Garbage trucks on Saturday inadvertently disrupted a performance by the New Japan Philharmonic World Dream Orchestra in the National Taiwan University Sports Center when they started loudly playing prerecorded tunes that signal waste collection, sparking outrage from classical music fans attending the event.
The internationally renowned orchestra was performing in the sports center when the trucks came to collect trash and recycling, playing music that twice disrupted musicians, sources said.
City garbage trucks play Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fur Elise and Tekla Badarzewska-Baranowska’s A Maiden’s Prayer at each collection stop to alert residents of collection times.
Photo courtesy of BigArt
The truck music reportedly surprised conductor Joe Hisaishi, who looked around the venue for its source before giving up and waiting for the tune to finish. He then smiled and gave a polite bow in its general direction before resuming the performance, a gesture that earned him applause from the audience.
However, netizens flooded the Facebook page of BigArt, the concert’s organizer, with angry posts, saying the company showed no regard for acoustics while selecting the venue and failed to anticipate the scheduled garbage collection, which showed no respect to ticket-buyers or performers.
“They lost our face to the world,” one netizen said.
“Now I have listened to garbage trucks for the first time during a concert; I will remember this for the rest of my life,” another said.
BigArt said the acoustic problems and the arrival of garbage trucks between 8pm and 9:10pm were known to Japanese organizers, and they had tried adjusting the schedule, but withheld the information from the musicians to “avoid affecting their performance.”
BigArt said that it had told Japanese organizers that the National Theater and Concert Hall were unavailable, and the orchestra said that background noises should not cause problems.
It said that Hisaishi asked staff members about the noise in a curious way and joked about it after the performance.
BigArt said that it accepts public criticisms and would use them to improve its conduct.
Formal concerts are usually performed at professional venues, but even purpose-built concert halls could be overwhelmed by unwanted noise, National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra chief of marketing and planning Huang Fu-ming (黃馥茗) said.
Huang said a performance by the symphony orchestra was once interrupted by fireworks near a venue, adding that such situations can only be averted by coordinating with city authorities and organizers of other events.
Universal Music Taiwan Ltd director of jazz and classical music Bernard Fu (傅慶良) said the sports center is not designed to host musical performances and coordination is necessary if a orchestra performs at the venue.
“The concert could have taken place on days when there are no garbage collection, like Wednesdays or Sundays, or they could have asked trucks not to play music when they were in the neighborhood,” Fu said.
Fu added that the incident is unusual because in Taiwan, complaints are typically made by local residents against the concert organizers and performers, citing the example of pop singer A-mei’s (張惠妹) concert at the Taipei Arena last year.
Additional reporting by Kuo An-chia
Taiwan yesterday condemned the recent increase in Chinese coast guard-escorted fishing vessels operating illegally in waters around the Pratas Islands (Dongsha Islands, 東沙群島) in the South China Sea. Unusually large groupings of Chinese fishing vessels began to appear around the islands on Feb. 15, when at least six motherships and 29 smaller boats were sighted, the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) said in a news release. While CGA vessels were dispatched to expel the Chinese boats, Chinese coast guard ships trespassed into Taiwan’s restricted waters and unsuccessfully attempted to interfere, the CGA said. Due to the provocation, the CGA initiated an operation to increase
A crowd of over 200 people gathered outside the Taipei District Court as two sisters indicted for abusing a 1-year-old boy to death attended a preliminary hearing in the case yesterday afternoon. The crowd held up signs and chanted slogans calling for aggravated penalties in child abuse cases and asking for no bail and “capital punishment.” They also held white flowers in memory of the boy, nicknamed Kai Kai (剴剴), who was allegedly tortured to death by the sisters in December 2023. The boy died four months after being placed in full-time foster care with the
CHANGING LANDSCAPE: Many of the part-time programs for educators were no longer needed, as many teachers obtain a graduate degree before joining the workforce, experts said Taiwanese universities this year canceled 86 programs, Ministry of Education data showed, with educators attributing the closures to the nation’s low birthrate as well as shifting trends. Fifty-three of the shuttered programs were part-time postgraduate degree programs, about 62 percent of the total, the most in the past five years, the data showed. National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) discontinued the most part-time master’s programs, at 16: chemistry, life science, earth science, physics, fine arts, music, special education, health promotion and health education, educational psychology and counseling, education, design, Chinese as a second language, library and information sciences, mechatronics engineering, history, physical education
The Shanlan Express (山嵐號), or “Mountain Mist Express,” is scheduled to launch on April 19 as part of the centennial celebration of the inauguration of the Taitung Line. The tourism express train was renovated from the Taiwan Railway Corp’s EMU500 commuter trains. It has four carriages and a seating capacity of 60 passengers. Lion Travel is arranging railway tours for the express service. Several news outlets were invited to experience the pilot tour on the new express train service, which is to operate between Hualien Railway Station and Chihshang (池上) Railway Station in Taitung County. It would also be the first tourism service
RSS