Kung fu's master musician
- Source: Global Times
- [08:58 August 06 2010]
- Comments
Tan Dun will take the baton at his Martial Arts Trilogy concert. Photo: Courtesy of Parnassus Productions Inc
By Hu Bei
If you want to make a modern, stylish Chinese martial arts movie, Tan Dun is the man to see. Not that he will be able to kick, leap and punch his way to stardom. But he will write the best music possible for your movie.
He is the man who created the scores for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee), Hero (Zhang Yimou), and The Banquet (Feng Xiaogang), the biggest box office successes in the history of Chinese martial arts movies.
Tan is now in Shanghai preparing another martial arts movie treat but one with a difference. He will present his Martial Arts Trilogy, an orchestral concert that features music from the scores of these three films. The concert will be performed by the Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra, the China Youth Symphony Orchestra, and the Shanghai Philharmonic Chorus.
A cultural ambassador to the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai, Tan will stage the premiere of the concert at the new Expo Culture Center, a striking 18,000-seat arena built for the cultural extravaganza on the north side of the Huangpu River, this weekend.
The concert will be repeated the following night and will move to the Shanghai Grand Theater for a performance on August 9. Tan believes that the first things most people, especially Westerners, learn about Chinese culture is through Chinese martial arts.
"We should look at martial arts as a traditional art form in China - not the fatal, bloody, violent impression that Hong Kong films give Western audiences. We should look at it philosophically, culturally, and with a human touch," he said.
This was his inspiration for his score for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which won him an Oscar.
In this concert, using the music from the three films, Tan blends Chinese philosophy, culture and martial arts history in a series of concertos.
"The essence of film music is the combination of drama and an orchestra. In this concert I will also use modern multimedia technology with 18 projectors screening clips from the three films in the style of traditional Chinese ink paintings," Tan said.
These three movies are essentially love stories and Tan uses different instruments to illustrate the different themes of each film: a cello for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; a violin and guqin (a traditional Chinese zither) in Hero, and piano and chorus for The Banquet.
Yo Yo Ma, the famous Chinese-American cellist, played the cello for the soundtrack of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Tan described his performance as transcend-ing "low and high culture, and romance and drama - just what the film needed."
For the concert the promising 22-year-old Italian cellist, Amedeo Cicchese, will take over for Ma. Cicchese has won prizes at home and abroad and has appeared as a first cellist with several major youth orchestras.
Japanese violinist, Ryu Goto, will play the violin solos for the Hero segment. Goto made his first appearance as a 7-year-old playing Paganini's Violin Concerto No.1 and since then has been a soloist with the National Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic, Wiener Symphoniker, the Vancouver Symphony and the Philharmonia Orchestra.
Chinese pianist Sun Jiayi was another child prodigy learning the piano from Lang Guoyin, the father of Lang Lang, and making her debut when she was 6.
Sun came first in the 2004 Fourth Moscow International Frederick Chopin Competition for Young Pianists and has won several other international awards.
