Mainstage Performance

Kronos Quartet and Wu Man, pipa

A CHINESE HOME

Saturday, January 16, 2010 | 8:00 pm
Memorial Auditorium

Tickets no longer available for online purchase. There will be a limited number of tickets available for sale at the door.

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PARKING ADVISORY: Due to a sporting event at Burnham Pavilion, we recommend you arrive on campus at least 30 minutes before show time. Parking around Galvez and Serra will be most impacted. Additional parking may be found near the Oval.

The Grammy-winning Kronos Quartet reunites with long-time collaborator Wu Man, a virtuoso of the Chinese pipa, in a powerful reflection on cultural tradition and transition. Co-commissioned by Lively Arts, A Chinese Home was inspired by the extraordinary story of Yin Yu Tang, an elegant, 300-year-old house from a southeastern Chinese village that was dismantled piece-by-piece at the turn of the millennium and rebuilt at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Drawing on Yin Yu Tang’s potent metaphors of displacement and migration, rebirth and rebuilding, the work is a musical and dramatic “construction” in its own right, exploring China’s evolving identity through contributions by multiple composers, enhanced with live staging and video elements by acclaimed stage and film director Chen Shi-Zheng (The Peony Pavilion, Dark Matter, The Bonesetter's Daughter).

The program also revisits a storied past collaboration by Kronos and Wu Man with a performance of composer Tan Dun’s Ghost Opera hailed by the Los Angeles Times as “remarkable…a broad-minded, culture-bending opus.” Famed for his score for the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and for his music for the Beijing Olympics, Tan most recently garnered international praise for his Internet Symphony No. 1 “Eroica,” commissioned by Google for this year’s YouTube Symphony debut.