Press
Short Bio
Barbora Xu (Silhanova) is a singer and composer playing zithers: Chinese guzheng and Finnish kantele. She focuses on reviving ancient music and making contemporary compositions of traditional poems.
Full Bio
Originally from the Czech Republic, Barbora Xu is a singer-songwriter living on Otava, an island in the Finnish archipelago. Barbora focuses on bringing thousand-year-old poetry singing traditions together into a new musical dialogue. Guiding her music is the ever-present relationship between humanity and nature.
Over the past ten years, Barbora has lived in many different countries, studying local music and collecting material for songs. She spent two years researching the musical traditions of the indigenous Bunun people of Taiwan as part of her studies into Chinese culture. More recently, Barbora has focused her musical attention on Finnish vocal and kantele traditions at the Global Music Department of the Sibelius Academy, in Helsinki.
Barbora has performed live all over the world, playing at venues such as Kings Place in London and Turku Concert Hall in Finland. Her work has been featured by the Finnish TV and radio broadcaster YLE, the BBC, International Radio Taiwan, the Czech National Radio and others.
In the course of her career, Barbora has organized and participated in numerous cultural events. In 2019 she took part in Making Tracks, an international music exchange programme in the UK. The following year, she co-founded Ask Your Elders, a project connecting future and current generations through storytelling, music and art.
Quotes
"A few notes transport the listener halfway across the world. It's a delicious shapeshifting, a product of Xu's glorious imagination and talent. It's quietly daring and provocative, a very satisfying joy."
- Chris Nickson, Rootsworld, 10/2021
"A work of luminous artistry"
- Charlie Cawood, Songlines ★ ★ ★ ★ 12/2021
"Barbora Xu travels far from the beaten path, exploring spaces where ancient ideas live side by side with present day views. Drawing on Taiwanese indigenous spiritual chants, Finnish folk poetry and her own imagination, Barbora's music is a slowly burning gem."
- Petr Dorůžka 6/2021
"With ethereal subtlety and nuanced simplicity, Xu manages to seamlessly intertwine East & West as if they were complimentary cousins, not vastly different cultures that exist half a world apart."
- Genevieve Andersen,Folkworks 11/2021
Barbora Silhanova (Czech Republic) - kantele, guzheng, voice
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