At Sackler, a dreamlike brew of Chinese music

It's been a good summer for anyone even remotely interested in Chinese music, with nearly a dozen performances of both traditional and contemporary works at the Smithsonian's Sackler Gallery. The miniseries, built around the theme of the mythological phoenix, ended this weekend with four performances of the rarely heard musical poetry theater known as kunqu, and its high point may have come on Sunday with "Dreaming of the Phoenix" -- a work by the young composer Du Yun that bridged thousand-year...