu Man is considered the world's leading player of the pipa, a traditional Chinese instrument. (Kuandi Studio)

On Monday, July 23, at Reed College's Kaul Auditorium, the world's most famous pipa virtuosa, Wu Man, performs with the Miro Quartet in the premiere of Xiaogang Ye's "Gardenia," another Chamber Music Northwest commission. After a reprise of "Frenetic Memories," she joins a Chamber Music Northwest string quartet in Chinese American composer Tan Dun's "Ghost Opera."

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Composer Tan Dun won Academy and Grammy awards for his score for "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."

"Beyond the Cultural Revolution"

When: Various times, Thursday-Monday, July 19-23

Where: Kaul Auditorium, 3203 S.E. Woodstock Blvd.; Lan Su Chinese Garden, 239 N.W. Everett St.; and Lincoln Hall, 1620 S.W. Park Ave.

Tickets: Some events free, others $10-$75, cmnw.org or 503-294-6400

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Vivian Fung is among the composers whose work will be performed in the "Beyond the Cultural Revolution" mini-series. (Charles Boudreau)