SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 2 -- The San Francisco Symphony gave its 20th annual concert here Saturday to celebrate the traditional Chinese Lunar New Year that attracted about 2,700 people who love Chinese culture and music.

The all-Chinese-music concert held at Davies Symphony Hall in downtown San Francisco, which was adorned with red lanterns and other ornaments signifying happiness and fortune in Chinese culture, featured some of the most famous Chinese folk songs for orchestra, including Moonlit Night on Spring River, Flower Drum Song from Feng Yang, and Moon Reflected in Er-Quan.

The orchestra was conducted by Perry So, who was from China's Hong Kong and made the performance his musical debut with the San Francisco Symphony. He previously cooperated with many other great symphonies and art groups in the world, such as the Nuremberg Symphony in Germany and the Cleveland and Minnesota orchestras.

He said the concert in San Francisco was a program created to take the audience "through centuries of Chinese music" across the entire Chinese history.

The concert began with the traditional Chinese melody Moonlit Night on Spring River by Chinese Pipa virtuoso Yang Wei, who presented a musical setting to reflect the scenic beauty of a moonlit night in the region south of the Yangtze River, as described in the same-title poem of the Tang Dynasty (618-906 A.D.) in Chinese history.

The artists of the San Francisco Symphony played for the audience that fully packed the music hall several other Chinese musical pieces that expressed the genuine folk culture of various places in China, including Yunnan Province in the country's southwest and Shanxi Province in the north.

Micheline Savarin, who is a home-grown San Franciscan working as a marketing staffer for a local company, told Xinhua that she enjoyed the Chinese New Year concert every year.

"I grew up in San Francisco and I love the melding of the cultures between the new year that we usually celebrate, and then the Chinese New Year. And I love the traditions and everything that is associated with it," she said. "It's just enlightening to come to these performances."

James Mark, a San Francisco architect, said that he has been to the Chinese Lunar New Year concerts for the past two years.

"It's fantastic," he said of his third time with the concert. "It was incredible, and I wouldn't miss it for the world."

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