My pessimistic expectations of having few opportunities to go out this month and even fewer worthwhile events happening to tempt me to do so continue to be regularly overturned.
This Sunday, despite being utterly exhausted after an unusually long and vexing day of work, I dragged myself along to The Bookworm for the latest of Time Out Beijing's 'Sunday Salon' series of interviews with leading Chinese classical musicians. This month's subject was the pipa virtuouso Lan Weiwei.
And her performances were absolutely spellbinding. Damn, you can do some amazing things with that instrument: the tone, I found, is quite like that of a banjo, but the playing style is more like flamenco, with a mixture of rapid strumming, all-finger picking, and percussive effects; and there's a lot of string bending too, and other fretboard tricks to conjure strange and eerie sounds. [There are Youku videos with extracts of one of her performances and of her interview with Time Out's Nancy Pellegrini on this new 'Sunday Salon' Webpage: frustratingly brief, but well worth a look.]
Aha! There's a much longer and better video of Lan Weiwei's playing on YouTube (filmed at the Atlas Academy in Amsterdam a couple of years ago).
And, oh yes, Ms Lan is absolutely gorgeous as well - definite 'Fantasy Girlfriend' material.
Since Ruby griped that I never seemed to enjoy a gig any more.... well, there have been three in eight days that I enjoyed immensely! It's shaping up to be an outstanding month on the music front.
1 comment:
In fact, I quite enjoyed laowai/Uighur folk trio The Beijing Alchemists the night before as well - so I might have said 4 good gigs in just over a week.
And then, of course, there was the 'DazeFeast last night - highlight of the early phase of which (I couldn't stay late, alas) was a stunning solo set by Zhang Si'an.
After the dismal start of the Kama Festival (which was actually pretty good for some of the music, but horrible in terms of organisation), it's been a pretty damned good month!
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