“I love music, but sometimes I think I don’t understand it. I can perhaps say why a composer writes this or that note, but that’s not understanding in the way you understand the workings of, say, a machine. With music, unlike a machine, there are simply so many mysteries.”
So said Gernot Schmalfuss last week. He’s in every way a highly charismatic figure. You feel it the moment he begins to conduct his Evergreen Symphony Orchestra (ESO). His enthusiasm is manifest, and it’s hardly surprising that the sounds the orchestra produces are the sweetest, clearest and often the most heartfelt to be heard anywhere in Taiwan.
“Take the fugue,” he continued. “There are rules for how to write one, but then you find Bach going in some totally different direction. Why? We can admire the end product, and we can love it, but can we really say we understand it? In the end it’s a bit like religion. Who can honestly say he understands God?”
The ESO receives no public funding, but is instead the brainchild of the Evergreen Group’s (長榮集團) Chang Yung-fa Foundation. It’s the only wholly-privately-funded orchestra anywhere in the world. And if that isn’t enough to mark it out as unique, it also has an exceptionally youthful composition — something special even in Taiwan, where the ages of all orchestral musicians are far below the global average.
“The ESO’s average age is somewhere in the 20s, just as it is in a good football team,” Schmalfuss told me smiling.
“One of the results of being privately funded,” he went on, “is that we have to develop our own talents rather than rely on bringing in soloists from abroad, though the ESO has played with many celebrated foreigners. And it’s true — the orchestra does play from the heart, not only because it’s our duty, but also because that’s how the musicians genuinely want to play.
“Because they’re young, they’re immensely enthusiastic. Whenever we have a week free from rehearsing for concerts we play other scores, just for the pleasure of it — Bruckner, for example, a composer who’s rather difficult to understand but who presents a challenge that the instrumentalists relish.
“We try to get close to the heart of things. Working with such a young ensemble is a dream because their desire is the same as mine, to get to the inner heart of what we’re playing. We never actually reach the heart, of course. But sometimes, perhaps, we come near it.”
I asked him what the orchestra’s particular strengths were.
“First of all, technique. Everyone is able to play in all the different musical styles. Secondly, commitment. Thirdly, openness of mind — they’re very quick to accept new ideas. And finally, they’re more than willing to adapt their sound to the various requirements of different kinds of music.”
No one who heard the ESO’s fabulous rendering of Bach’s B Minor Mass last March, performed with the Taipei Philharmonic Chorus and soloists, will doubt for a moment the truth of this. Their mastery of the baroque style was manifest, even though a guest conductor, rather than Schmalfuss, was on the podium on that occasion.
“They also learn very quickly,” Gernot Schmalfuss continued. “If you give them a particular direction for a certain passage early on, and that passage recurs, they remember what you said and play it that way themselves the second time, without having to be reminded.
“Also, there’s none of the rivalry you sometimes find among musicians. I was an oboist in an orchestra for many years, and I know what can happen!”
Taiwan’s Evergreen Group specializes in maritime transport, air transport (including Eva Air) and the hotel business. The ESO was founded six years ago, and Schmalfuss has been its music director since January of 2007. It’s 70-strong, smaller than some of the world’s great orchestras. But this smallness contributes to the special nature of its sound. In addition, as Schmalfuss pointed out, if he needs more players for a particular work, there’s no shortage of talented instrumentalists in the Taipei area.
Gernot Schmalfuss is himself a celebrated oboist. As a member of the elite Consortium Classicum, he’s recorded many chamber works for wind instruments by, among others, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert.
He’s also known in the musical world for having discovered some lost scores by Antonio Casimir Cartellieri, a contemporary of Beethoven who died young. He’d been looking for them in the libraries of castles and ducal palaces for 10 years, he told me, and finally discovered two of his four symphonies. They’re in a style that lies somewhere between Haydn and middle-period Beethoven, he said. They’d never been played in modern times, and therefore never recorded.
It appears that Schmalfuss actually bought these antique scores himself, but he was untypically — and tantalizingly — reluctant to go into details. So I asked him if maybe they provided a recording opportunity for the ESO.
“Well, we do have plans to issue more CDs and DVDs, but exactly what and when have yet to be worked out. We’re also thinking about opera — and ballet too, in conjunction with some of the local dance companies.”
In 2007 the ESO performed in Los Angeles to a very enthusiastic critical reception. They’ve been invited back, but next month they’re going to Shanghai to give a concert in the 2,000-seat Shanghai Oriental Arts Center in Pudong. They’ll also provide the musical accompaniment for the opening of a new Evergreen building in the city.
Orchestral versions of Taiwanese folk songs have always been an important ingredient in ESO concerts, and they constitute the boarding music on Eva Air flights. Will they play Taiwanese folk songs in Shanghai, I asked.
“Oh yes!” said Schmalfuss. “But also Japanese, Indonesian and Chinese ones as well.”
As I got up to go, Schmalfuss said, “You can’t say Brahms is my favorite composer, or Bach, as some people do. I just like good music — and even not so good music as well!” He laughed.
Such honesty was typical of the man’s generous and tolerant spirit, I thought. Small wonder, then, that the sparkling ESO can be guaranteed to provide such an enjoyable, and even rejuvenating, evening’s entertainment on a regular basis.
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