Chia-Yu Joy Lu bowed a pastoral landscape into being — a gently sloping grassy expanse with a big sky and low horizon — when, suddenly, her right hand let loose a run of clipped, staccato notes, horses’ hooves running wild across the Green.
Lu offered that transporting musical experience for several dozen onlookers Thursday morning during a press conference celebrating Friday’s start of the 29th annual International Festival of Arts & Ideas.
This year’s fest will bring 150 events to the Elm City — from “bike rides to gastronomy tours to giant puppets to Samara Joy,” as Mayor Justin Elicker put it.
Arts & Ideas Executive Director Shelley Quiala said that 85 percent of this year’s events are free, and they will include artists from Sierra Leone, Mumbai, and Puerto Rico, among many other parts of the world. “That is reflective of New Haven,” she said to applause. “New Haven is an international city.”
On the Arts & Ideas lineup for Saturday is a New Haven Symphony Orchestra performance at 8 p.m. on the Green, the first time the local orchestra will perform under the leadership of its new conductor, Perry So.
And in the orchestra as part of that Saturday show will be Lu, a native of Taiwan who currently lives in Bridgeport but plans on moving to New Haven at the end of this month because of just how much she loves the city.
Lu plays the erhu, a two-string Chinese fiddle, and leads a 10-instrument group called the New Haven Chinese Cultural Cooperative.
At Thursday’s press conference, she performed a song called “Horse Racing” on her erhu for the assembled politicians and local arts and culture boosters. Watch the video above to catch parts of that performance.
“It’s so melodic. It’s like you’re singing,” Lu said about the erhu, which she’s been playing for more than 20 years.
Those more harmonious inclinations of the instrument, she said, make it all the more fun to try out other “techniques,” she put it, like the quicker clip meant to imitate the sound of horses in motion.
Lu said she’ll be playing a song called “War Horse” on Saturday, which has an even wider array of erhu playing than the “Horse Racing” performance on Thursday.
Click here for info on Saturday’s symphony concert, here for info on the New Haven Chinese Cultural Cooperative’s Arts & Ideas show at 6:15 p.m. on Sunday, June 23, and here for the full Arts & Ideas lineup.
Thomas Breen photos
A&I ED Shelley Quiala: Friday's Samara Joy concert has brought in over $60,000 so far in gross revenue, "by far" the most for any single event in A&I's history.
Mayor Elicker and Gov. Lamont.
Chia-Yu Joy Lu on the erhu ...
... and Kenneth Joseph of the St. Luke's Steel Band, on the steelpan.