FUJITSU MAIN STAGE, SATURDAY
Guo Yue is (yet) another internationally-acclaimed musician who has a special place in his heart for Pontardawe (and it's entirely mutual).
This pictures was taken at a performance he gave last year in the Pontardawe Arts Centre and, as you may have spotted, there's more to him (even) than the virtuoso renditions of traditional Chinese music that he gives on any one of his fifteen different flutes, not to mention a host of other instruments.
Yue has worked on the soundtracks of several international films, including Bertolluci's Oscar-winning The Last Emperor and The Killing Fields. He also played the soundtrack theme, composed by George Fenton, for the Emmy award-winning Channel Four documentary Beyond the Clouds
Yue celebrates his fiftieth birthday this year (so he's exactly twenty years older than we are!). He was born in Beijing in 1958, the year of Mao's Great Leap Forward and he was actually named after it: Guo means Kingdom and Yue = Leap Forward.
He grew up as part of a large (but largely unschooled) family of musicians in the alleyways and courtyards beneath the (aptly-named) Drum and Bell Towers of the city.
In the West we are apt to associate Chinese music with the stylised, high-pitched sounds of Peking Opera. But Guo Yue's music is different. Most of it comes from bamboo flutes whose breathy, curvaceous voices bend and swoop, sometimes almost purring, poignantly conveying yearning, loss, parting, anticipation and joy which, according to Chinese philosophy, are the four things that life's about.
http://pontardawefestival.com/artists/article.php/20080412113935490