It sometimes seems as if there’s nothing Taiwan’s classical music audiences love so much as paying good money to see international celebrities in the flesh.
The next 10 days will witness the Croatian pianist Ivo Pogorelich giving concerts in Taipei and Kaohsiung, with Jose Carreras and Kiri Te Kanawa hard on his heels in joint recitals in the same cities. While Pogorelich will play in concert halls (the National Concert Hall in Taipei and the Chih-teh Hall in Kaohsiung), the two singers, accompanied by Taiwan’s Evergreen Symphony Orchestra under David Gimenez, are likely to all but fill the two cities’ giant arenas. What, then, is going on?
Pogorelich, a hugely talented artist at the height of his powers, will play a program of serious items chosen, one imagines, to please himself rather than to conform with any perceived taste out there in the stalls. Carreras and Te Kanawa, by contrast, appear to be doing everything in their power to attract mass audiences. The second half of their program consists of unchallenging items (Gershwin, Man of La Mancha), and they will wind up proceedings by singing together a Chinese folk song, A Place Far, Far Away (在那遙遠的地方).
It is always nice to hear the Evergreen Symphony Orchestra, but it’s nevertheless tempting to say that when once-powerful vocalists are in the twilight years of their careers, they routinely embark on tours of Asia. This is perfectly legitimate — what is surprising, though, is that audiences appear so willing to pay to go and hear them. There must be a thousand better working singers in the operatic field, youthfully vibrant and lacking only celebrity names. But here in the far-flung corners of Asia we seem to prefer to pay to hear the celebrities, whatever their age, in far-too-large auditoriums in which generous amplification is of course a necessity.
But the huge arenas are justified because the ticket-buying demand is there. It’s only possible to conclude that what
people really want is to be seen to be connected to some kudos-bearing name. They don’t want a musical experience but a status-enhancing one.
Pogorelich is another matter. He’s part of the ongoing, if rather drawn-out, Chopin International Festival (this year being the 200th anniversary of Chopin’s birth) and he’ll play, among other things, Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 3 in B Minor, Op. 58, not greatly popular but something serious pianists love to get their teeth into. Good luck to him! He’s not one for throwing sops to the masses, and if you judge any of these three visitors to our shores to be worthy of your support, then Pogorelich is undoubtedly the one to go for.
The fact that he’s also giving a free concert in Taichung tomorrow night testifies again to his good, and strictly non-commercial, intentions. The contrast with what’s happening in the Kaohsiung stadium and Taipei arena could hardly be more marked.
April 14 to April 20 In March 1947, Sising Katadrepan urged the government to drop the “high mountain people” (高山族) designation for Indigenous Taiwanese and refer to them as “Taiwan people” (台灣族). He considered the term derogatory, arguing that it made them sound like animals. The Taiwan Provincial Government agreed to stop using the term, stating that Indigenous Taiwanese suffered all sorts of discrimination and oppression under the Japanese and were forced to live in the mountains as outsiders to society. Now, under the new regime, they would be seen as equals, thus they should be henceforth
Last week, the the National Immigration Agency (NIA) told the legislature that more than 10,000 naturalized Taiwanese citizens from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) risked having their citizenship revoked if they failed to provide proof that they had renounced their Chinese household registration within the next three months. Renunciation is required under the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), as amended in 2004, though it was only a legal requirement after 2000. Prior to that, it had been only an administrative requirement since the Nationality Act (國籍法) was established in
Three big changes have transformed the landscape of Taiwan’s local patronage factions: Increasing Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) involvement, rising new factions and the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) significantly weakened control. GREEN FACTIONS It is said that “south of the Zhuoshui River (濁水溪), there is no blue-green divide,” meaning that from Yunlin County south there is no difference between KMT and DPP politicians. This is not always true, but there is more than a grain of truth to it. Traditionally, DPP factions are viewed as national entities, with their primary function to secure plum positions in the party and government. This is not unusual
US President Donald Trump’s bid to take back control of the Panama Canal has put his counterpart Jose Raul Mulino in a difficult position and revived fears in the Central American country that US military bases will return. After Trump vowed to reclaim the interoceanic waterway from Chinese influence, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed an agreement with the Mulino administration last week for the US to deploy troops in areas adjacent to the canal. For more than two decades, after handing over control of the strategically vital waterway to Panama in 1999 and dismantling the bases that protected it, Washington has
RSS