PRESENTED BY:
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Wu Fei with
PRESENTS
Presented on February 7 as part of the Sights & Sounds on Sundays series at NCMA, this concert reflects the spirit of the Museum’s Initiative for Jewish Art and Culture: exploring Jewish history and global diaspora through artistic collaboration, cross-cultural understanding, and the living power of music.
Wu Fei is a Beijing-born, Nashville-based composer, vocalist, and master of the guzheng, the 21-string Chinese zither. Classically trained at the China Conservatory of Music and Mills College, she has performed around the world at venues and festivals including the Forbidden City, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Paris’s Quai Branly Museum, North Sea Jazz Festival, Vossa Jazz, Europalia, and Big Ears. Her music draws on the guzheng’s 2,500-year-old musical language while moving freely among Chinese tradition, Western classical composition, improvisation, and contemporary sound.
NCMA Initiative for Jewish Art and Culture
$31 ADULTS
$28 NCMA MEMBERS
$23 STUDENTS
Sunday, February 7, 2027
2:00 p.m.
SECU Auditorium - NC Museum of Art
2110 Blue Ridge Rd. Raleigh, NC 27607
Shanir Ezra Blumenkranz
Shanir Ezra Blumenkranz is a Brooklyn-born bassist and oud player whose career has placed him at the center of New York’s adventurous creative-music scene. He has recorded and performed extensively with artists including John Zorn, Cyro Baptista, Jon Madof, Jamie Saft, Daniel Zamir, Pharaoh’s Daughter, and others, bringing together influences from jazz, Middle Eastern music, Jewish musical traditions, improvisation, and experimental sound.
Together, Wu Fei and Shanir Blumenkranz create music of rare dialogue and discovery. Their collaboration grew out of Wu Fei’s Hello Gold Mountain, a symphonic work inspired by the stories of Jewish refugees who fled Europe and found sanctuary in Shanghai during World War II. Blumenkranz became part of that project in 2019, and the two artists have since developed a duo language that brings the shimmering resonance of guzheng together with the deep sonorities of bass and the expressive colors of oud. Big Ears describes their pairing as “the magic of musical recombination,” joining seemingly distant traditions and finding new energy in the space between them.
For this special Sights & Sounds on Sundays concert at the North Carolina Museum of Art, NCMA’s Initiative for Jewish Art and Culture for an extraordinary musical encounter between two artists whose work crosses borders, histories, and traditions.
Wu Fei – guzheng and voice
Shanir Ezra Blumenkranz – oud, bass, voice