Pianist Gu Jieting aims to connect East and West

Gu Jieting and Kunqu Opera actress Lu Jia share the stage during the show Rencontre between Debussy and Du Liniang.

In Tang's work, the story revolves around Liu Mengmei, a poor young scholar, and Du Liniang, the daughter of a high-ranking official, who share the dream of meeting and falling in love under a tree, despite the fact that they've never met. Tormented by this unfulfilled love, Du dies. Years later, Liu passes by the same garden and finds Du's portrait. He immediately recognizes the woman and eventually digs her out of her grave, "revives" her and marries her.

In Gu's rendition, Du stands out as an independent role, singing to the music selected from French composer Claude Debussy's piano repertoires, such as The Girl with the Flaxen Hair and Clair de Lune.

"Debussy is one of my favorite composers. When I was young, I played lots of his works but was not able to fully understand him," Gu tells China Daily.

As for Kunqu Opera, Gu's family introduced her to the traditional Chinese art form as a child.

Gu's great-uncle, V.K. Wellington Koo, was a prominent diplomat of the Republic of China; and her father, Gu Keren, studies traditional Chinese literature and is a Kunqu Opera scholar.

At age 18, she went to Conservatoire de Paris on full scholarship and graduated with a master's degree in piano and chamber music. She returned to Shanghai around four years ago.

Her study in France enabled Gu to better interpret Debussy and she realized the composer was fond of using unusual scale patterns, especially pentatonic scale, a musical scale containing five different tones, which is the basic scale of traditional Chinese music. Since 2009 she has been doing a comparative analysis of Debussy's piano music and traditional Chinese music.