Word: mandarinism
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...hear in television commercials and Au Bon Pain's front foyer. His allegiance is not to music that is popular, but to music that is earth-shattering. And indeed, the BSO's last concert, featuring Gustav Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde and Bela Bartok's The Miraculous Mandarin, might have been earth-shattering enough to crack fault lines into Symphony Hall...
Expanding on the theme of mortality, the concert opened with Bartok's The Miraculous Mandarin, Bartok's own exploration of life and death. This one act opus was more of a pantomime than a musical suite. In fact, it was almost a miniature play. While there were no actors, no costumes, no sets, there was one staple of drama--an unmistakable storyline. Ozawa took the role of the narrator and the instruments assumed the voices of characters. The Miraculous Mandarin's format was vaguely reminiscent of the children's symphony, Peter and the Wolf. Its plot, however, was drastically different...
Ostensibly, the opus was not uplifting. But it was rivetting. No one dared to flip a program during The Miraculous Mandarin. The tension mounted to such an unbearable degree that at the end of the piece, the audience collectively exhaled and all of Symphony Hall leaned back from the edge of their seats. It would be foolish to glean any message about death and dying from a pantomime. And yet, paradoxically, this is what the opus' power derived from. An audience could not help but be mesmerized when the tawdry relation between a prostitute and her customer explored the interface...
...come very close. He likes the altitude--it energizes him--and over the past five years he has seemed to defy gravity as he pushed his country's economic reforms further and faster than anyone thought possible. To his many admirers at home and overseas, he was the enlightened mandarin who single-handedly could break through the red tape and propel China's economy into the next century. Even Asia's debilitating economic crisis didn't seem to faze Zhu. In March he laid out a program for China to make its state-owned firms profitable, restructure its debt-ridden...
October brings the onset of restlessness, Mandarin-speaking TFs, frigid air and the rumblings of social action. In an unfortunate coincidence, it also marks the opening of the punch season for Harvard's legendary final clubs. The results: anxious muckrakers, rejuvenated by summer internships with the National Organization for women, find an easy target their festering impulse to eradicate injustice. Every year the clubs are subjected to the same tired assaults on the petty, ill-reasoned grounds. As a result, those being punched feel compelled to stage embarrassing displays of moral incertitude and false humility, while campus publications chime...