Yi Yi

In its depiction of one family, Yi Yi accurately and expertly captures the themes and details, as well as the beauty, of everyday life. Following its debut at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000, Yi Yi has collected a host of awards from prestigious international film festivals. Yi Yi garnered its director, Edward Yang the Best Director at Cannes Award in 2000 and was nominated for the Palme d'Or in the same year. Yi Yi is an epic story about the Jiang family seen through three different perspectives: the father NJ (Nien-Jen Wu), the son Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang), and the daughter, Ting-Ting (Kelly Lee). The three-hour piece starts with a wedding, concludes with a funeral, and contemplates all areas of human life in-between with profound humour, beauty and poignancy. The other Taiwanese cast members include Elaine Jin as NJ's wife, Min-Min, Su-Yun Ko as NJ's former love Sherry, Hsi-Sheng Chen as Ah-Di, and Pang Chang Yu as Fatty. The film also stars Japanese comedian Issei Ogata as a Japanese software mogul, Ota.

Each member of a family in Taipei asks hard questions about life's meaning as they live through everyday quandaries. NJ is morose: his brother owes him money, his mother is in a coma, his wife suffers a spiritual crisis when she finds her life a blank, his business partners make bad decisions against his advice, and he reconnects with his first love 30 years after he dumped her. His teenage daughter Ting-Ting watches emotions roil in their neighbors' flat and is experiencing the first stirrings of love. His 8-year-old son Yang-Yang is laconic like his dad and pursues truth with the help of a camera. "Why is the world so different from what we think it is?" asks Ting-Ting.

The extraordinary, internationally embraced Yi Yi (A One and a Two . . .), directed by the late Taiwanese master Edward Yang, follows a middle-class family in Taipei over the course of one year, beginning with a wedding and ending with a funeral. Whether chronicling middle-age father NJ’s tentative flirtations with an old flame or precocious young son Yang-Yang’s attempts at capturing reality with his beloved camera, the filmmaker deftly imbues every gorgeous frame with a compassionate clarity. Warm, sprawling, and dazzling, this intimate epic is one of the undisputed masterworks of the new century.

Highly praised by the world’s leading magazine Gramophone as an artist with “both nerve and unusual pianistic assurance”, the OPUS KLASSIK nominated Young Steinway Artist Yi Lin Jiang immediately caught the international music world’s attention with the release of his debut album “Masques” and was rewarded with a nomination for the prestigious German Record Critics' Award within the same season.

Highly praised by the world’s leading magazine Gramophone as an artist with “both nerve and unusual pianistic assurance”, the OPUS KLASSIK nominated Young Steinway Artist Yi Lin Jiang immediately caught the international music world’s attention with the release of his debut album “Masques” and was rewarded with a nomination for the prestigious German Record Critics' Award within the same season.

The worldwide lockdowns of 2020/21 proved highly fruitful for US-based violinist Itamar Zorman in his quest to seek out new repertoire. A virtual voyage around the world yielded a discovery of many lesser known and rarely played works for violin, which he presented in 2020 as a livestreamed video series entitled Hidden Gems. From this musical treasure trove he selected 10 pieces for his new album Violin Odyssey, produced by Grammy Award-winning Judith Sherman.