Sometimes great experiences hit you unexpectedly. This month has seen an extraordinarily effervescent DVD, and two wonderful, more serious, CDs from young chamber ensembles. But that's life -- you never know what to expect, what's coming your way, or quite how you're going to react.
Romantic Paradise
Andre Rieu (violin)
Alternative Tentacles
Universal Music DVD 986 599-6
Purists are going to hate this but I loved it. Classical music has these days become something of a minority preoccupation but, as Andre Rieu points out, it was originally for everyone. He wants to get back to that situation, and this DVD certainly shows that the classical tradition isn't going under without a fight. It's essentially a record of a concert in the Piazza della Republic in Cortona in Tuscany, but soon pans out into an incredibly indulgent song of praise for Italy -- girls with vine leaves in their hair, Renaissance costumes, fireworks, nothing's too luscious or too over-the-top. But this is what Italy has always meant to outsiders, and this DVD merely represents the feeling's latest, and welcome, manifestation. The music's well-worn too, but it doesn't matter. The all-age crowd sings along to Verdi, and it's all in all populism gone crazy. It aspires, you could say, to be Europe's answer to American-style music, and don't take it too seriously and you'll be all-but convinced. There's big money in it too, of course, and Rieu has played to 20,000 in Madison Square Garden. Really, it's all a crazy but lovable circus. Watch this with a bottle of chianti and you'll simultaneously fall over laughing and be keying in your travel agent's number for a quick trip to Italy. It's a genuine premonition of summer.
New Year's Concert 2004
Wiener Philharmoniker
Conducted by Riccardo Muti Deutsche
Grammophon DVD 073 097-9 RCA
Year after year the Vienna Philharmonic issues a lavish pictorial account of its famous New Year Concert. With the splendid setting, the affluent, formally-attired audience, the music taken entirely from the waltzing Strauss family, the flowers and the ritual, sedate clapping, it's rather like a late Christmas card. Serious classical music lovers can only smile tolerantly and be more than a little embarrassed. There's nothing new to report this time round. Riccardo Muti has a few sage words to say on the theme of all men being brothers, but apart from that the best things on this DVD are the bonus scenes of Austria, reminiscent of an up-market tourist brochure, but pretty fine for all that. Given the speed tickets for this same orchestra have sold in Taipei, people here are no doubt going to continue to snap up this sort of thing. The combined allure of wealth and easy listening is too much to miss out on.
Beethoven
Triple Concerto, Piano Trio Op.11, Eroica Trio, Prague Chamber Orchestra
EMI Angel CD 5 57654 2
Now for the serious stuff. The youthful Beethoven originally wrote this early piano trio for piano, cello and clarinet. But the clarinet was a new instrument and almost no one knew how to play it, so he adapted the clarinet part for violin, thus reverting to a more conventional line-up. This is lucky for the young American all-female Eroica Trio who here give the work an absolutely stunning performance. Also on this CD is Beethoven's later Triple Concerto for the same combination of soloists. It's played with an appropriately scaled-down ensemble, the Prague Chamber Orchestra, thus affording a sound something like what its original audiences would have heard. One of the great virtues of these soloists is their willingness to go for emotionally expressive playing, not so long ago thought indulgent, but always much to Asian taste nevertheless. The ravishing opening of the concerto's slow movement is a case in point, though the trio's brief slow movement is in fact equally fine. This is altogether a delightful CD and highly recommended.
Diva
Angela Gheorghiu (soprano), Various Orchestras
EMI Classics CD 5 57705 2
Angela Gheorghiu certainly hasn't lacked success, but she has never managed to win over this reviewer. I wait to be impressed, and am routinely left cold. For me her voice lacks body, and she doesn't seem willing to take emotional risks with the music. I am looking for something to overwhelm me, and I keep trying to give her voice a fuller quality by adjusting the controls, but it doesn't work. If you go for self-effacement and a deferential tone, Gheorghiu may be for you. But for me, opera is about passion, whereas what you have here is tastefulness and restraint. The items from French operas on this disk consequently work best, but the Italians Bellini, Verdi and Puccini, all represented here, didn't write their magnificent music for voices like this.
Brahms
String Quartet No: 1, String Quintet No: 2, Belcea Quartet, with Thomas Kakusa
EMI ClassicsCD 5 57662 2
These Brahms chamber works are complexly wrought music and repay repeated listening. It would be forgivable to consider the quartet as something in the way of an appetizer here because it's the superb quintet that makes this CD worth buying. It's a wonderful work, and when he wrote it Brahms hinted it might even be his farewell to music. Fortunately it wasn't, but it remains a major piece, crammed full of invention and swirling, sometimes almost tidal, emotion. The young British quartet, plus Thomas Kakusa playing the extra viola, give it a very fine performance, dramatic, tender, wistful, introspective. All in all, this quintet, together with the Eroica Trio's versions of Beethoven, constitute the finest purely musical items on offer this month. Recommended.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s