finally saw the first emperor on the met live hd broadcast. my overall feeling is that it is a rather risky project for tan dun. while fusion is more and more becoming the trend in the arts, he does it too deliberately. he seemed to be trying to please too many people, throwing all available musical elements in there, be it chinese, romantic, or contemporary... while there was no particularly memorable meoldy line for it to really sound chinese or puccinian, it was too concrete to be minimalistic. somewhat neither here nor there. and it was unnecessarily long. could be easily compacted into 2-2 1/2 hours long. it dragged on and on, losing much of the audience's attention and in the end weakening the climax's strength, although i did like the ending very much.

visually it was satisfactory. the set was very nice. domingo was very good. yueyang could've been prettier. the least they coul do was to give everybody chinese dance training to get the mannerism right. not quite there. costume was nice. dance was good.

ha jin sucked. the libretto was a joke. they should've gotten gao xingjian to write it in chinese. lol. or get an english speaker to write it in english.

need to go. more to come