Lured by cash incentives and teaching jobs, many of China's leading classical musicians have come back to their newly affluent country in the past 10 years.

The country has produced many fine singers. Its conservatories are churning out many more. Yet the infrastructure for Western opera is almost non-existent. Partly, this is because of the dominance of China's own operatic tradition.

The growth of classical music in China, its sonic brilliance and attraction to sponsors cultivating Western links, has posed a challenge for players of traditional instruments.

For them, earning a living, let alone building a recording career, can be a struggle. The problem is that their instruments - the guqin and zheng (types of zither), the pipa (lute) and the erhu (a two-stringed Chinese violin with a wonderful, unearthly sound beloved of buskers, who often pretend to be blind) - were not designed for the concert hall.

Bigger ensembles just do not suit them; they are better played singly or in small groups, where the delicate solo passages can breathe. Large groups have been assembled, serried ranks of erhu and pipa players, all performing as if their lives depended on it.

But the results, said the China Phil's Yu, were a disaster. To survive, he insists, traditional Chinese music has to be true to itself. There is belief that true Chinese music must lie in its villages.

What does it all add up to? Classical music in China - despite the mass production of musicians, the vitality of "high-end" music-making in Beijing and the phenomenon that is Lang - is still in its infancy.

It has yet to truly enter the bloodstream: it feels thinly spread, sponsor-dependent, in some ways misdirected. Every music student wants to be a superstar soloist, another Lang; established artists are happy to be teachers or gala stars.

China needs opera houses and touring companies (the country produces plenty of singers but they have to go to the West to work), chamber orchestras, recitals. China may yet be the salvation of Western art music, but it will take several generations.

(China Daily/The Guardian March 14, 2008)