A selection of photos from Musica Viva’s “La Bohème”, December 2017.
A few years ago, President Xi Jinping gave a speech which offered his views on the role art should play in Chinese life.
Steven Mosher has written important books about the everyday lives of the rural Chinese and China’s coercive population policies. In his new book, Bully of Asia, he ventures into the realm of geopolitics and perceives a global, zero-sum conflict between China and the United States.
Musica Viva’s current production of Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème is a vivid justification for Hong Kong’s support of two opera companies. Different strategies yield different outcomes, to the great advantage of Hong Kong’s cultural scene. Musica Viva’s use of, in general, younger singers (“young” in opera being a relative term) and Director-General Kingman Lo’s focus on ensemble singing, lead to performances that are accessible and immediate.
They say that armchair generals discuss tactics but real generals discuss logistics. So here’s something different. Dawn of Victory is an account of World War I focused entirely on logistics. Jim Maultsaid enlisted at the outbreak of the war in 1914 and was immediately sent to the front where he was badly wounded on the first day of the Somme offensive. He survived, but was permanently disabled. Rather than being demobilized, he was packed off to officer candidate school and then sent back to France as a Lieutenant in charge of one platoon of the 96,000 Chinese labourers recruited to help with the war effort. His were from Shandong. Dawn of Victory is the story of the platoon’s day-to-day struggle to keep the frontline troops supplied with food, ammunition and fuel.
At the British Council in Hong Kong on Friday, the UK literary quarterly Wasafiri launched an issue dedicated to writing from the former British colony.
This November in New York has featured three different versions of the Madame Butterfly story on stage: the original at the Metropolitan Opera, a revival of the David Henry Hwang play M. Butterfly and a revival of the musical Miss Saigon. Of these, I managed Hwang and Puccini back-to-back.
Nicholas Gordon interviews Victor Mallet, author of River of Life, River of Death.
The rise and fall of Brazil, Russia, India, and China, the so-called BRIC nations, is the great geo-economic story of the twenty-first century. In the early 2000s, these countries were tipped to redraw the economic map of the world. With a combined population of nearly 3 billion, they constituted roughly 40 percent of the world’s people. Throughout the first decade of the new millennium, they were among the fastest-growing countries in the world, sailing through the 2008-2009 global financial crisis in a way that made them the envy of the world. When the long-standing G-7 group of developed countries proved unable to meet the challenges posed by the crisis, the wider G-20—including all four BRICs economies—rose to the occasion. At a time when developed countries were talking austerity, the BRICs countries opened the taps on government spending. The crisis did not turn into the second Great Depression (though it looked as though it might in early 2009). For this, surely some of the credit goes to the swift action taken by the BRICs to stimulate domestic demand.
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