Being Zhang

“Masterpieces are irreplaceable with their timelessness. I still clearly remember when, for the first time, I heard a couple of bars in the last movement of Beethoven’s Opus 109 – it was about 20 years ago and I felt deeply touched and captured at that moment… It was something truly indescribable to me.

Bagua zhang (Ba gua chang/Pakua chang) is an internal energy art even more ancient than tai chi chuan. Bagua zhang was developed 4,000 years ago in Taoist monasteries primarily for health and meditation. In the last several hundred years, bagua zhang has become known as a powerful internal martial art, but it is equally effective as a health and moving meditation practice. The Energy Arts program emcompasses all three applications of bagua zhang: martial arts, health and meditation. Bagua zhang techniques are based on the I Ching, a 5,000-year-old text considered the classic Taoist bible about the nature of change.

Tengyue Zhang won the 2017 Guitar Foundation of America (GFA) International Concert Artist Competition, one of the world’s most prestigious events. His debut recital illustrates the moods, colors and techniques of the concert classical guitar from baroque transcriptions to masters of the twentieth-century genre such as Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Tansman, and Brouwer. Despite being from very different backgrounds and time periods, several of the pieces share intriguing relationships in their use of variation form or thematic motifs and harmonic progressions.

Rosanne Philippens is considered one of the most promising violin talents in the Netherlands. Her open and communicative style of performance won her first prizes at competitions including the Dutch National Violin Competition in 2009 and the Freiburg International Violin Competition in 2014. This release from Channel Classics focuses on Polish and Russian works inspired by myths and legends. Philippens is joined by pianist Julien Quentin as well as the Nationaal Jeugd Orkest led by Xian Zhang in performances of Szymanowski's Mythes and Violin Concerto and Stravinsky's Chanson Russe and L'Oiseau de Feu.

One of the most exciting filmmaking talents to have emerged from China in recent years, Jia keeps the dramatic focus tightly reigned in this digitally shot, absorbing and searing portrait of contemporary China.

For the first time in many years businessman Luo Yusheng drives to Sanhetun, the village in North China where he was born. The district mayor called him to tell him that his father died suddenly, and Yusheng is rushing back to be with his mother. He finds her grief-stricken, keeping a sad vigil outside the decrepit village schoolhouse. But she is adamant that her husband's funeral will follow age-old local customs, even if they are rarely observed nowadays. She will personally weave the funeral cloth on the village loom, and local men must carry the coffin from the hospital back to the village.