Master pipa player makes appearance

Wu Man's musical journey has taken her from the Chinese city of Hangzhou (where she was born), to Beijing (where she studied), to San Diego (where she now lives).

Her traveling companion on this journey has been her musical instrument, the pipa.

"It's a pear shaped, lutelike instrument," the soft-spoken woman explains, with a delicate Chinese accent. "It has four strings, and it's plucked like a guitar. It has about 20 frets."

The pipa is both popular and long-established in China, dating back about 2,000 years. Its distinctively bright and brittle tone has become synonymous with Chinese music.

In China and the West, Wu is acknowledged as a master of the instrument. She's been nominated for five Grammy awards. Two years ago, Musical America magazine named her "Instrumentalist of the Year." And the U.K.'s influential Gramophone magazine has called her "a force of nature."

She brings her pipa to Houston on Tuesday, appearing in a chamber-music concert with the Shanghai Quartet. The performance is co-presented by Da Camera of Houston and the Asia Society Texas Center.

The concert is an East-meets-West mix. The Shanghai Quartet will play Béla Bartók's "String Quartet No. 5," Bright Sheng's "String Quartet No. 4, Silent Temple" and "Yao Dance," arranged by Yi-Wen Jiang, the second violinist in the quartet. Wu will play a selection of solo pieces and will join the quartet for Lei Liang's "Five Seasons."

This kind of program showcases the two facets of Wu's art - combining the skills necessary to play traditional Chinese music with a deep knowledge of contemporary Western classical music. She decided to pursue and ultimately merge both kinds of music while she was still a student at Beijing's Central Conservatory.

"Just as I was graduating," she recalls, "China opened the doors to the West, and it was possible for Chinese musicians to experience Western music. The Boston Symphony visited China in 1979. And the violinist Isaac Stern came to my school to teach a master class."

In 1990, she moved to the U.S. and soon began to perform with the Kronos Quartet - a San Francisco ensemble that specializes in contemporary music. She has played so often with Kronos that she's sometimes referred to as the "fifth member" of the quartet. And, in 1998, she became a founding member of the celebrated cellist Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble.

Major orchestras, from New York to Sydney, Australia, have invited her to appear as a guest soloist. As well, such prominent American composers as Philip Glass, Terry Riley and Lou Harrison have written music for her.

Wu wasn't the only Chinese musician to take advantage of China's open-door policy. In 1985, the young members of the Shanghai Quartet arrived in the U.S. Today, they are a resident ensemble at Montclair State University in New Jersey.

"I knew the Shanghai Quartet in China," Wu says. "We were classmates, and we're still friends. We didn't work together for a long time, but somehow this project made sense."

At the core of their current collaboration lies Liang's "Five Seasons," which was written for Wu and the Shanghai Quartet by the Chinese-American composer in 2010. They've already played the piece together at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and in several college towns.

The Washington Post declared Liang's piece "brilliantly original and inarguably gorgeous."

Wu often visits China, to perform and to teach. But today, America is her home. And, after 25 years in the U.S., Wu has no regrets about her decision to leave her homeland.

"I wanted to know more about what was going on outside China," Wu says. "I wanted to challenge myself. Friends who studied piano or violin said, 'What are you going to do in America? You play the pipa!' I said, 'I will survive.' "