University Daily Kansan
Thursday, March 5. 1987
7
Arts / Entertainment
Chen to give last KU concert
Zuohua Cheng, associate professor of music and University Symphony Orchestra conductor, leads the symphonic orchestra during rehearsal. Chen will
give his final performance Sunday at 3:30 p.m. in Crafton-Preyer Theatre at Murphy Hall.
By IENNIFER FORKER
Staff writer
Chen, associate professor of music and University Symphony Orchestra conductor, survived the cultural revolution of the 1970s in China to become, nearly 10 years later, the conductor of the premier orchestra in China. Chen will leave the University of Kansas after this semester and
Even the hardships of working in a labor camp couldn't reduce Zuo-huang Chen's enthusiasm for music.
become conductor of the Central Philharmonic Orchestra of Beijing, the capital of China.
The communist people in power during the revolution forced Chen and hundreds of other intellectuals to work in rice fields without modern machinery. They had to farm the land with only their hands.
The communists wanted to change his beliefs. Chen said.
"I was so polluted by Bach and Mozart and I was supposed to change
my mind." Chen said. "It's difficult to change people's minds. I didn't give up my ideals in western music."
Chen's final performance with KU's symphonic orchestra will be at 3:30 p.m. on Sunday at Crafton-Preyer Theatre in Murphy Hall. The orchestra will play Dimitri Shostakov's "Symphony No. 5." Chen said
"It is a very difficult piece, even for professionals, to play well. We don't play the piece perfectly, but we play it well," Chen said.
Chen said that he often was credited with improving the orchestra during the past two years, but that students actually were responsible.
"My students should get a lot of credit," he said. "They play the instruments, and they work their best.
"It's been very special. A lot of my students have become my good friends."
Wendy Hanson, Garden City sophomore, said Chen had done a great job in getting the ball rolling.
"He's phenomenal. He's one of those conductors that in 10 years you can say, 'Yea, I played under Chen.' " she said.
Hanson said she would never forget Chen because he improved the orchestra and created a positive
environment for practicing.
"He put excitement back into the program," she said.
Chris Greanm, Jamestown junior, said students played well under Chen because his enthusiasm was contagious.
"He is very exciting in the way he conducts. His teaching, and the energy he puts out is very easily absorbed by his player play his best," Grennan said.
Two other orchestra members agreed that Chen brought the orchestra closer together.
"When Chen came he also brought camaraderie to the people. We used to not mingle with the other security officials, Kansas City, Mo. senior said
He said musicians used to be divided into their sections, whether string or brass, and wouldn't communication with other students.
Chen said he planned to return to KU.
"I hope I will be coming back many times in the future. I think I have a very good connection here," he said.
"I have become one of a very big family at the University and in the community.
"I couldn't imagine before coming
that I would make so many
friends."
Paintings depict the familiar in unusual way
professor incorporates Asian and American cultures into his art
Roger Shimomura's exhibition of 12 unittied acrylic paintings at the Kellas Gallery, 7 E. Seventh St., presents a visitor with a number of images of the relationship between American and Asian cultures.
The figures depicted by Shimomura, professor of art, are easy enough to recognize: Donald Duck and a squirrel fishing lure, a shoe and an airplane.
But for all their familiarity, they are no less surprising glimpses of the familiar in unfamiliar surroundings. Mixed with Disney characters, are faces reminiscent of Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe and figures from 19th century Japanese woodcuts. They're also intriguing comic book colors, overlap one another, disregarding space and each other.
The paintings appear to be framed close-ups of a larger picture. They give the impression of looking through a window into another world, a flat world of only height and width. Many of the figures ignore the frame
Gil Chavez Columnist
itself They show only part of themselves, as they intrude into the picture, or thrust out of it.
In one, Donald Duck glares at the viewer, brandishing a paint brush like an angry artist. He holds the viewer's attention so much that the background, which is a man and a woman about to kiss, almost slips by unnoticed.
Several of the faces look into the paintings with the viewer. Some look to the sides, as if watching something the viewer can't see. Others look directly out with disconcerting boldness.
tion are often in the corners.
Much of the tension in the paintings comes from the dominating diagonal lines that thrust in from the corners. In one, arms reach in, in another, an oversized crayon reaches in. The points that hold the viewer's atten-
Present in many of the pictures are similarities between American and Japanese cultures, such as the way a Disney character's face echoes the painted face of a geisha. And it is true that there are common themes in the two cultures. "For instance, Aikira Kohama's seven Samurai," was easily devised by a character named Magnificent Seven." In recent years it has been fashionable in American business to study the Japanese style of management.
The kimonos of the Japanese women are nearly pure abstract patterns of colors and lines rather than realistic representations of cloak and bodice in a graphic sense of curving lines in the hands of many of the Japanese figures.
But there also is tension and conflict in these works. This would appear to be more in line with the artist's own past. Shimomura's family spent two years at a relocation camp after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He was 5 years old when
they finally were allowed to leave
This view may have been what Shimomura had in mind. I would prefer not to know what he was thinking. The works would lose much of their appeal to me if the wonder were taken from them.
The works evoke a place where cartoon characters and colors are of great importance, where cultures collide and sometimes mix and where a little duck, Huey, I think, swings a wooden sword and Superman is a kabuki.
The exhibition could be described as the "Seven Dwarfs Meet the Seven Samurai," with Warhul doing some of the backdrop. Of course, that is my cynical adult view, not the view I prefer.
The Empire Brass Quintet will perform at the Crafton-Prairie Theatre in Murphy Hall at 8 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are reserved and on sale at Murphy Hall box office. They are $8 and $7 for senior students and other students and $10 and $8 for the general public.
Empire Quintet brash with brass
It is a world where a hand comes down, as if from the sky, to touch your ear; arms reach to pick you up. And your view is obstructed by legs, as if you're only three feet tall, or about the height of a child. This is the view I prefer.
By JERRI NIEBAUM Staff writer
Diversity and relaxed rapport are trademarks of the Empire Brass Quintet, which will play selections from Johann Sebastian Bach to Leonard Bernstein on Sunday at the University of Kansas
'T here should be a little bit of discovery in every concert.'
Samuel Pilafian
tuba player
"There should be a little bit of discovery in every concert," said Samuel Pilaifan, tuba player with the quintet.
The ensemble plays classical, old-time jazz, contemporary. Latin American and many other styles of music, which Pilfarian said the quintet played to please different audiences.
"Some sounds are brand new to the listeners," he said.
Leonard Bernstein, composer and conductor, started the group in 1971 when he was director of the Tanglewood Music Center in Lenox, Mass., a summer school for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Pilaian played in the first performance which marked the opening of the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
Since then, the group has replaced the original trumpet, French horn and trombone players. But Pilafian and trumpet player Rolf Smedevg have played with the Empire Brass Quintet in the United States, Europe and Japan since the group was formed.
But the group also gets an enthusiastic response from Japanese audiences that usually clap in unison, be said.
"American audiences are really great because they let you know when they're having a good time," Pilafian said.
In 1976, the quintet became the first and only brass ensemble to
win the Naumburg Chamber Music Award, an award based on a contest in New York City.
"Brass music is to be taken seriously as a movement." Pilafian said.
Brass music has become an increasingly popular form of chamber music during the past 15 years, and Pilaian said the music has helped to make music their full-time careers after winning the award.
"It's like doing your hobby for a living," he said.
The Empire Brass Quintet recorded their most recent album, "A Bach Festival for Brass and Organ," with Douglas Major, organist at the Washington Cathedral in Washington, D.C. They will release their 26th album in April.
Pilafian said Caroline Kennedy, daughter of President John F Kennedy, had heard the group's albums and asked it to play at her wedding in July. She chose eight songs, some of which honored her father, for the quintet to play.
In 1984, the group performed for a special program on teamwork for "Mr. Roger's Neighborhood," a public television series for children.
"We are like a bunch of speed balls," said Pilafan. "In three days, he (Rogers) had us all moving at his speed . . . For about a week afterwards we all spoke very slowly."
Pilafian first played the tuba when he was 11 years old. He was a pianist who wanted to play in a band.
"You can't play piano in the band," he said.
Pilafian was also a runner, so he had the lung power needed to play the tuba.
"In tuba, you have to blow your brains out," he said.
This will be the second KU Chamber Music Series performance by the Empire Brass, and as they did two years ago, the group will teach a master class in music. From 4-6 p.m. Saturday, the musicians will share ideas they developed while touring the world.
Sunday's performance of classical and contemporary music will include a selection from Bernstein's "West Side Story."
"There are some pieces that make you smile," Pilafian said.
'Lethal Weapon' adds action to typical cop plot
"Lethal Weapon," a new action film starring Mel Gibson, Danny Glover and Gary Busey, is implausible at times, but packed with enough thrills a minute to make it worth your money.
The circumstances that unite Gibson, a suicidal narcotics officer, and Glover, a middle-aged homicide sergeant, are contrived, but the two work well enough together that this plot shortening can be overlooked.
The movie, yet another cops vs. drug smuggler thriller, is filled with action from the first scene to the last. Though there is no sex in the film, moviegoers who hope to see Mel naked will get their wish, but only
John Benner
Columnist
Gibson plays a police officer whose wife recently has died in an automobile accident. The rumor around the precinct house is that he has a death wish. Gibson, dependent and spending his first Christmas alone in 11 years, sticks a gun into his mouth to end it all.
briefly.
After an overacted drug bust scene in which he displays his total lack of fear or sense, he teams with Glover to investigate the death of a young prostitute who jumped to a spectacul-
lar death in the opening scene.
In a series of unnecessary coincidences, the prostitute is the daughter of a man who saved Glover's life in Vietnam. Glover and Gibson discover the man is part of a heroin murder team, and on contacts made during the war.
Another member of the ring, Gary Busey, just happens to be a former comrade of Gibson's, also in Vietnam. The two men served as mercenaries and use martial arts to duke it out in a heavily staged final action scene.
Enough bad news.
The good news is that Glover, as Sgt. Roger Murtaugh, and Gibson, as Officer Martin Riggs, make an excel-
'We gotta get up and catch bad guys today.'
- Mel Gibson
as Officer Riggs
lent and humorous team (1 smell a sequel). Also, the plot is not as predictable as it could have been.
Glover, a big attraction after his role as Mister in "The Color Purple," plays the perfect dupe for some of her past managements to get in a few of his own.
The next day, Glover's wife lets Gibson into the bedroom before her husband has managed to struggle out of bed. Gibson awakens him with a
His home life, which includes a white house in the suburbs, a loving wife and three children, is contrasted with travel trailer littered with beer, cans.
On their first day together, Gibson volunteers for the task of talking a suicidal man in from a seventh-story edge. He ends up handcuffing himself to the would-be jumper and then forces the man, who has since been held by his mind, to drop the Santa Claus watches on the sidewalk.
cup of coffee and says, "We gotta go and catch bad guys today."
Busey, as the mercenary Mr. Joshua, is the leader of the bad guys. Unfortunately, the character never is developed fully, but the former Kansas State University football player does a respectable job in this limited role. The part is his first since he dropped 60 pounds and got off of drugs after his role as Coach Paul Bryant in "Bear."
Another enjoyable aspect of the film is the score, which was co-written by Eric Clapton. The soundtrack features some nice blues work by him and by saxophonist David Sanborn.