Word: dunnings
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...title role is sung by Placido Domingo, who in the 80s displayed his celebrated tenor in movie versions of Cavallieri Rusticana, Pagliacci, La Traviata and Otello, all directed by Franco Zeffirelli. But I was mainly interested in the Chinese connection. I wanted to see ? hear, really ? what Tan Dun, the gifted composer who had won an Oscar for his scoring of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, would do with his epic subject. I also was eager to see the production, since it was to be staged by Zhang Yimou, director of many sublime Chinese dramas, including Hero, the worldwide martial arts...
...Zhang staged Turandot in 1997. Now he's hooked up with his old friend Tan Dun ? they knew each other in the early 80s, before the budding composer left China to study at Columbia University and devise his own musical entente between China and the West? for what was probably the Met's most eagerly anticipated original production of the new millennium. Tan Dun's alchemic mixture of influences might produce an opera to span the globe: real world music. The Met promised the largest production since its War and Peace, suggesting that Zhang would take the visual splendor...
...score for The Emperor's Shadow was composed by Zhao Jiping. From the mid-80s to 2000, while Tan Dun was in the U.S., Zhao was the PRC's preeminent movie composer, working with most of the A-list directors. For Zhang Yimou he scored Red Sorghum, Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern, Story of Qiu Ju and To Live. For Chen Kaige: Yellow Earth, The Big Parade, Farewell My Concubine, Temptress Moon and The Emperor and the Assassin. For Zhou Xiaowen: No Regrets and The Emperor's Shadow. For Sun Zhou: Heartstrings and Breaking the Silence. Of these...
...libretto, by Tan Dun and Chinese-American novelist Ha Jin, adheres to the contours of The Emperor's Shadow, but with a different ending: Jianli cuts out his own tongue, and the anthem he leaves to be sung is a slave song we heard at the beginning of Act 2. The writers have trouble marshalling the movie's dramatic pull; their lyrics don't put the personal conflicts across with the same clarity and intensity. Domingo, a trouper at 64, has the notes down but struggles with his enunciation. (Even though he's singing in English, we needed the subtitles...
...story begins... in New Jersey. Dun, dun, dun. Therein, Brenda Martin (Julianne Moore, “The Hours”) walks into a hospital and says that her car has been car jacked in the local projects. And her son was inside. Or so she tells Detective Lorenzo Council (Samuel L. Jackson, “Pulp Fiction”) the bad-ass police officer, whose beat includes that project...