Opera sampler of regional styles visits Taipei

One of the first events in the current flood of Chinese opera events to be hosted by the CKS Cultural Foundation will be performed at the National Concert Hall in Taipei tomorrow. Listening to Chinese Opera II (聽戲弄樂韻自來), the second time a collection of different Chinese operatic forms has been held, will bring together practitioners of Yue-style opera, Hu-style opera, Pu-style opera and peikuan opera, making this concert a rare chance to see developments in the diverse Chinese operatic tradition.

The initiative to bring over some of the best exponents of regional opera from China to perform in Taiwan has been led by Tseng Yung-yi (曾永義) head of the Chinese Folk Arts Foundation and a noted scholar of Chinese theater. For this concert, he has enlisted the support of the National Chinese Orchestra (國立實驗國樂團) who will face the considerable challenge of providing music for four very different types of performance.

Bringing together different forms of opera into a single concert is relatively rare occurrence. The reason for doing so is to reveal the diversity of traditional Chinese theater and seek new ways to expound its relevance to a modern public.

While Pu-style opera can trace its ancestry to the kind of singing that might have been heard in the court of Qin Shi Wang (秦始王), the first emperor of China, Hu-style opera had its heyday in the 1930s, drawing on the influences of Hollywood movies and the urban lifestyle that had developed in Shanghai at that time.

Listening to Chinese Opera II, with its diversity of styles, is the perfect prelude to 11 performances of Chinese opera, with seven groups visiting from China. The concert will be held at 7:30pm at the National Concert Hall and tickets are NT$200 to NT$400.