It can't be repeated often enough that Taiwan's classical music scene, and its musical education system generally, are far and away the strongest anywhere in East Asia. The music department at Kaohsiung's National Sun Yat-sen University, for example, has 14 full-time teachers and 32 part-time ones, plus a graduate school, as faculty member and pianist Li Mei-wen (李美文) told Taipei Times earlier this week. And that's not even particularly large by Taiwan's standards. Two concerts next week are another tribute to this wonderful and extraordinary phenomenon.
Monday sees a performance in Taipei's Novel Hall, to be repeated in Kaohsiung Oct. 22, of three works for piano quintet. These are all, however, for the unusual combination of piano, violin, viola, cello and double-bass. Traditionally piano quintets are written for piano plus string quartet, but the substitution of a double-bass for the regular quartet's second violin means that this particular line-up of instrumentalists has, in fact, very few works from the classical repertoire available to them.
PHOTO COURTESY OF NOVEL HALL
Easily the most famous of these is Schubert's Trout Quintet, and this will unsurprisingly form the final item in Monday's concert. Another is the Piano Quintet by Johann Hummel (1778-1837), which will be Monday's opening item.
As its central piece, however, Monday's concert will have the premiere of a new work by Taiwanese composer Lee Tze-shang. Entitled South Muse III, and to be played in the presence of the composer, this is an evocation of the spirit of the exquisite traditional music from southern China known as Nanguan, only this time scored for Western instruments.
Lee Tze-shang's one-movement work follows two earlier South Muse compositions, the first for Chinese instruments, the second for piano and cello. The premiere of South Muse II was given in 2003 by Li Mei-wen (next week's pianist) and a cellist from the New York Philharmonic who was in Taiwan at the time to give a solo recital.
The five instrumentalists who will perform these quintets are all teachers at the National Sun Yat-sen University's music department, which also commissioned the Lee Tze-shang work. They are Li Mei-wen (piano), Fang Yung-shin (方永信) on violin, Wang Yi-jen (王怡蓁) on viola, Chang Yi-shin (張毅心) on cello and Wu Jeng (武崢) on double-bass.
Ticket prices in Taipei are unusually low (NT$100 to 300) because the concert has been generously sponsored, in part by Taipei City's Cultural Affairs Bureau. The medium-sized Novel Hall is, in the opinion of many people, this writer included, Taipei's most comfortable and congenial concert venue.
Schubert's Trout Quintet is the most substantial work of the evening, lasting some 40 minutes, in contrast to Hummel's 20 minutes and Lee Tze-shang's 10 minutes. It was composed in 1819 in a deliberate tribute to Hummel's quintet written 17 years earlier. It contains five movements, with a theme-and-variations movement added, prior to the finale, to the more usual four.
This much-loved quintet has gained its nickname because Schubert re-used the melody from his song The Trout as the theme for the penultimate movement.
Schubert's quintet is full of a spring-like lyricism, freshness and tenderness, together with some contrasting dramatic changes of mood. But Hummel's quintet is also highly melodic. It was at a summer school in the ancient town of Steyr, in Austria, that Schubert was asked by his friends to write another piece -- in the spirit of Hummel's sweet-sounding and tuneful composition -- for the same unusual combination of players.
Performance notes:
What: An Evening of Piano Quintets
Where: Novel Hall, 3-1 Sungshou Rd, Taipei(
When: Monday, 7:30
Tickets: NT$100, NT$200 and NT$300. The program will be repeated Oct. 22 at 7:30pm in Kaohsiung in the Sun Yat-sen University Hall, tel: (07) 722 1016.
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