Kaohsiung hosts the World Games in July, a huge gathering featuring sports not included in the Olympics. And just in time for the arrival of the world’s sports journalists and camera crews, Taiwan’s second city has completed its vast new World Games Stadium, which is capable of seating 40,000 and boasts 8,844 solar panels.
The Opening Ceremony of the games (on July 16) will be much like an Olympic opening ceremony. But the Inaugural Concert that opens the stadium on Wednesday will be an all-classical affair. It features the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Vienna State Opera Choir and Taiwan’s National Experimental Chorus (國立實驗合唱團) performing Beethoven’s Seventh and Ninth symphonies and Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, which ends with the firing of guns.
But why should an ultra-modern, eco-friendly building, constructed in Asia, celebrate its inauguration with acoustic music written 200 years ago in distant Europe? Why not a massive pop concert with some of the region’s top bands? Or, if classical music is to be favored, why not something contemporary featuring living composers, including Taiwan’s composers?
There are arguments on both sides, of course. This, I imagine, might be the case for the prosecution: In Asia, classical music is often associated with status. Well-heeled audiences arrive in large cars and pay handsomely to watch famous names. Classical music represents affluence, and it’s not surprising that Kaohsiung’s city fathers should pick it to open their extremely expensive new building.
They’ve predictably opted for tried and tested items with a guaranteed social cachet. Beethoven seems about right — his Ninth Symphony, after all, ends with a massive, if strident, vocal number with four roaring soloists and a chorus that can be as big as you want. (It’s routinely performed in Taipei’s Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall (國父紀念館) with seven hundred or eight hundred singers).
In addition, because foreign things are often thought in Taiwan to be better than their local equivalents, no one will be surprised to see an American orchestra and a European chorus. Both will have been flown in and housed at immense cost, but then conspicuous consumption, especially in these difficult times, is very much the name of the game.
Finally, why choose labor-intensive old-style acoustic music when it will have to be electronically amplified (using those solar panels) to fill such a vast space anyway?
So, what is the case for the defense?
Essentially, that this aging foreign music has world standing. The last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the celebrated (if sometimes decried) Ode to Joy, is, after all, the EU’s transnational anthem, and was also closely associated with the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. In that context it was a hymn to liberty too, and Kaohsiung may also be making a veiled point in selecting it.
Then there is the consideration that Taiwan is preeminent in Asia in all aspects of classical music performance. But, this being the case, why not employ all Taiwanese musicians? This is an argument that will be kept carefully hidden by the defense attorneys.
So, let the party begin. It would certainly have been a more riotous one with other kinds of music. But it will be a great day for Taiwan anyway, and the less musically inclined, plus those for whom Beethoven and Tchaikovsky would never have been first choice, will simply have to sit back and endure.
The Main Stadium Inauguration Concert — The World Games Concert 2009 (2009迎接世運之夜 — 世運主場館落成音樂會) is at the World Games Main Stadium, Kaohsiung (高雄世運主場館) located at the junction of Jhunghai and Junsiao roads (中海路與軍校路口), beginning on Wednesday at 7:30pm. Tickets are NT$290 to NT$3,000, available through ERA ticketing or online at www.ticket.com.tw.
On the final approach to Lanshan Workstation (嵐山工作站), logging trains crossed one last gully over a dramatic double bridge, taking the left line to enter the locomotive shed or the right line to continue straight through, heading deeper into the Central Mountains. Today, hikers have to scramble down a steep slope into this gully and pass underneath the rails, still hanging eerily in the air even after the bridge’s supports collapsed long ago. It is the final — but not the most dangerous — challenge of a tough two-day hike in. Back when logging was still underway, it was a quick,
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
The launch of DeepSeek-R1 AI by Hangzhou-based High-Flyer and subsequent impact reveals a lot about the state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) today, both good and bad. It touches on the state of Chinese technology, innovation, intellectual property theft, sanctions busting smuggling, propaganda, geopolitics and as with everything in China, the power politics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). PLEASING XI JINPING DeepSeek’s creation is almost certainly no accident. In 2015 CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping (習近平) launched his Made in China 2025 program intended to move China away from low-end manufacturing into an innovative technological powerhouse, with Artificial Intelligence
RSS