Salome (tonight and Sunday at Taipei's National Theater) may turn out not be quite the experience traditionalists will be expecting. Instead, it turns out to be a form of "deconstruction" of Strauss' opera, while musically vigorous in the best traditional manner.
The set will indeed show a palace in which a decadent Herod and his debauched wife Herodias drunkenly cavort.
But rather than luxury decayed into dilapidation, it all resembles a palace that the builders never
completed.
As for the ending, something like the opposite of what those who know the work as Oscar Wilde and Richard Strauss wrote it should be expected.
At rehearsals this week Felix Chen conducted his Taipei Symphony Orchestra like a man inspired.
This is one in a long line of magnificent concerts and opera productions Chen, a veritable Taiwanese "living national treasure" has given to Taipei City.
Inga Fischer (Salome) possesses a magnificent voice that it's hard to believe is issuing from the slight frame that makes her so appropriately girlish for the role. Peter Weber (the Baptist) is a tower of strength, physically and vocally. Hans-Dietr Bader makes a snarlingly harsh Herod, with a voice that penetrates to every corner of the theater.
He is matched at every point by Leandra Overmann, marvelously over-the-top as a voluptuous, pleasure-loving Herodias.
Backstage, Overmann related with relish how she was mistaken for soprano Montserrat Caballe at Chiang Kai-shek airport by a senior immigration official after a junior one had failed to find Yugoslavia (the country of her passport) on any list.
Currently tickets are available at N$1,200 for Friday's and NT$1,000 and NT$1,200 for Sunday's performance.
This month the government ordered a one-year block of Xiaohongshu (小紅書) or Rednote, a Chinese social media platform with more than 3 million users in Taiwan. The government pointed to widespread fraud activity on the platform, along with cybersecurity failures. Officials said that they had reached out to the company and asked it to change. However, they received no response. The pro-China parties, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), immediately swung into action, denouncing the ban as an attack on free speech. This “free speech” claim was then echoed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC),
Exceptions to the rule are sometimes revealing. For a brief few years, there was an emerging ideological split between the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) that appeared to be pushing the DPP in a direction that would be considered more liberal, and the KMT more conservative. In the previous column, “The KMT-DPP’s bureaucrat-led developmental state” (Dec. 11, page 12), we examined how Taiwan’s democratic system developed, and how both the two main parties largely accepted a similar consensus on how Taiwan should be run domestically and did not split along the left-right lines more familiar in
Specialty sandwiches loaded with the contents of an entire charcuterie board, overflowing with sauces, creams and all manner of creative add-ons, is perhaps one of the biggest global food trends of this year. From London to New York, lines form down the block for mortadella, burrata, pistachio and more stuffed between slices of fresh sourdough, rye or focaccia. To try the trend in Taipei, Munchies Mafia is for sure the spot — could this be the best sandwich in town? Carlos from Spain and Sergio from Mexico opened this spot just seven months ago. The two met working in the
Many people in Taiwan first learned about universal basic income (UBI) — the idea that the government should provide regular, no-strings-attached payments to each citizen — in 2019. While seeking the Democratic nomination for the 2020 US presidential election, Andrew Yang, a politician of Taiwanese descent, said that, if elected, he’d institute a UBI of US$1,000 per month to “get the economic boot off of people’s throats, allowing them to lift their heads up, breathe, and get excited for the future.” His campaign petered out, but the concept of UBI hasn’t gone away. Throughout the industrialized world, there are fears that
RSS