Salome (tonight and Sunday at Taipei's National Theater) may turn out not be quite the experience traditionalists will be expecting. Instead, it turns out to be a form of "deconstruction" of Strauss' opera, while musically vigorous in the best traditional manner.
The set will indeed show a palace in which a decadent Herod and his debauched wife Herodias drunkenly cavort.
But rather than luxury decayed into dilapidation, it all resembles a palace that the builders never
completed.
As for the ending, something like the opposite of what those who know the work as Oscar Wilde and Richard Strauss wrote it should be expected.
At rehearsals this week Felix Chen conducted his Taipei Symphony Orchestra like a man inspired.
This is one in a long line of magnificent concerts and opera productions Chen, a veritable Taiwanese "living national treasure" has given to Taipei City.
Inga Fischer (Salome) possesses a magnificent voice that it's hard to believe is issuing from the slight frame that makes her so appropriately girlish for the role. Peter Weber (the Baptist) is a tower of strength, physically and vocally. Hans-Dietr Bader makes a snarlingly harsh Herod, with a voice that penetrates to every corner of the theater.
He is matched at every point by Leandra Overmann, marvelously over-the-top as a voluptuous, pleasure-loving Herodias.
Backstage, Overmann related with relish how she was mistaken for soprano Montserrat Caballe at Chiang Kai-shek airport by a senior immigration official after a junior one had failed to find Yugoslavia (the country of her passport) on any list.
Currently tickets are available at N$1,200 for Friday's and NT$1,000 and NT$1,200 for Sunday's performance.
Nov. 11 to Nov. 17 People may call Taipei a “living hell for pedestrians,” but back in the 1960s and 1970s, citizens were even discouraged from crossing major roads on foot. And there weren’t crosswalks or pedestrian signals at busy intersections. A 1978 editorial in the China Times (中國時報) reflected the government’s car-centric attitude: “Pedestrians too often risk their lives to compete with vehicles over road use instead of using an overpass. If they get hit by a car, who can they blame?” Taipei’s car traffic was growing exponentially during the 1960s, and along with it the frequency of accidents. The policy
Hourglass-shaped sex toys casually glide along a conveyor belt through an airy new store in Tokyo, the latest attempt by Japanese manufacturer Tenga to sell adult products without the shame that is often attached. At first glance it’s not even obvious that the sleek, colorful products on display are Japan’s favorite sex toys for men, but the store has drawn a stream of couples and tourists since opening this year. “Its openness surprised me,” said customer Masafumi Kawasaki, 45, “and made me a bit embarrassed that I’d had a ‘naughty’ image” of the company. I might have thought this was some kind
What first caught my eye when I entered the 921 Earthquake Museum was a yellow band running at an angle across the floor toward a pile of exposed soil. This marks the line where, in the early morning hours of Sept. 21, 1999, a massive magnitude 7.3 earthquake raised the earth over two meters along one side of the Chelungpu Fault (車籠埔斷層). The museum’s first gallery, named after this fault, takes visitors on a journey along its length, from the spot right in front of them, where the uplift is visible in the exposed soil, all the way to the farthest
The room glows vibrant pink, the floor flooded with hundreds of tiny pink marbles. As I approach the two chairs and a plush baroque sofa of matching fuchsia, what at first appears to be a scene of domestic bliss reveals itself to be anything but as gnarled metal nails and sharp spikes protrude from the cushions. An eerie cutout of a woman recoils into the armrest. This mixed-media installation captures generations of female anguish in Yun Suknam’s native South Korea, reflecting her observations and lived experience of the subjugated and serviceable housewife. The marbles are the mother’s sweat and tears,
RSS