Members of audience give the Spectacular a standing ovation. (The Epoch Times)

Pianist Mr. Baker

(Clearwisdom.net) DENVER--The Buell Theatre at the Denver Performing Arts Complex brought grace and beauty into the lives of the people in Denver with the internationally acclaimed Divine Performing Arts Chinese New Year Spectacular show on Friday Jan. 30.

Mr. Baker, a pianist and owner of two piano stores in town, remarked during the intermission, "The show is phenomenal...You can feel the music. It's just unbelievable."

He said what made the show outstanding was that the musicians and the performers presented "everything that they know about their art and their music."

"The music, the way they do the music and the dance together ... is like, they take the music and balance it perfectly, with the symmetry of the dance and the voice and the vocals," he said.

"The vocalists are both unbelievable, the tenor and the soprano are really, really unbelievable musicians. So, I think they've done a great job of putting it together, not only musically but also dance-wise, also vocally. It's just a really wonderful performance. Especially with all the backdrops and the costumes that you come across. It's really portraying exactly what you are trying to do with music and presenting to people exactly how you feel," he said.

The DPA's digital backdrops give each scene an added visual depth and grandeur. Each backdrop is custom-designed to match exactly a given dance's costumes, story line, lighting, and even choreography.

The rest of the audience seemed to agree with Mr. Baker--Tian Ge, the tenor, who sang the song, "Cosmic Renewal" received an encore call.

Mr. Baker also talked about his feeling for Chinese culture as displayed in the show. "The culture is really wonderful. I am actually from the Philippines and I go to a lot of Filipino dances and I think it's a wonderful thing that you're doing culturally to bring not only other people of Asian families together, but also people in the U.S., so they can understand the culture and the music, not just as the country itself, but also as a music beneficial to everybody that understands music. The music is actually the basis of everything."

"Music helps you relax, music can help through hard times and you're bringing something in a difficult time with the economy right now, that people can come and enjoy and it takes their minds away from the stress and all the problems and this is what was so wonderful about tonight."

Mr. Baker, who played classical music when he first started and now plays jazz and contemporary music, talked about why the music was special to him. "Usually ... when you're going to concerts, you don't have all the different types of music. So, you go from the string and the horn players to the drums and rhythm, which is completely different than the vocalists, the tenor and the soprano who are doing traditional songs that you can actually see the lyrics in English--now you can understand the music, not just hearing it, now you can understand it. So, you know what they are singing about and why. And then when they are putting it together, the musicians are great that are playing in the pit [orchestra pit], which I used to do."

Of all the pieces so far, Mr. Baker said the one that moved him particularly was, "probably, the soprano vocalist. That piece of music was very touching and then the Falun [Dafa piece], when they did the music for that. Also about how they were persecuted for their beliefs. Yes, you can feel it. Very, very expressive."

The piece he was referring to, "Heaven Awaits Us Despite Persecution," tells the tale of a father who is persecuted for practicing Falun Gong. The fantastic scenes that ultimately unfold in this piece present a message of hope and bespeak of a longstanding Chinese belief that good people are ultimately rewarded, even if not in this lifetime.

"It almost makes you cry because you understand what the people are going through. The music helps bring that out. If it was just a play or if they were just speaking it's one thing, but the music brings out the emotion that you couldn't get any other way."

Source http://en.epochtimes.com/n2/content/view/11211/