Music: Peking Opera ALICE TULLY HALL was jammed Monday for a free performance of a Peking opera. While people sat on steps and stood in the aisles, the Ya-yin (“melodic”) Ensemble from Taiwan performed “The White Snake and Hsu Hsien,” featuring Kuo Hsiao-chuang as the White Snake.The Ya-yin Ensemble, founded by Miss Kuo in 1979, is dedicated to preserving and updating the Peking opera. Its production mixed traditional musical elements – such as speaking the dialogue in swooping, musical phrases and having the instrumentalists onstage – with such modern effects as amplification for the singers and a smoke machine that made clouds. In the 18th century, the Peking opera brought together regional Chinese opera styles for a spectacle in which refined gestures, costumes and makeup share the stage with crowd-pleasing slapstick and acrobatics. Stringed instruments and flutes accompany the high, nasal singing and dialogue, while percussion – gongs, drums and wooden clappers – intensifies dances and battles.“The White Snake” is a domestic drama with supernatural repercussions. In the ancient legend, a snake becomes a human girl and marries the handsome but weak-willed Hsu Hsien. Under the advice of the snake’s sworn enemy, Hsu Hsien insists that she drink a purifying wine, which reveals her to him as a snake.The shock kills Hsu Hsien, so the White Snake, back in human form, must trek into the mountains and battle swordsmen to get the Grass of Immortality that will bring her husband back to life. He revives, but retires to a temple, and she retrieves him only after another trek and battle – one in which the company’s acrobats, as fish and prawns, leaped and tumbled across banners symbolizing the Yangtze River. Although it had interludes of acrobatics and clowning, most of the opera was a drama of love and distrust, with Miss Kuo as a devoted and hard-pressed wife and Ts’ao Fu-yung as the befuddled Hsu Hsien. The two of them, and the coquettish Green Snake (Alan Chow in the first act, Ma Chia-Ling in the second), wheeled around each other in intricate steps and formed delicate tableaus while they sang. Even to a Western eye, they clearly conveyed comic and noble emotions, especially in a touching reunion scene. |
