Zhou Xiaoyan周小燕

Zhou Xiaoyan周小燕 was born in a business family in Wuhan, Hubei on August 17, 1917. Zhou Xiaoyan's father, Zhou Cangbai, is a very progressive industrialist. He likes music very much. Due to the influence of his father, Zhou Xiaoyan had a strong interest in music since he was a child. In September 1935, Zhou Xiaoyan, who loves music, was admitted to Shanghai National Music College, specializing in vocal music singing. In 1937, when the Anti-Japanese War broke out, Zhou Xiaoyan was forced to suspend her studies and returned to her hometown. Zhou Xiaoyan came to Paris at the end of 1938. In Paris, she met the famous composer: Zierpin. With his help, she entered the Russian Conservatory of Music in Paris to study vocal music. In October 1945, after seven years of hard work After tempering, Zhou Xiaoyan finally boarded the stage of the National Theater in Paris. In 1945, he performed on the stage at the National Opera House in Paris; in May 1947, he sang Tilpin and some Chinese composers on the stage at the second Prague Spring Concert with the wife of composer Alexander Tzilpin, the pianist Ms. Li Xianmin art songs. In the same year, she returned to teach at the Shanghai National Conservatory of Music; she joined the Communist Party of China in 1956; the ten-year Cultural Revolution was the darkest period in Zhou Xiaoyan’s life. Supporting her persistence and resistance, the famous tenor Wei Song was a student she trained during the Cultural Revolution. After the Cultural Revolution, Zhou Xiaoyan served as the vice president of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and presided over the establishment of the Zhou Xiaoyan Opera Art Center; she is considered an authority in the Chinese bel canto music field. The more famous students include Liao Changyong, Zhang Jianyi, Li Xiuying, Gao Manhua and so on. Her husband is film artist Zhang Junxiang. In order to revitalize and develop Chinese opera, train opera performers, and strengthen international music and cultural exchanges and cooperation, in May 1988, Zhou Xiaoyan established the Zhou Xiaoyan Opera Center at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. In 1989, Zhou Xiaoyan Opera Center began to rehearse the opera Rigoletto, which was a success. Zhou Xiaoyan is a tenured professor at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, a famous Chinese coloratura soprano and vocal music educator. From 2000 to 2002, she hosted three consecutive international opera master classes in Shanghai, and invited more than ten experts including Joan Dolman from the Metropolitan Opera House to teach, which promoted the cultural exchanges between China and the West. Over the past decades, she has trained a large number of outstanding vocal talents; they have emerged on the opera stage at home and abroad, and have frequently won championships in various vocal competitions at home and abroad. In view of her outstanding contributions in vocal music art and vocal music teaching, in recent years, Zhou Xiaoyan has successively won awards from the Chinese Musicians Association. The Golden Bell Award, the highest honor in Chinese music art, the French National Military Officer Medal awarded by the French government, the 2002 Special Contribution to Literature and Art awarded by the Shanghai Municipal Government and the 2003 Municipal Education Meritorious Award. During her 90-year life journey, she used notes and scales one after another to complete the most exquisite and colorful ornamentation on the melody line of "Mother-Motherland".