Seven Days: Vermont's Independent Voice

Renaissance Woman

When Xuefei Yang was a young girl, she’d heard of the violin and the piano, but not the guitar. It’s no big mystery why: She was born in China in 1977, just a year after the decade-long Cultural Revolution ended. The movement’s heavy restrictions on musical composition and performance effectively stunted the country’s musical culture — and, as the first-ever guitar major at Beijing’s Central Conservatory of Music, Yang helped spur its rebirth. Now heralded as one of the world’s top classical guitarists, she comes to Middlebury College with a mixed repertoire, including Isaac Albéniz’s Asturias, Leo Brouwer’s Guitar Sonata and her own arrangement of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Violin Sonata no. 1 in G Minor.