LITTLE ROCK, Ark.—Several musicians attended and thoroughly enjoyed the performance at Little Rock's Robinson Center Music Hall, where the Shen Yun Performing Arts show appeared on Jan. 20.
Ms Kotcherguina, a Russian musician who plays with the Arkansas Symphony, shared a little about her background, "I play a stringed instrument in the viola section and also I play for the string quartet."
She looked at the performance with the ears and eyes of someone who knows theater art. To her it was interesting to see a medley of dance, songs, and music played by an orchestra that combined Eastern and Western instruments.
Ms. Kotcherguina was so impressed with the orchestra quality that she thought at first she might be listening to a recording.
"I've played on the stage quite frequently for the last five years, and I think the orchestra is doing a very good job: clean tone, good intonation, very interesting, new instruments' sound."
But she was impressed with other aspects as well.
"I'm impressed by the dancers and the costumes. I like all the ideas. I am curious about Chinese culture, but I did not have an opportunity to experience [it] as much. My parents went to China before I was born so I do feel I have little connections to that country," she said.
Remembering her first exposure to Chinese influence, she said: "I remember back in Russia, when I was listening to a recital ... that was my first exposure to real life and different Asian instruments. Also, in Russia we do have some instruments related to Eastern culture, so it's not completely unknown to me.
"I am impressed by how much this culture has affected our culture and I feel almost at home [in it] although at this point I am more Western than Eastern."
'I did hear something different'
Also at the performance on Wednesday was Mr. Smith, also a musician, who talked about the different instruments played by the orchestra: "I enjoyed that as a musician. I was hoping that I would get to see something different, and I did hear something different and I really enjoyed it.
"We first sat in the upper part of the balcony for the first show and that's a totally different experience because you can see the whole dance [company} as the images and that's a little different than sitting by the orchestra because you're just looking up at the dancers. I saw it from both perspectives, as we were invited to sit by the orchestra. It was great though, it was really good."
When sitting close to the orchestra, one can watch the facial expression of the musicians, so he said, "You can tell they're very serious about their music."
Moving the conversation to the 3-D backdrop where translations of the songs were displayed, he said: "I enjoyed the captioning for the singing, and I followed the Chinese characters above the English which I realized about half way through the show that I should be looking at that too. So I was able to identify some pretty simple stuff like when they were talking about the sacred path and I could tell which character was the sacred [one] and which one was the path. ... it was all very interesting to me."
The Epoch Times is a proud sponsor of Shen Yun Performing Arts. For more information, please visit ShenYunPerformingArts.org
