Barun Roy: Asian icons, made in China

ASIA FILE

A new breed of music halls are ancient Asia's latter-day cultural icons, stunning in their sophistication.

The New York Philharmonic's recent tour of North Korea was as unexpected as it was historic, but it came as yet another proof of Asia's growing lure among Western performing artists. And one reason why the region has become their favourite stomping ground away from home is the emergence of a new breed of music halls that are at par with the world's best. These are ancient Asia's latter-day cultural icons, stunning in their sophistication and pieces of art themselves, lending to the Asian landscape an excitement we hadn't experienced before.

Last December, China's National Centre for the Performing Arts officially opened in Beijing, and who wouldn't want to perform at a place like that? It's China's dazzling new showpiece, like its many Olympic wonders, lodged on 149,500 square metres of space next to Tienanmen Square. Designed by the famous French architect Paul Andreu, it sits within a shallow pool overhung by a huge, bubble-like, elliptical, titanium-and-glass dome that people have come to call The Egg. Some call it a Floating Pearl. Of course, there are detractors who say it disturbs the feng shui of the area, but nobody denies that it's a unique creation and gives the world one more excuse to come visiting, if only to contemplate the pure modernity of its architecture against the Great Hall of the People. The contrast reveals what new China is all about.

The centre includes an opera house for 2,416 people, a concert hall for 2,017, and a theatre that can seat 1,040. This makes the $400 million facility twice as big as the famed Kennedy Centre in Washington. Visitors enter through a glass-enclosed corridor submerged under the artificial lake and emerge into a lush, dazzling interior meant to overwhelm. Its acoustics and mechanical wizardry are said to be good enough to rival any hall in Europe or the US. The New York Philharmonic passed through here before its trip to Pyongyang. The Kirov Opera and Ballet was there soon after its opening. Seiji Ozawa came down to conduct the China National Symphony Orchestra. The Royal Ballet will come calling in June. The platter is filling up fast and it's not difficult to understand why.

Then there's the Shanghai Grand Theatre, which has played a leading role in establishing China as an international performing arts destination since opening in 1998. In fact, it's the one singular reason why Shanghai, China's pre-eminent centre of business and commerce, has also emerged as the international music industry's major reference point in Asia, an Asian Broadway, if you wish, or a West End. The American musical, Hairspray, will be performing in early July.

Also designed by a French architect, Jean-Marie Charpentier, the Shanghai Grand is a 10-storey, 62,803 sq m facility, with two underground floors, two loft floors, and six floors above ground, tucked under a huge inverse-curved roof that symbolises the Chinese treasure bowl and invokes the sky. The facades form a clear glass box allowing outside and inside views to blend. It has a 1,800-seat main hall for ballets, operas and symphonies; a 600-seat medium theatre for chamber orchestras, and a 200-seat auditorium for dramas and fashion shows.

And in Guangzhou, before the Olympics begin in Beijing, doors will open to an opera house so very modern that even The Egg might feel jealous. Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi-born British architect known for an avant garde style that obliterates the divide between architecture and sculpture, has designed an unusual complex of undulating structures, set amid grassy slopes on the banks of the Zhi Jiang River, that look like two boulders and don't disturb the surrounding landscape. Her larger boulder is a 1,800-seat opera theatre and the smaller one a 2,500 sq m multifunctional digital hall. Other facilities are all embedded like shells into these landforms along an internal approach promenade. The entire design is so complicated that no two beams or column connections are the same.

These and other musical venues coming up in many Chinese cities, like the Wenzhou Grand Theatre, which Uruguayan architect Carlos Ott has designed to look like "a gold fish in a pond," add a totally different tang to China's increasingly irresistible attraction. Of course, there's the Seoul Arts Centre, whose 2,340-seat opera theatre has three separate auxiliary stages that allow acts to be performed without any interruption, or Singapore's Theatres on the Bay that has acoustics only five other halls in the world are said to have, with a reverberation chamber, an enormous void, that occupies the volume of four Olympic-size swimming pools.

But it's China that's grabbing most of the attention right now. It's there that art, music and architecture are combining like nowhere else in a visionary endeavour to create a present that could surpass even the excitement of a past hallowed by thousands of years.