It’s less well-known than it should be that Taiwan’s Evergreen Symphony Orchestra [ESO] has a large number of DVDs available containing recordings of their concerts. I’ll review some of them over the next few months, and begin now with one featuring a concert given with, among others, the eminent Russian violinist Zakhar Bron in 2005. Also starring was the Japanese violinist Mayuko Kamio, only 19 at the time. The conductor for the occasion was Taiwan’s Wang Ya-hui (王雅慧) — she was then the orchestra’s music director.
The opening Vivaldi item is predictably light-weight, but the central piece, Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins, is fine indeed. Most surprising for me, though, was the Poeme for violin and orchestra by the reticent French 19th-century composer Ernest Chausson. Beautifully played here by Mayuko Kamio, it’s a hauntingly atmospheric piece. Chausson apparently wrote it after feeling a full-scale violin concerto would be too demanding for his small-scale talent — half way between romantic and impressionist. It was first performed three years before he died after crashing into a brick wall while out riding his bicycle.
These DVDs from ESO have real charm, giving the genuine feeling of a live performance. The full range can be seen on the orchestra’s Web site,
www.orchestra.evergreen.com.tw.
Video Artists International, of Pleasantville, New York, continues to offer rare recordings of famous stars across the whole range of classical music. Watching its black-and-white Tosca, starring Renata Tebaldi (one of the 20th century’s greatest operatic sopranos) in a performance in Tokyo in 1961, is a strange experience.
The production itself is 100 percent traditional. The 39-year-old Tebaldi is wildly applauded on her first appearance on stage, and the Cavaradossi, Gianni Poggi, acknowledges protracted cheering with grateful gestures to the audience just moments before he is due to be executed by firing squad in the stage plot.
Tosca may be as melodramatic as any opera can be, but it has enormous strengths nonetheless. This performance is towered over by a superb Scarpia from baritone Giangiacomo Guelfi. He dominates the close of Act One, and the Te Deum against which he is supposed to snarl his evil designs scarcely makes a showing.
Act Two, at the end of which Tosca murders Scarpia , is superb throughout. This video shows Cavaradossi being tortured in the neighboring room, something that isn’t usually visible to a real-life audience. Meanwhile Scarpia is demanding his night of love with her as the price for his menials removing the spiked iron crown from her lover’s skull.
Puccini’s music isn’t ideally clear by modern recording standards, and the shepherd boy’s song that opens Act Three can hardly be heard at all. Even so, this is a version that collectors of operatic rarities will find hard to resist.
Haydn is known as the “father of the symphony,” but he was also the father of the string quartet. Prior to him, and in his earlier efforts in the form, the first violin played all the tunes and the other three players simply provided an accompaniment. But in the six quartets Opus 33 he made the crucial move of giving all four instruments equal, or almost equal, status, with the leading motifs switching around among them. This breakthrough led to the form becoming the premier vehicle for “intellectual” music for the next 150 years.
Moreover, it was these six quartets that inspired Mozart to labor over six of his own in the new style. They are some of the greatest quartets ever written, and he dedicated them to Haydn. The two men, plus Mozart’s father and another instrumentalist, played some of them together in Mozart’s Vienna apartment, and this was the event that prompted Haydn to tell Mozart’s father that his son was the greatest musical genius known to him, dead or alive.
There are many recordings of Haydn’s quartets, but the ones on period instruments by the French Quatuor Mosaiques (Mosaiques Quartet) are something special. Period instrument playing, which came into fashion in the 1970s, was initially beset with problems, but the Mosaiques are credited with having ironed these out and produced versions that are simultaneously characterful and seamless. They have to compete with the excellent bargain-priced versions from the Kodaly Quartet on Naxos, as well as the impassioned ones from the Lindsays, but this pair of CDs can nevertheless be recommended to all listeners who appreciate impeccability and poise.
Andre Rieu’s latest extravaganza, Andre Rieu in Wonderland, is both predictable and astonishing. The live concert, containing popular classical items served up along with horses, a camel and an elephant, plus Some Day My Prince Will Come and Somewhere Over the Rainbow, is a happy-happy carnival of enormous color and brio. Rieu’s events are basically parties and, though purists are sure to disapprove, they really can’t harm anyone. They give great pleasure, as well as helping banish the popular conception of the classics as being drab (Rieu’s underlying purpose). This one took place in Holland’s Efteling amusement park and centers on enchanted castles and delicious princesses. Clearly an almost-fantastic time was had by almost everyone.
In the March 9 edition of the Taipei Times a piece by Ninon Godefroy ran with the headine “The quiet, gentle rhythm of Taiwan.” It started with the line “Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention.” I laughed out loud at that. This was out of no disrespect for the author or the piece, which made some interesting analogies and good points about how both Din Tai Fung’s and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) meticulous attention to detail and quality are not quite up to
April 21 to April 27 Hsieh Er’s (謝娥) political fortunes were rising fast after she got out of jail and joined the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in December 1945. Not only did she hold key positions in various committees, she was elected the only woman on the Taipei City Council and headed to Nanjing in 1946 as the sole Taiwanese female representative to the National Constituent Assembly. With the support of first lady Soong May-ling (宋美齡), she started the Taipei Women’s Association and Taiwan Provincial Women’s Association, where she
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) hatched a bold plan to charge forward and seize the initiative when he held a protest in front of the Taipei City Prosecutors’ Office. Though risky, because illegal, its success would help tackle at least six problems facing both himself and the KMT. What he did not see coming was Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (將萬安) tripping him up out of the gate. In spite of Chu being the most consequential and successful KMT chairman since the early 2010s — arguably saving the party from financial ruin and restoring its electoral viability —
It is one of the more remarkable facts of Taiwan history that it was never occupied or claimed by any of the numerous kingdoms of southern China — Han or otherwise — that lay just across the water from it. None of their brilliant ministers ever discovered that Taiwan was a “core interest” of the state whose annexation was “inevitable.” As Paul Kua notes in an excellent monograph laying out how the Portuguese gave Taiwan the name “Formosa,” the first Europeans to express an interest in occupying Taiwan were the Spanish. Tonio Andrade in his seminal work, How Taiwan Became Chinese,
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