一人同唱平﹑子喉 - 粵曲帝女花之庵遇

Comment by 秉浩 on June 8, 2008 at 5:53pm

My goodness! She is more than a talent.... truly a rare find who has made me feel much less pessimistic about the future of 粵曲!

What is unbelievable is that in both 任腔 and 白腔，she has captured as close to 100% of the original flavour. I would rate her way above all of the singers of 雛鳳鸣 which apparently had the advantage of direct guidance from 任、白, and judging by the age of her, she could NOT have been a direct student of the original singers, right? What is her name and where did you find her? Were there anything written up about her? If no performing arts worker has yet hunted her head, I would be terribly disappointed with the cultural arena of southern China (HK, Macau & Canton included).....

If I may stretch my appreciation of her talents a bit more as a critic, I would even say that in many ways her presentation of 庵遇 may have surpassed some aspects of 任、白's version:

A. 白雪仙, as you know, was not appreciated universally by fans of 帝女花, in that her pitch was sometimes super-high. This gal sang much, much more naturally, even though at times she either could not, or chose not to, come across with the dramatized pitch that 白雪仙 did.

B. In many scenes other than <庵遇>，most notably <鳳臺求偶> and <賜死>, 白雪仙's supposedly "background" singing were done with way too much egocentricity. They literally have became intrusive in my opinion. To use <庵遇> as my illustration: where 駙馬 recited the loneliness and quietness of 崇禎's spirit ("...月照泉臺静...."), 公主 should supposedly be sobbing, in my interpretation of the scene. The way 白雪仙 sobbed, however, I would have thought she was trying to out-play 任劍輝 on the stage, judging by how hard she was "sobbing" (in effect whining). By contrast, this gal your showed sang her part almost seamlessly following 駙馬's line "一對蠟燭也無人奉敬". One can, of course say that this is her intrinsic advantage of " 一人同唱平﹑子喉" as she simply would not have the chance to make those blunders 白雪仙 liked to make, which leads to my next point....

C) 任劍輝's enactment of one 前朝駙馬 would have been impeccable, were it not for the inevitable femininity peeking through. Therefore, as sung by 任劍輝, the character 周世顯 became "溫婉灑脱有餘，but 悲壯豪邁不足" (my own criticism). This inadequacy was most noticeable in the 4 opening lines for the scene where 周世顯 asked, and after some argument was permitted by the Manchurian Emporor to, "loudly recite the Princess's letter" in his imperial court. We could not fault 任劍輝too much for such minor insufficiecies, in my admiring opinion -- afterall, he was really a she. Now if I tried to compare line for line how this gal sang the lines of 周駙馬 within this clip, I would be quite impressed by how much more masculinity this gal is able to inject into the role. It was subtle, but the masculinity was undoubtedly there. Unfortunately, <庵遇> is NOT the best scene to analyze fairly to make this judgement. It is meant to be a sad and somewhat witty scene, in which both 任、白had played well. It would not be easy to gauge the deeper 功力 of this gal, especially with regard to my yearn for her to correct the excessiveness of 白雪仙 and the inadequacy of 任劍輝. For this reason, therefore, I would die to just have a chance to hear (or watch and hear) her play the entire play (or at least the scences <求偶> and <上表>)!

Anyway, a great clip and thank you for sharing.

Comment by Arthur on June 10, 2008 at 10:00pm

I stumbled upon her on YouTube. Her name is 陳志萍 (Gladys Chan). She apparently teaches singing in Toronto.

There are quite a few of her videos here on YouTube

I totally agree with your point about Gladys Chan's ability to project a much more masculine tone into the role.

I could not find her performing <求偶> or <上表>. I did find and have added a video of her singing 香夭 in the video collection here. I also added the video of 任、白's 香夭 for easy comparison. It is interesting to not watch but only listen to the two performances.

My pet idea regarding 任、白 is that their tremendous chemistry is partially due to 白雪仙's ultra femininity (some might say over the top femininity) on stage which serves to compensate for 任劍輝's lack of masculinity. Next to 白雪仙, 任劍輝 can appear to be more masculine than she actually is.

Comment by Arthur on June 10, 2008 at 10:17pm

Yay, iGlobalChinese.com is the place to find or tell others about great stuffs such as this!

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