Saturday, January 19, 2008

José Carreras recital

I almost missed out on a great opportunity to listen to Carreras because by the time I learned about the recital earlier this week, it was already sold out. If I hadn't exhausted all my contacts and traded some favors, I wouldn't have had the opportunity to catch one of the finest living opera singers in my lifetime.


The concert: while Carreras has lost some of his range (the highest note he hit all night, if my pitch hasn't failed me, was a Ab5 --and that was delivered with visible strain), he more than made up with an impassioned, controlled delivery. His intense concentration was amply projected through his voice and, to an even greater extent, his facial emotions. Notwithstanding a few strained high notes, Carreras' voice oozed with a mature, dutiful yet non-threatening perfection. The dramatic highlight of the evening was a superbly crafted encore piece --Verdi's Libiamo ne' lieti calici, together with soprano Po-ching Ip (no, I don't believe Carreras hit the last Bb...but who cares...the capacity audience, including I, went absolutely berserk after a prolonged, rousing third-last note, the G5). In an earlier encore (he did a total of three encores), Carreras first confounded the audience by revealing what seemed to be a hastily scribbled cheat sheet, and then turned the house into a pandemonium when he began singing to the tune of "在那遙遠的地方", in accented (but arguably well spelled-out?) Mandarin Chinese. While Carreras was taking breaks on backstage between his 10 arias of the evening, Ip (who was a classmate of mine at music school in HK, over 10 years ago) filled in with memorable performances, including Puccini's O mio babbino caro and, as an encore, Gounod's Je veux vivre dans ce reve.

To end, a little about the performance venue: it was held at the white-themed Concert Hall at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (or The Egg, as it is affectionately known). Similar to the opera house (which I visited two weeks ago when it first opened), the concert hall's interior is subtly tasteful and, thank goodness, without the kind of excessive exuberance that seems to define the modern Chinese taste. My only complaint: the existence of pieces of glass-like material separating the grid lights from the ambiance. When these grid lights hit the side of this glass-like material, a magnified refraction is casted on the side of the concert hall. Because the grid is suspended through wires from the ceiling, it could move, if ever so slightly, enough to cause the magnified refraction to move, in a musically miscued and visually annoying manner.

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Christmas in China (Part II)

As a follow-up to my earlier post, I would only add that while Christmas (as a religious affair) remains a minority's business, Christmas as part of popular culture is alive and well. Many shopping malls in Beijing would blast Christmas music throughout much of December. Company offices were decorated with all kinds of Christmas motifs, ranging from white Santa pin-ups (so far I haven't heard from ethno-nationalists complaining about companies getting too decked out by white faces) to blinking Christmas trees (quite a full circle, considering that China is the world's manufacturer of plastic trees and blinking lights). To be sure, Christmas has become the marketer's gift from God --no pun intended --it provides a preprogrammed, westernized theme according to which products and services are repackaged and marketed. To this day, my local Sichuan restaurant still has a "Christmas special" that includes three dishes and a soup -- a fairly unprovocative combination of beef, pork and vegetables that could allude to anything but, at least to me, Christmas. I mean, could the restauranteur at least have concocted some dishes that are more marginally related to Christmas, or at least have renamed them with a more representative portraiture of the holy day...such as, if you shall bear with me, 白色聖誕, for 水蒸豆腐...much in the same way restaurants would for 春節 dishes, such as 年年有餘? Christmas in China, like Christmas in Hong Kong, is essentially a month-long shopping and dining orgy during which consumers spend and marketers market, all in the name of the holy spirit. I can't help but think that it won't be moral philosophy but 21st century consumerism that will eventually marginalize theology --just as jingle bells get droned out by the endless ringing of the marketer's bloated cash registers.


Christmas in China

“China doesn't celebrate Christmas” is probably as misinforming as “Brooklynite doesn’t swear”. Of course, most mild-mannered folks from Brooklyn don’t swear (at least not in public), and most Chinese don’t celebrate Christmas the way most westerners do in the west. But by most conservative estimates, there are at least 50 million Christians in China, and, while they are merely a fraction of China’s massive population, they are not, in absolute terms, insubstantial.


Yet, their religiosity is mostly masked away, for personal piety or for whatever reason you may think to be related to the Chinese government’s alleged micromanagement of religion in China.

Thus, there are both a mist of romanticism and a tinge of mystique about attending a church service in China, not least on Christmas Eve: romantic, because it is as if one is seeking a forbidden fruit; mystical, because one hears so much about it yet experiences so little. My last church visit was three years ago, also on Christmas Eve, in a little Arizonan town called Flagstaff. I was there because a pastor's child with whom I was road-tripping in the area at that time compelled me to check out Jesus Christ. It wasn’t as if I’ve never checked out J.C. before –I grew up with some family members who are evangelical, born-again Christians, and spent a great deal of my childhood in a high school supervised by the Anglican Church. Yet, I went with my road-tripping buddy anyway because I didn't want to sit in the motel room alone, nursing a bottle of Jack Daniels while TV showed Jerry Springer repeats. But I digress. Three years later, I wasn’t trying to deal with solitude, but to find out more about religion in China: thus I found myself sitting inside a church in Beijing, singing Christmas carols in Chinese and observing each and every moving part during the church service. Midway into the church service, its surprising familiarity compelled me to wonder whether, language aside, the same moment could have replayed anywhere else, especially given that I expected a state-sanctioned church service to be drastically different from a non-supervised one, like the one in Arizona. My observation was this: if there were any difference, it was minute. I was told that state-sanctioned churches, where the pastors are pre-screened by the state, forbid pastors from aggressive evangelism and from mustering certain phrases, such as heavenly kingdom (天國) and road to heaven (去天國的路), lest they be contrary to the proletarian ideals. I didn’t believe I heard any of such phrases, or any phrases that I’d imagine could be “smoking guns”. On the other hand, that could also mean that I was simply not paying attention to what the pastor was saying (or that it was impossible, unless after some heavy post facto analysis, to find out what was censored and left unsaid). Anyway, I was honestly too preoccupied romanticizing that surreal moment – the moment where a nonbeliever like me was sitting in a Communist-sanctioned church in China, on Christmas Eve, listening to his brothers and sisters singing Lord-praising phrases in unified choruses – to give much thought about what was said or unsaid. Admittedly, a lot of folks were just like me –they were there to satisfy their curiosity, while others just seized any opportunity to snap digital pictures as if they were bedeviled by Annie Leibovitz’s spirit. But, like that 50 million+ folks in China, the rest was enlivened by the joyous moment, praising the glory of the Lord in a genuine act of faith and dedication to J.C. and his heavenly father.

I am not ready to say that I was moved by any of the romanticization. My agnosticism aside, however, I am somewhat relieved to see how at least some folks in China genuinely believe in something other than Louis Vuittons and the kind of material comfort that is devoid of non-utilitarian substance.