Friday Miscellanea

You might need a Wall Street Journal subscription to view this article: Opera Star Hao Jiang Tian Bridges East and West. But try Googling the headline.

By opera-world standards, Hao Jiang Tian is a late bloomer. The Chinese native didn’t even attend his first opera until he was 29 years old, when he was getting ready to study in the U.S. and heard Luciano Pavarotti at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Since then, Mr. Tian has made up for lost time. Today, the 64-year-old bass is a presence on the global opera scene, having performed more than 50 roles at companies from Berlin to Buenos Aires. At the Met, he has appeared for more than 20 seasons, including alongside Pavarotti in 1993 in Verdi’s “I Lombardi”—just a decade after his first visit to the opera.

Mr. Tian is about to appear in an opera written in Mandarin at the Lincoln Center.

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You would think that if you mixed up Bach, Sufi music and a little John Cage you would get something a bit more interesting:

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Alex Ross has one of those big pieces he is so good at in The New Yorker. This one is on the Dutch National Opera's production of excerpts from Stockhausen's mammoth 7-opera cycle Aus Licht.

At first, the Holland Festival had hoped to stage all seven operas, but the logistical challenges proved insurmountable. Instead, a production team led by the French-Lebanese director Pierre Audi assembled fifteen hours of excerpts—a little more than half of the cycle. The musical director was the Dutch flutist Kathinka Pasveer, who lived and worked with Stockhausen. She spent three years supervising an army of some four hundred performers, many of them students at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. They essentially majored in Stockhausen.

This was a fantastic opportunity for those students! Over at YouTube we find some clips about the production:

Here is a clip featuring bits with Stockhausen himself.

I have attended lectures by some famous composers such as Witold Lutosławski and Jō Kondo, but the only really well-known composer I have met personally was Karlheinz Stockhausen when he brought his ensemble to Salzburg in 1988 and gave seven concerts of his chamber music. I had a nice conversation with him after one of the concerts. A remark that sticks in my mind is his comment that a recording of a performance is like a post-card: it resembles the event, but hardly captures it fully.

Ross cites "Angel Processions," the second scene of the opera Sunday, as an example of Stockhausen's "impeccable craft." Here is a clip of that section:

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China has engaged in an orgy of building, not least in the area of culture: Why China Has Hundreds Of Empty 'Ghost' Museums.

The museum looked like a colossal golden jelly bean. The adjacent library was designed to look, literally, like a row of books on a shelf. Across the street was an opera house that appeared to have been modeled from some kind of ancient Silk Road fortress. These magnificent buildings were all aligned along a massive public plaza that was nearly the size of Beijing's Tiananmen Square, which ran south from the palace-like edifice of the new local government headquarters. Such monumental public works may have come off as normal along the raging boulevards of a vibrant, uber modern big city, but out here in Ordos Kangbashi–a quiet and scantly populated new city rising up from the desert of central China– it was difficult to suspend a surreal feeling of disbelief: why would all of this be built here? I would soon discover that it was all a part of a top-down central government initiative to completely revamp China's cultural infrastructure.

Ironically, one main reason that China has little to put in these museums and libraries is because the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 70s launched by Chairman Mao managed to destroy a great part of China's cultural inheritance:

China's historical sites, artifacts and archives suffered devastating damage, as they were thought to be at the root of "old ways of thinking." Artifacts were seized, museums and private homes ransacked, and any item found that was thought to represent bourgeois or feudal ideas was destroyed. There are few records of exactly how much was destroyed—Western observers suggest that much of China's thousands of years of history was in effect destroyed, or, later, smuggled abroad for sale, during the short ten years of the Cultural Revolution. Chinese historians compare the cultural suppression during the Cultural Revolution to Qin Shihuang's great Confucian purge. Religious persecution intensified during this period, as a result of religion being viewed in opposition to Marxist–Leninist and Maoist thinking.

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For a bit more cheery news, Andermatt concert hall brings high culture to Alpine ski village:

A brand new concert hall, the first purpose-built arts venue in an Alpine ski village, opened on Sunday night in the Swiss resort of Andermatt with the Berlin Philharmonic and conductor Constantinos Carydis christening the space.

The light-filled, flexible hall is designed by British architect Christina Seilern of Studio Seilern. It is part of an ambitious new development for the once-dwindling village that it is hoped will transform it into a year-round cultural destination.

Say what you will about Europe being a museum of the past--in my book that is high praise.

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One of the pieces played in that inaugural concert was Shostakovich's Chamber Symphony op. 110a. This is an arrangement by Rudolf Barshai (approved by the composer) of the String Quartet No. 8. Here the performers are Terje Tønnesen, and the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra.