Customer Reviews

Kronos Quartet, with Wu Man - Tan Dun: Ghost Opera

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The first time I listened to this CD after bringing it home I thought "...ten dollars. I just threw away $10 on this thing." After giving it another chance I heard passages that made me jump out of my chair. After hearing it through the third time - on headphones - I was totally hooked.

The major problem this CD will have for most listeners is that it is genuinely original. There is simply nothing else that sounds like it. The Kronos Quartet are well established as avant garde chamber musicians, and in combination with Chinese musicans Tan Dun and Wu Man they have created a truly spooky, and playful piece of music. It has a very asian feel to it, with moments of lyric dissonace when Wu Man races with her PiPa (the traditional Chinese lute) accompanied by the western musicians with violins and cellos wailing over the excited shouting of the ghosts to each other across the melody. The last moments of the 4th movement in particular sound like the Bernard Hermann score for "Psycho" ending in the thunderclap crash of a temple gong and the unison shout of the ghosts. "Ghost Opera" is a long, truly strange tone poem of the restless dead which takes some getting used to, but it rewards the effort. It is that rarest thing - music to dream by.

Ghost Opera was my first Kronos Quartet CD, and I loved it right from the start, though it took some time for me to understand it in depth - and have I really understood it after all? (As with all complex works of art, one never can tell.)

In my opinion, the first thing one who wishes to get to know Ghost Opera should do is just lie down - eyes tightly shut - and listen to it, without any expectations, letting the music taunt one's senses at first, and then relieve them... Oppose no resistance - it might be painful at the beginning, but that will make it all the sweeter in the end. Once the senses have adapted to this extraordinary music, its apparently undecipherable code will suddenly become clear and the message Tan Dun wished to convey will start making sense at last.

To me this CD is about anxiety and calmness, violence and peace, life and death. One will decide what the meaning is for oneself, of course: what matters is that a meaning will come. Bach and Tan Dun, the past and the present, do come together, and the result is something extremely sophisticated and fresh at once, something altogether mesmerizing.

I have no authority to say so, but I think Ghost Opera to be a most incredible achievement of contemporary classical music.

I stumbled onto this cd by accident and I'm glad I did. I've heard all sorts of new art music but never anything like this. Tan Dun has done an amazing job with writing this work. He requires the quartet to engage in all sorts of expanded techniques from the bowed gong to vocals and chants. For these techniques the Kronos Quartet must be equally commended for pulling such a difficult work off so well.

The work itself represents a trinity of NOW, PAST, and FOREVER. Dun opens the work by fusing the NOW (represented by the String Quartet and the Pipa played by Wu Man) with the Past (represented by quotes from a Bach prelude, folk songs, monk chants, and a Shakespeare soliloquy. As the work progresses the NOW joins with FOREVER (represented by water, stones, metal, and paper) to create some very exciting and enticing episodes of sound.

Overall, the Ghost Opera is definitely a work worth hearing. It's not your Tosca but that is okay because Tosca has been done. Dun has succeeded in creating something new that still is fairly accessible to the general public. I must warn you however that this is not background music. It is a work that you must LISTEN to. Those who take the time to understand this work will be emotionally and intellectually moved. Isn't that what music is about?

Three disclaimers to start my review:
1. I like Avant-Grade/Experiental music.
2. I adore Chinese music!
3. I generally do NOT like Tan Dun's music.
That said, I have listened through Tan Dun's "Ghost Opera" five times in a row since I purchased it. To neatly pigeonhole it, the music is experimental, multi-cultural and for lack of a better term, "post modern." Tan Dun is one of the best-known representatives of the "Sent Down"/"New Wave" generation of composers. (Others include the CHEN Yi, ZHOU Long, CHEN Qigang, HE Xiantian and GUO Wenjing). Growing up during the Cultural Revolution, these young men and women were sent into China's hinterlands both to represent the revolutionary values of the Party and to share in the experiences of the peasants first hand. These musically gifted teenagers absorbed - and several of them catalogued and transcribed -hundreds of folk songs. When the Cultural Revolution ended, this same group was among the first students admitted to China's newly re-opened conservatories and universities and were the first to have exposure to the modern music of the west.
TAN Dun is certainly more fortunate than most of his generation, is better marketed and is a bit of a musical chameleon in comparison. His scores for Hero, Crouching Tiger and most recently The Banquet are very different from his "concert" music. Yet there are similarities. What sounds audacious in a concert is perfectly suitable in a soundtrack for a epic martial arts film.

I do not know if TAN Dun would agree, but upon my listening to this piece, I found that the "Ghosts" alluded to in the title are indeed, the Ghosts of Memory. Passages of Bach weave in and out of textures generated both by natural sounds (TAN's signature use of water sounds...), traditional Chinese gestures (brilliantly performed by WU Man on the Pipa) and extended playing techniques from the Kronos Quartet. The use of the voice - often in hushed whispers or fragmentary vocalizations - is ANYTHING but jarring. To even suggest that this music may have been influenced by Peking Opera is ill-informed. This music sounds more like George Crumb at his most "oriental", poetic and dream-like rather than anything you'd ever hear in Chinatown.
FINAL WORDS: While not a fan of this composer, I found the music poetic, creatively scored, brilliantly performed, at times quite beautiful and profoundly sad. To the ignoramus who likened this to Kabuki, well, first off Kabuki is JAPANESE! This composer is from CHINA! I think there is a difference! And whoever heard "yowling"... what were YOU listening to? JEESH!

This is one of the most relaxing and enjoyable pieces I've heard in a long while. It gives such a nice message, and a possitive message. Communication. everything from shouting to odd bowings blend wonderfully. Tan Dun has used more progressive techniques tastefully, and not with a blantant sense of "this is new and weird, I'll use it", which is what one will get with a lot of modern music. It has quite a few lovely depths to it; truly 4 dimentional music. I recommend having some friends over, having a few mixed drinks, have a listen, and openly discuss what you find it to be about. You shouldn't be suprised to hear anything from Shakespeare, Bach, to violence, free-association, Frued, anti-establishment, etc., etc.
Over all, I only gave it 4 stars because I'd love to hear it live, which I'm sure would be an experiance in itself.

I'm fortunate because I brought to the first hearing of Tan Dun's GHOST OPERA, a love of string quartette music; a love of percussion music of all kinds; Cinese Opera music, as well as contemporary Avant-Guard compositions that incorporate drumming, strings and mixed sounds, including voice. Coming to GHOST OPERA with wide listening experience, allowed me to focus on the limited numbe and t ypes of instruments used, as well as on the non-instruments used to produce music, and to focus on the way these sources were chosen to form patterns. I did not expect melodies, and did not feel the need for them, yet when they came, though they very seldom appeared, I found I could enjoy them as arbitrary choices on the composer's palate.

There are five sectins in this GHOST OPER. Myself, I did not find the titles of these pieces anything other than irrelevant. The music, overall, is abstract, and nearly impossible to describe.

All in all, if you enjoy to experience something very different from the usual, the hackneyed, this piece has much to offer. As a piece of chamber music it has everyting one hopes for; it is intimate, spare, compelling, dramatic, comic sometimes, and always demanding or challenging. It is ear candy, both sweet and sour -- a prickly confection -- and wuld sit well on a program with the latter Bartok quartets, or some Schoenberg or Berg equivalent. (German elecronic music of the 70s might appear more human, beside it.) The difference would be, perhaps, that whereas European quartets would be expected to sound well in an enclosed space or room, this (augmented) quartet suggests an enclosed space open to the sky. A garden, you see. Something to be played and listened to in a pavilion. This is music to clean the palate, so to speak; to scrape off of one's organs of perception, the mucus of the ordinary; the common place. This piece, like others of his pieces, help one experience the present more vividly.

The Chinese composer Tan Dun has gained great acclaimed over the last 15 years or so for his blend of Western avant-garde stylings and Chinese folk materials. Born in 1957, the composer was sent into the countryside during the Cultural Revolution to participate in peasant work. He made lemonade out of these lemons by absorbing a great deal of folk music, and signing onto a Peking Opera troupe that visited the area. Tan Dun came to New York in the mid-1980s, studying with figures such as John Cage, and he began to work towards a synthesis of East and West.

"Ghost Opera" for string quartet and the Chinese pipa lute (1994) is a good example of Tan Dun's mature music, quoting from both the Western canon and Chinese folk material and delighting in unorthodox sources of sound. The performers not only play their customary instruments, but also rip up paper, splash water around in elaborately lit glass bowls. There's no real plot, instead the fragments that make up the brief libretto give the work a ritual-like atmosphere, harkening back to the village shaman that so enchanted the young composer. It takes talent to follow a quotation from a Bach prelude with a Peking Opera standard, not to mention some avant-garde clanging and scratching, and still make the whole work generally cohesive.

The Kronos Quartet were the dedicatees of the piece along with Wu Man. They've toured the piece around the world and even recorded it on video. Their performance here thus has an air of definitiveness about it. Still, at times these American musicians seem a bit uncomfortable with the Chinese material, and it would be interesting to hear a recording of the piece by an all-Chinese ensemble.

While there's much technical invention in GHOST OPERA, and the work as a whole avoids simple crossover gimmickry for something much more rich and rigorous, my attention was lagging at time. I believe that the synthesis of East and West Tan Dun was looking for was better realized in his multimedia concerto Tan Dun: THE MAP (available on a fine Deutsche Grammophon DVD). Fans of the composer who know more than his popular Hollywood soundtrack work and know what they would be getting into in this disc might find it worth picking up.

Seriously folks, if you want something a little different than the drivle they play on the radio nowadays, then THIS IS THE CD FOR YOU.

You have to listen to this with a very open mind. There's some yelling on this CD, but it's atmospheric, and it works well.

Don't get this CD if you think it's going to be full of pop singers belting out "songs" they didn't even write. This is Dan Tun at his best.

Amazing. Haunting. Buy it!

i LOVE Kronos Quartet...got the chance recently to see them live performing "again" with Wu Man..doing a Terry Riley piece which put me into heaven, i didn't want them to stop, and didn't want to leave...therefore why wouldn't i wan't to hear some other work of theirs with Wu Man, and a composer whose movie music i've liked...
well it didn't pan out so well for my feeble brain, it's cute, it's crazy, it might be great to see live (or on the DVD of them), but it's not something i can listen to frequently, as background music...guess i like their more accessible stuff..Nuevo, Caravan, Pieces of Africa, etc.

I must confess I bought this CD only because I like the word "ghost". I like the word "ghost" even better when you put a .htm after it, if you know what I mean. Aren't the Kronos Quartet simply amazing? They did some amazingly haunting work on the "Requiem for a Dream" soundtrack. This amazing piece of music brings a brand new feeling to the opera, which has seen little innovation of recently. Did I mention it is amazing? As many have said here, you must really sit down and listen, even give yourself over to the piece, in order to fully comprehend the depth and beauty that is involved. I fully recommend this CD to all who are not afraid of truly original music that will open up your mind and engage your senses.