Mei Gui Zhang

 by Oliver Pashley  October 1st, 2026

‘Being patient is very important in this business’

Mozart and Chinese folk music surrounded soprano Mei Gui Zhang in equal measure as a child. Growing up in China with singers for parents, one singing opera, the other folk, created an indelible fusion of cultures that she carries with her to this day.

Now based in New York, Mei Gui’s versatility and commitment to a variety of styles and roles have made her a rising star on the opera circuit.

Mei Gui Zhang © Dario Acosta

Mozart is particularly close to Mei Gui’s heart, having sung Despina in Così fan tutte (Tanglewood), Zerlina in Don Giovanni (Atlanta Opera) and Barbarina in The Marriage of Figaro (Metropolitan Opera); having competed in the Glyndebourne Opera Cup in 2020 (winning the audience prize), Mei Gui makes a role debut as Susanna at the Glyndebourne production of Figaro in their autumn festival this year.  

I catch Mei Gui during Glyndebourne rehearsals, and we talk about her love of Mozart, the folk music surrounding her growing up in China, and the one thing from home she never leaves without on her international travels…

You are deep in rehearsals for your upcoming Glyndebourne debut, singing Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro. How’s it going?

I think it’s going to be a wonderful production — I’m really looking forward to it. The cast, the singers, everyone is at such a high level. I really enjoy singing Susanna. It’s a lot of fun.

Are there any challenges unique to this role?

Susanna has so many recitatives, and physically I have to anticipate singing them. It’s a long role — I have to sing from the beginning to the end — I have to tell myself where to save the energy and where to give it more, because it’s a really physical role for me. I’m always on stage!

You are renowned for your interpretations of Mozart — do you remember your first encounters with his music?

Don Giovanni, Guangzhou Opera House © Guangzhou Opera House

My parents were both singers, and I studied with my father from the very beginning. My first aria was actually Cherubino’s Voi che sapete, so The Marriage of Figaro was one of the first things I sang!

I then went to the Lindemann Young Artist Programme at the Metropolitan Opera, where I started singing Barbarina from that opera a lot. I sang it in at least thirty different performances across three productions, so I know The Marriage of Figaro quite well!

I started with Cherubino, moved on to Barbarina, and now I am singing Susanna — hopefully later on I can sing the Countess! So I knew Mozart really well from the very beginning of my training.

What kind of music surrounded you as a child, with both parents as singers?

My mother is a Chinese folk singer, and my father is a classical opera singer. The styles are totally different. Opera singers don’t use a microphone, of course, and Chinese folk singers do, so their projection techniques are very different from those of a ‘classical’ opera singer. That’s why my parents are always disagreeing with each other!

I can sing a little bit of folk music because I always heard my mum singing it, and when I was young, my mum taught me a lot of Chinese folk songs, but opera is my favourite.  

Your connection to your cultural roots has been described as ‘a hallmark of your career’. What do you do to stay connected?

When I was young, I learned so many Chinese traditional songs and folk songs, so I think I have those melodies in my blood. I enjoy singing them, and my classical opera training helps me sing them.

Sometimes, when I have a recital, I’ll put Chinese art songs into my repertoire. The audiences love it, even if they don’t understand the words. I include translations in the programmes, so they can really feel it and love it.

The audience always gives me good feedback when I do that, so that’s why I keep putting these art songs into my programmes.

How much does the fact that Chinese is a tonal language influence things like the melodic contour when set to music?

Chinese is not an easy language to sing, so when I sing and use my opera technique, I need to modify what I’m doing a little bit, because it’s not as easy a language to sing in as, say, Italian.

Composers do think about the tones — spoken Chinese goes up and down — but in the music it’s not as obvious. I think the most important thing for singing in any language is legato. I think that’s true for every instrument. I played the violin and piano as well, and when you think about a phrase, the legato is very important.

Did you always want to be a singer, or were you tempted by the violin or piano as well?

Mei Gui Zhang © Dario Acosta

I always wanted to play the violin when I was very young, but my parents told me that I had to study the piano first. They thought the piano was a necessary instrument not just for singing, but for everything, so they said I had to play the piano first — but they also said that the violin was too difficult!

I started piano when I was seven years old, and my high school major at the Shanghai Conservatory was piano. I started to play the violin only when I was fifteen. I still loved it, so I convinced my parents to let me play it!

I started singing when I was three, just as a hobby, and singing has been in my blood since childhood. My experience with instruments has been really helpful.  

You are known for your versatility across different styles and operatic roles. What’s the key to maintaining that versatility?

I’ve sung Mozart a lot, and I also recently sang a lot of Verdi, like Gilda in Rigoletto and Oscar in Un ballo in maschera, so I think my repertoire is quite wide.

It’s wide, but not aggressive. I like to take my time. That’s why I still sing a lot of Mozart. Mozart is very essential for young opera singers, so I keep his repertoire close.

Mozart is like school for me. It’s like when kids play outside and have fun, but then have to come back in for some discipline! It feels like a safe area [for my voice].

What would you like to sing in the future?

I would love to sing Lucia from Lucia di Lammermoor, Liù from Turandot, and maybe, when I’m older, Madame Butterfly. I’d also love to sing Mimi from La Bohème — I think my voice is growing more and more as time goes on, so there are so many more roles I’d like to sing.

I think in the opera world, you have a long way to go — you have to be patient before singing everything. I feel like I’m on the right track, moving slowly! I think being patient is very important in this business. I have to grow myself and let people see me grow.

What do you do in your spare time?

For sports, I love to do scuba diving. I love the ocean, so that’s my favourite thing to do. I like swimming and being in the water. Apart from that, I like to watch movies. I get a lot of inspiration from films, which I can then use on the opera stage. Any kind of movie — Chinese, Korean, American — but not horror movies!

I also like to cook, especially Chinese food. I’m from Southwest China, so I enjoy cooking Sichuan food, which is very spicy. The red spicy peppers are one of the most important ingredients for me, so I always carry chillies with me when I travel — chilli powder, spicy sauce, anything. My fiancé, however, cannot eat spice — he says it’s pain rather than a flavour!

How to Prepare for Rehearsals

by Oliver Pashley 

The most obvious thing to take care of before a rehearsal
is learning your notes © ClassyAF/Facebook

As a classical musician, we are often faced (in more normal times, at least) with the dilemma of having too many notes to learn and not enough time to learn them in. Concerts and opportunities come in at the last minute, sometimes leaving us barely enough time to practice the music before being thrust out onto a stage, gawping out into the cavernous arena as a hungry audience bays for entertainment. Ok, maybe that’s my performance anxiety talking, but before I get too overdramatic and mix my metaphors of musicians and gladiators any further, it is true that people have asked me in the past how we prepare for rehearsals, especially at short notice. How do we get ready for rehearsals? How do we choose what to practise and prioritise? And, perhaps more importantly, what gets left to chance in the rehearsal room?

The most simple, and perhaps obvious thing to take care of before a rehearsal is learning your notes. Nothing is worse than waiting for someone to get to grips with something they could have learned in their own time, and in a professional setting, it’s a sure-fire way to never get asked back again. Of course, there may be genuinely difficult things that, despite practice, still take putting together in the rehearsal room – no one is saying you have to be 100% perfect all the time or it’s curtains – but there’s a difference between spending rehearsal time working out a legitimate problem and wasting rehearsal time because you didn’t look at your music beforehand.

© Manchester Summer Chamber Music

With this said, there might be instances where you just don’t have enough time to get everything under your fingers. If you get called up at the last minute to play in a concert you might not have time to play everything by yourself beforehand – but maybe the vast majority of what you have to play is sight-readable (unless you’re doing a last-minute concerto, but that’s a whole other story). And if there’s a tricky excerpt or something nasty that appears, then our training will have prepared us for this: it’s commonplace at conservatoires for students to learn the most infamous passages in the orchestral repertoire, not just to hone their technique, but on the off chance they’ll actually have to perform them in the future. The more work that’s done as a student, the greater the memory bank to fall back on later down the road.

While preparation is important, this shouldn’t be confused with needing to necessarily play every single note before the rehearsal starts. Part of the skill of working as a musician is being able to look at a part and laser out the bar or two that needs a bit of work while leaving the rest to the rehearsal. It might be that two bars of semiquavers stand out amongst a sea of semibreves, and so this is where the priority needs to be focused, especially for things like recording sessions, where the music may have been printed only minutes before the red light illuminates.

© reverb.com

This might sound scary, but this is where the training kicks in. Things that might take an amateur ensemble time to get to grips with – tuning, balance, ensemble, and so on – are all taken as read before any of us even open our cases in the rehearsal room. We’re responsible for learning our notes, of course, but we’re also responsible for being responsive and adaptive, for learning to adjust on the fly – and this is something that you can’t prepare for alone.

Through our years of training, of performing in youth orchestras, taking part in masterclasses, doing courses, receiving lessons, attending concerts: these are when all the skills are learned and honed. In music college, there are certainly still things to learn, but there is also a focus on opening up, on being receptive to what’s going on around you: in simple terms, of listening.

Our personal practice only takes us so far. We can arrive with the notes under our fingers but unless we listen and respond in the moment, the music won’t go anywhere. If you show up reasonably prepared and with your ears open, you’ll avoid being thrown to the lions and live to see another day. Sorry, couldn’t resist.

A Glimpse Into the World of the Music Session

by Oliver Pashley, Interlude

  

Recording Film and TV Music Behind-the-Scene

Cast your mind back to the last movie or TV show you watched. Chances are there was music of some kind, enhancing the mood, providing suspense at cliffhangers, setting the scene or underscoring a poignant moment. Wherever we look in the media, music is everywhere, but did you ever wonder who exactly plays the instruments on these recordings, or how the process works?

You’d be forgiven for not giving it a second thought; music for media, after all, is there to enhance the overall experience, and arguably is most effective when it doesn’t stick out too much. There is, however, a whole industry behind recording live musicians and getting music ready for picture.

In a place like London, recording studios can be found all over the city, ranging from humble setups in converted warehouses to grand institutions with international reputations, like Abbey Road and AIR Studios.

The studios themselves don’t employ musicians. This job is outsourced to external booking agents, known as ‘fixers’. The musicians in the fixers’ books often have heaps of experience and are some of the best players in their field. The pace of recordings is fast and high-pressured, so being engaged for a recording session requires you to be at the top of your game. In London, session musicians can also be found freelancing in orchestras, in shows on the West End, touring with chamber groups – for many musicians, session work makes up just one part of their career.

Abbey Road Studio One: The world-famous studio where many film soundtracks have been recorded, including the soundtracks to the Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Empire Strikes Back

One of the great things about doing recording sessions as a classical musician is the variety of music you come into contact with. I’ve been in orchestras and ensembles recording music for films, TV dramas, nature documentaries, pop albums, art house movies… the range is so broad, and it keeps the work endlessly interesting.

For film and TV, we musicians come into the production process relatively late. A movie’s soundtrack isn’t finalised until pretty much the final edit, seeing as scores and parts have to be made for a large number of people. Changing and editing orchestral scores is a time-consuming (and costly) process, so it’s often left as late as possible in order that (hopefully) the music can simply be recorded and lined up with finalised visuals that won’t change much if at all, to avoid costly adjustments to the soundtrack.

Of course, there is the magic of editing (it is possible to record a whole orchestra and then chose and change it at your whim) but broadly speaking, recording sessions happen mostly towards the end of production, rather than the beginning, and there is something exciting about being part of a process much bigger than yourself. Sometimes there are screens in the studio that playback footage as you’re recording, and to see the show coming to life in real-time can be quite thrilling.

Not every soundtrack you will have heard will have been recorded live, however. The landscape of recordings has changed dramatically in recent decades, spurred on by huge advances in technology. As software has become more and more sophisticated, commercial ‘sound libraries’ have flooded the market, letting composers create incredibly realistic-sounding scores just by using a bank of prerecorded sounds.

While these can be incredibly useful, enabling productions without the budget to accommodate live orchestral setups to achieve realistic-sounding results, there is still very much a place for live recording, and it is still very much part of the production process for many TV shows, movies, video games and other soundtracks.

AIR Studios Exterior: The outside of Abbey Road’s less well-known cousin, AIR Studios. You’d be forgiven for walking past
without even realising it’s there; AIR has had many previous bases, but this converted church has been its home since 1992.

The level of responsiveness and adaptation you can request of professional musicians is something that, in my opinion, cannot be equaled by any sound bank. It’s commonplace in sessions to be asked to play several takes in a different way – the director or music supervisor might want it to sound more angry, or calm, or glassy, excited, soulless… the list goes on. That is much easier to achieve with a human being who can respond on the spot rather than having to recalibrate a preset batch of sounds.

Session work, while sometimes stressful, can be incredibly rewarding. It may take a while to get into that particular world, at least in the UK, but it offers interesting and challenging opportunities that can fit nicely into a freelancing career.

Ever wondered what actually happens in a recording session, or how different they are from a live performance? Read on to discover more…