The second season of the international music competition Silk Way Star began airing on China’s CCTV-3 and CCTV-15 on September 6. Kazakhstan’s Rukhiya Baidukenova won the opening round with “Bulbul” (“Nightingale”), according to the Chinese newspaper Yiwu Shangbao.
The season is being recorded at the Global Digital Trade Center in Yiwu, Zhejiang province. The project is jointly organised by the Television and Radio Complex of the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan and China Media Group. The first episode also aired on the Chinese media group’s digital platforms.
In its preview of the opening round, CCTV singled out Rukhiya’s performance, noting its blend of virtuoso vocal technique and folk inflections. The song appears in the Chinese version of the programme as “夜莺”, meaning “Nightingale”.
The singer plans to keep introducing audiences to Kazakh music in her later performances. In an interview with Jibek Joly, she said she wanted to showcase the dombyra and the sybyzgy, a traditional wind instrument, as well as throat singing. She hopes to devote more than half of the ten rounds to this idea, offering new interpretations of traditional Kazakh songs.
The second season features performers from twelve countries: Kazakhstan, China, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Malaysia, Türkiye, Vietnam, South Africa, Russia, Serbia, Brazil and New Zealand.
The season comprises ten themed competition evenings. Performances are scored by twelve professional judges from different countries and an audience jury of one hundred people. The two juries’ scores are added together: each episode has a winner, while the overall title goes to the contestant with the highest cumulative score across all ten rounds. CCTV’s published rules set out this system.
