Listings

SHOWS

Menahem Pressler Piano Recital

Date: Oct 19－7:30 pm

Venue: National Center for the Performing Arts

Price: 240-500 yuan

At 94, Menahem Pressler has spent over half a century teaching, learning and playing for audiences with orchestra's around the world. See this amazing classical master at the NCPA when he appears to play a program that will include both Eastern and Western compositions.

Contact: 010-6655-0000

Jim Chim Sui-man One Night in WuHuan

Date: Oct 14-15－7:30 pm

Venue: Beijing Comedy Theater

Price: 80-400 yuan

Love is the eternal topic of humankind. Marriage witnesses the eternal debate between men and women. Men and women stick to their arguments and make utmost extents to strongly argue on just grounds. In the end, who can win this battle? At a strange and ambiguous night of Valentine's Day, when a successful man and the other man's housewife kiss in a resort hotel with "hidden secret", they fall into the uncontrollable "uncanny" event. More and more people are involved into this event. Born in Hong Kong, Jim Chim Suiman majored in Theatre and Drama in Hong Kong. After graduation, he studied mimes under the tutelage of the famous British physical theater director David Glass.

Contact: 010-6655-0000

La Voix Humaine－Beijing Music Festival

Date: Oct 19-21－7:30 pm

Venue: The Red

Price: 180 yuan

Belgium's premier new opera company Muziektheater Transparant is invited by the Beijing Music Festival to bring "La Voix Humaine" in a concept of director Wouter Van Looy, soprano Naomi Beeldens and pianist Joroen Malaise. This one-act opera for soprano and orchestra is composed by Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) on the basis of a written work by Jean Cocteau (1889-1963). In a desperate telephone conversation, a woman makes a final attempt to get back her lover. She creates a web of words－fearful, yearning, hysterical－as a safety net in her struggle for survival in the face of the imminent void. The gradual realization that her lover has chosen once and for all to be with someone else drives her to despair, until the connection is literally broken. In the staging by the soprano Naomi Beeldens and director Wouter Van Looy, the stage is a mind map in which props and chalk lines are the only tangible remains of a lost relationship. The woman, in an obscure, film-like space, seems to be staging her own death and obsessively keeping her love alive in endless repetition. In the background, a dancer gives shape to the absent lover, while the pianist and composer Jeroen Malaise brings Francis Poulenc's score impressively to life.

Contact: 010-6593-0250