Originally published on Tue April 30, 2013 1:11 pm
For the third installment of Q2 Spaces, we visited the home and work space of Tristan Perich — a New York-based sound, visual and installation artist whose music blends a composer's interest in acoustic classical instruments and electronic manipulation with an inventor's exploration into circuitry and computer code.
Credit Zhang Yaxin / Courtesy of the see+ Gallery, Beijing, and the Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto.
A Chinese and a North Korean embrace in a pledge of everlasting (political) love. From Raid on the White Tiger Regiment, 1971.
Credit Zhang Yaxin / Courtesy of the see Gallery, Beijing and the Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto.
The "model works" engineered by Jiang Qing combine elements of 1930s Hollywood fantasy, Peking opera and classical ballet with heaping doses of political dogma.The Red Detachment of Women, 1973.
Credit Zhang Yaxin / Courtesy of the see Gallery, Beijing and the Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto.
The aesthetics of classical Peking opera, with its stylized performing techniques and facial gestures, was an important element of the "model works" that Jiang Qing and her collaborators created. Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, 1969.
Credit Zhang Yaxin / Courtesy of the see Gallery, Beijing and the Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto.
Another Zhang still from Raid on the White Tiger Regiment, 1971.
Credit Zhang Yaxin / Courtesy of see+ Gallery, Beijing, and Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto
Photographer Zhang Yaxin created incredible and indelible images as stills from the array of "model" operas and ballets planned and sanctioned by the Chinese government during the Cultural Revolution.A Chinese and North Korean solider embrace in Raid on the White Tiger Regiment, 1971.
Credit courtesy of Naxos
Credit courtesy of Naxos
Credit courtesy of Naxos
Credit courtesy of Naxos
Credit Zhang Yaxin / Courtesy of the see Gallery, Beijing and the Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto.
Some of the model workswere expanded into a range of theatrical, politically acceptable iterations. First composed as an opera in 1964, The White-Haired Girl was also adapted into an opera-ballet and a film. The White Haired Girl, 1974.
Originally published on Fri April 26, 2013 4:56 pm
During the chaos and oppression of China's Cultural Revolution, one curious new theatrical genre was born — and it was the child of the Communist Party. Jiang Qing (a.ka. Madame Mao), a former stage and screen actress and the notorious wife of Mao Zedong, led the creation of yang ban xi: "model works" that were meant, in words attributed to Chairman Mao, to "serve the interests of the workers, peasants, and soldiers and [conforming] to proletarian ideology."
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Pablo Helguera is a New York-based artist working with sculpture, drawing, photography and performance. His new book isHelguera's Artunes. You can see more of his work atArtworld Salon and on his own site.
Originally published on Tue April 23, 2013 12:22 pm
The young Austrian pianist Ingolf Wunder shines in Mozart, Jorge Federico Osorio reintroduces an intoxicating Mexican concerto and Elisveta Blumina reveals the gentle side of Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov.
Got an idea for a classical cartoon or a reaction to this one? Leave your thoughts in the comments section.
Pablo Helguera is a New York-based artist working with sculpture, drawing, photography and performance. His new book isHelguera's Artunes. You can see more of his work atArtworld Salon and on his own site.
The Dresden Staatskapelle's principal conductor, Christian Thielemann, asserts that Anton Bruckner's music, in its long-winding search for beauty, is the perfect antidote for modern life. He and the orchestra brought Bruckner's Symphony No. 8 to Carnegie Hall on April 19, 2013.
Credit Melanie Burford for NPR
Conductor Christian Thielemann performed the massive, 80-minute work without a score.
Credit Melanie Burford for NPR
A close-up view of Bruckner's densely knitted music.
Credit Melanie Burford for NPR
Bruckner's majestic score calls for an incredible array of instruments, including three harps, contrabass tuba and four Wagner tubas.
Credit Melanie Burford for NPR
The Dresden Staatskapelle's principal conductor, Christian Thielemann, asserts that Anton Bruckner's music, in its long-winding search for beauty, is the perfect antidote for modern life. He and the orchestra brought Bruckner's Symphony No. 8 to Carnegie Hall on April 19, 2013.
Credit Melanie Burford for NPR
Thielemann and the Dresden musicians acknowledge the audience's enthusiastic applause at evening's end.
Credit Melanie Burford for NPR
The Dresden Staatskapelle, founded in 1548, dedicated this Carnegie Hall concert to the memory of their late conductor laureate, Sir Colin Davis, who passed away on April 14.
Credit Matthias Creutziger
Conductor Christian Thielemann will lead the Dresden Staatskapelle in the majestic Symphony No. 8 by Anton Bruckner at Carnegie Hall.
Originally published on Mon April 29, 2013 1:33 pm
Anton Bruckner divides audiences. For admirers, his sprawling, stately symphonies — with their great pauses and timeless repetitions — represent the summit of the 19th-century Viennese symphonic tradition. For skeptics, the symphonies are exercises in lumpy piety, plagued with bombastic sonorities and numbingly long-winded development sections.
