Shanghai's Erhu player and composer Ma Xiaohui is one of China's most promising musical exports. Raised in an academic family, Ma began to play the Erhu at the age of six, a two-stringed fiddle without a fingerboard and truss with a small cylindrical resonance box. By playing a song from the soundtrack of Oscar-winning "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" in a duet with cellist Yo-Yo Ma, Ma Xiaohui became internationally known. By playing with new techniques and acoustic colour she breaks through the traditional, classical boundaries of the instrument. The musical encounter with Swiss drummer Pierre Favre becomes a dialogue beyond intercultural language barriers: intimate and virtuosic at the same time. Favre is a brilliant rhythmist, who at times plays the drums and cymbals gently, who caresses and strokes his instrument, and then at times hits it with all his might, or who scratches and scrapes it, as if he wanted to outwit his own instrument and enable it to create unknown and unimaginable sounds. Common basis of the duo is their improvisation, a foundation for the never ending process of the creation of musical ideas and discourses.
