Bitter Love
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Music CD Cover
Composer: Dun TanConductor: Tan Dun
Performer: Ying Huang
Edition: Music CD
Format: Cast Recording
CD Release Date: 1999-08-17
Music Label: Sony
Soundtracks:
- Against Time Of Desire
- I Once Dreamed
- Moist With Sweat
- NChiCa
- Gentle Showers
- How Sweet This Incense!
- It Is A Ghost!
- Your Solemn Vow
- Can It Be True
- This Is My Fear
- To Come
- At Peony Pavilion
- Stir My Belt Ornaments
- Secrecy Departing
Free Music Notes for Bitter Love
Free Music Review: A Composition that Missed the Mark
Hit: 1 Stars
'East meets West' appears to be the hallmark for this work of avante garde Chinese composer Tan Dun.
Well, I love Chinese music, been listening to large volumes of Chinese operatic recordings and performances for more than 40 years - from the southern Cantonese to the north-western Qin and Yu operas, and even more the Eastern Kun operas and Huang Mei lyrics.
What is being achieved in this album? I would hesitate to call it East meeting West.
Fine, it is original. Fine again, that Miss Huang Ying is a lyrical soprano with a good voice and sound technique.
But please do not mistook the work as having any lineage with the Chinese operatic tradition: it has virtually none of such.
The choice of singer alone reveals that there is no regard to the authentic Chinese operatic tradition: a Western lyrical soprano is UNABLE to bring out the style and sonics in Chinese traditional-styled melodies. For such performer, go for the celebrated Chinese soprano Miss Wu Bixia instead, the pioneer of fusion of Chinese and Western vocal styles.
Very much unlike the more recent work of Tan "The First Emperor", this album endeavours to present music that is off the beaten track. However, the result is that it is off track. The stuff here, I dare say, accounts for more than half of the adverse criticism of that opera, a much more valid work in all respects but for these 'grey area' elements.
Chinese operatic arias are much more than wailing and whining. Musical lines are more melodious, harmonics much clearer.
The blurred effects here are not authentic Chinese style.
I envy those who are able to enjoy this album.
Bitter Love Poster
When he was a youth in his native China, Tan Dun spent a period as a fiddle player for a Beijing opera troupe. His intimate familiarity with the great Chinese epic opera The Peony Pavilion from the 16th century (produced during the 1999 Lincoln Center Festival) is evident in his own work of the same name, for which Peter Sellars collaborated as stage director. Bitter Love is a self-contained fusion of music and poetry that draws from Tan's larger opera score. The traditional love story of The Peony Pavilion--which bears some striking similarities to the Orpheus myth--comes through in floating, dreamlike fragments that reflect Chinese poet Tang Xianzu's lucid imagery like a smoky moon against water. As in his earlier and fascinatingly experimental opera Marco Polo, the New York-based Tan creates an eclectic collage of styles that mix East and West, old and new, as well as classical purity and pop energy, all with audacious imagination. This is, after all, a composer who has written music for water and stones, and he exhibits an almost childlike delight in the sensuous appeal of sounds here, in the overlay of traditional Chinese instruments such as pipa with synth beats, cross rhythms, and a panoply of percussion. Soprano Ying Huang gives Tan's fluttering threads of melody a silver sheen. However tempting it might be to label Tan's project as "crossover," it displays a depth and artistic integrity not usually associated with the term. --Thomas MayClassical Music CDs
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