One can make a case for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni being the best opera ever written. There is Mozart’s inimitable music, of course, but also the story, at once irrepressible and and morally-nuanced, perky yet profound. Yet, with two 90-minute acts, it can sometimes drag. But not on this opening night.
There is a longish section in Grace E Lavery’s Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Aesthetics and the Idea of Japan on Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado and which asks, among other things, whether the operetta is really about Japan. Spoiler alert: it might be, or might not be, depending whom you ask and exactly what you ask.
Kerry Brown has earned a reputation as one of the most prolific and yet reasonable commentators on China. In The Future of UK-China Relations, he turns his eye on his home country.
The Chinese diaspora, and the diasporic experience, is typically covered country-by-country or perhaps region-by-region, the geography usually determined by what is relevant to a particular group of readers. The narratives of the Chinese in, say, California and London are usually treated separately.
Hong Kong is a surprisingly green place: the skyscrapers that form the stunning cityscapes that are the territory’s most common and iconic images hug the coast. Some three-quarters of Hong Kong is in varying degree countryside and 40 percent set aside as parkland.
Reviewing a world premiere can be a privilege, albeit a somewhat daunting one. This first production of Beauty and Sadness, a new opera by Elena Langer to an English-language libretto by David Pountney, based on the 1975 novel by no less than Nobel Prize-winning Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata, is one of the most significant musical…
Brian Eyler isn’t a fan of dams, perhaps any of them, but at least not those that are, or may be, on the Mekong.
Literature comes in many forms; sometimes it is sung.
Many potential readers of James Griffiths’s new book well have had direct experience of the “Great Firewall of China” of the title. But that doesn’t mean they won’t find the book useful. Griffiths stitches events and issues, most of which are—individually—reasonably well-known, into a coherent narrative. The result is a readable, well-documented history of the…
To attempt a revisionist history of Western imperialism in just over 150 pages is, to say the least, ambitious. It has largely been an article of faith that the West “won” history. Even those whom the West presumably defeated didn’t usually take much issue with the conclusion. Seeking to turn conventional wisdom about Western global…
China hasn’t yet gotten much of an outing in western opera. It’s not for lack of material, but the most famous “China opera” nevertheless remains Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot whose relation with the country is tenuous at best. It has only been in this century that operas directly informed by China—and with direct Chinese creative input—have…
These aren’t bedtime stories. Indeed, reading them before bed might not be a good idea at all.
With domestic Hong Kong opera productions leaning almost exclusively to more or less traditional readings of the stalwarts of repertoire, perhaps someone sometimes has to shake things up a bit. This is what the Hong Kong Arts Festival arguably set out to do by having Oper Leipzig bring Calixto Bieito’s unconventional staging of Richard Wagner’s…
With a surname like Silber, a book on silver is perhaps inevitable. And if you thought a book entitled The Story of Silver: How the White Metal Shaped America and the Modern World and published by the venerable and academic Princeton University Press would be a dull, dense, heavily-footnoted tome, you’d be wrong (although not…
Asians, in general, need little convincing that the United States is, if not an empire per se, at least imperial. The title of How to Hide an Empire might therefore be seen as an attempt at irony.