The Essential Guide to China

A new three-CD collection highlights classical Chinese instruments, famous movie scores and meditation music

With over three hours of music covering folk, film tracks and meditation music The Essential Guide to China (various artists, Union Square Music) covers a lot of ground, but very little that is new.

The first CD features classic folk music and is certainly the more interesting of the set. China folk aficionados will recognize the majority of tracks and the traditional Chinese folk instruments – the guqin, guzheng and pipa are played at their finest. The strong harmonic bends of the guqin – the Chinese seven-string zither – are played by internationally acclaimed and London-based Cheng Yu on several of the tracks including "White Snow In Sunny Spring," whilst Zhou Yu and Xu Pingxin perform other classics.

The film music on the second disc starts with Tan Dun’s classic theme to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but slides slowly downhill from there. Most of the tracks are unrecognisable to all but the most avid of Chinese film buffs and, unlike the timeless quality of the folk music, the film sound tracks sometimes sound dated. "Bygone Love" from the excellent 1993 film Farewell My Concubine doesn’t do the song (or the film) justice and sounds similar to the background music of a karaoke track, with a Kenny G-style saxophone drowning out the orchestral music.

The much better third disc is made up of meditation music and is more a continuation of the first disk with a slower pace and more use of the harp, gongs and wind instruments in traditional folk and monastic style. Calm and relaxing, it’s the sort of music you would expect to hear in a shop that sells incense as its main product.

The Essential Guide to China is a great introduction to a wide range of Chinese folk music and will certainly sell a few copies to those with an interest in traditional Chinese music. And to a few spa owners and sinologist film buffs, too.

Tom Pattinson