I Sing! International Youth Singing Art Festival - the first international singing art festival in China, will take place in Suzhou from June 26 to July 28.

Jointly sponsored by the Asian Performing Arts Center (APAC) and Suzhou Culture and Arts Center, the festival will feature about 40 outstanding vocalists from China, USA, France, Italy, Canada, Netherlands, Croatia, Chile and Uzbekistan, as they rehearse and perform together.

I Sing Beijing is a project APAC held with the China National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (NOCFL) since 2011. It is the first project that focuses on training Western vocalists to sing in Chinese and has attracted a massive amount of media attention around the world.

In three years, I Sing Beijing has held several concerts at the National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing and Lincoln Center in New York. The festival follows the success of the I Sing Beijing project.

Placido Domingo, the world-famous tenor, is invited as the honorary chairman of I Sing! International Youth Singing Art Festival, and world-class artists in opera and vocal music will also give classes.

The training will focus on vocal acrobatics and performance skills of Western opera. Chinese vocalists will learn to pronounce and converse in Western languages, while Western vocalists will learn to sing in Chinese. After the training, all the vocalists will give a performance combining Western opera and Chinese music.