The Taipei Music Festival (台北市音樂李) begins tomorrow night with the first in a series of performances that organizers hope will dazzle classical music lovers now through the end of the year.
Pianist Andrey Pisarev will take the stage of the National Concert Hall tomorrow night to perform Liszts' Hungarian Rhapsody No. 5 and Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 and Symphony No. 2 in E Minor. Pisareve will be conducted by Noorman Widjaja (黃胤靈), an ethnic Chinese born in Indonesia, who studied in Berlin and was himself a pianist before becoming conductor of the Nuremberg National Theater and the Berlin Symphony Orchestra and Dresden Philharmonic.
"I'm happy to be in Taipei for the annual music festival," he said at a press conference earlier this week. "The local symphony orchestra has organized an exciting line-up of guest musicians and conductors and I'm honored to be among them."
Among the other conductors to take up the baton at the National Concert Hall and other venues in this year's Taipei Music Festival are Arild Remmereit, Daniel Boico, Chen Xie-yang (
Petitgirard.
While now known the world over, American-Israeli Minsky earned his name in Germany, where his handling of the original versions of Bruckner's symphonies earned him the respect of German audiences and critical acclaim as a "vollblutmusiker" or full-blooded musician.
He'll be in Taipei Nov. 17 to conduct the Taipei Symphony Orchestra in Beethoven's Egmont Overture, Shubert's Symphony No.8 Unfinished' and Mahler's Symphony No. 1 Titan.
The following week, Ligeti will take the stage of Chungshan Hall for even more Beethoven and Mahler -- Overture No. 3 Leonora' and Symphony No. 5 respectively -- as well as Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 3. He'll also conduct a choral concert of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 on Dec. 4.
The music festival ends Dec. 22 with a one-night-only appearance by France's preeminent conductor and composer, Laurand Petitgirard, whose career has taken him from concert halls around the world to recording studios from music and film.
Petitgirard led the Orchestre Symphonique Francais from 1989 to 1996 before taking up the baton with the Orchestre de Rhin-Mulhouse. Along the way he has conducted dozens of the world's premiere symphony orchestras in Spain, France, Germany, the US and England, where he led the BBC Concert Orchestra. In 2001, he conducted the score to Abel Gance's five-and-half-hour film Napoleon with the Monte Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra.
He will lead the Taipei Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Beethoven's Coriolan Overture, Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto Op. 35 in D Major and Brahms' Symphony No. 1 at the National Concert Hall.
Other dates to mark on your calendar fall on Sept. 24 and 25, when Remmereit will conduct Leoncavallo's opera Pagliacci, and Nov. 22 and 23, when the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra visits the National Concert Hall.
For your information :
Tickets for all these dates cost from NT$200 to NT$1,200 and can be purchased by contacting the Taipei Symphony Orchestra at (02) 3393 9888. For a full schedule of dates and venues for the Taipei Music Festival, visit TSO's Web site at http://www.tso.gov.tw
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