Stay-Home World Tour Stop #3: Hong Kong (FREE!)

By Alexander Hough in Arts & Entertainment on Feb 23, 2010 10:00PM

After swinging through Africa and Iran, the next stop on our passport-less vacation takes us to Hong Kong, the home of the Windpipe Chinese Ensemble, which will be performing for the first time in North America this Thursday night at Northwestern University. The concert is a collaboration with Chicago-based Fulcrum Point to celebrate the Chinese New Year - the Year of the Tiger - which began on February 14.

The show will be an eclectic juxtaposition of the new and the traditional. Fulcrum Point is a new-music ensemble that puts together fairly adventurous programs, while the Windpipe Chinese Ensemble is a nine-member group who perform on seventeen different traditional Chinese instruments. The groups plays a mixture of traditional and modern Chinese music, and Thursday's program will consist of works by contemporary composers, including a pair of world premieres. One new piece is Li Cheong's "Drumming Ridge" for dizi, a bamboo transverse flute (a transverse flute is one that requires air blown across the hole and so is played horizontally, like the one we take to American band camp), and string quartet. The other is Ng Cheuk-yin's "Tiger Sketch," which will be accompanied by a video of comic artist Lee Chi-ching creating a tiger-themed painting. A half dozen other pieces will be performed, as well as a multimedia finale entitled "Cat and Rat - Legend of the Chinese Zodiac" based on the children's book of the same name by Chinese illustrator and author Ed Young.

The concert is free, but you have to e-mail rsvp@fulcrumpoint.org in advance to reserve your tickets (four maximum).

Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Thorne Auditorium, 375 E. Chicago, Evanston, e-mail rsvp@fulcrumpoint.org to reserve tickets, FREE