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Classics for Christmas. And why not?

Peace and love aren’t just the preserve of hippies.TheNational Experimental Chorus is getting in the on the act, too. PHOTO: COURTESY OF NATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL CHORUS

Christmas had always been a time when old traditions are revived and even reenacted. Christmas dinner is usually eaten in the UK at 3pm, which was the time everybody ate their main meal of the day in the 18th century, but not for long thereafter. Silly after-dinner games reminiscent of the leisurely Edwardian era are still sometimes played over the port and nuts, and not long ago charades were performed on Christmas evening.

The West's only true remaining festival was the one day in the year when watching TV was, in some households, actually frowned on. Even today, the latest cellphone may be top of many peoples' Christmas Present Wish List, but heaven help the cook if there isn't everything traditional to eat and drink for dinner.

East Asia is enthusiastic to learn about and copy these traditions, and nowhere more so than in Taiwan. Santa Claus nailed to a cross — as was reputedly on display a few years ago in a Tokyo department store — isn't a spectacle that's likely to be witnessed in 2007 Taipei.

I sincerely hope classical music isn't going the way of charades and Christmas Day port. But even so, many people do think it's the most appropriate music for the festive season. Would hip-hop really be welcome at Midnight Mass? And so it is that Taipei's classical music forces are getting ready for a major push this mid-December.

Within the next seven days the nation's capital is due to experience a fully-fledged Peace and Love Christmas Concert (tonight in the National Concert Hall), a Christmas Concert from the Taipei Symphony Orchestra (TSO) at Zhongshan Hall (tomorrow), a concert including the iconic last movement from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on Christmas Eve (celebrating Joy and Love, though also Freedom when it was played in 1989 Berlin to mark the fall of the Berlin Wall), and, on Christmas Day itself, a Henry Mazer Memorial Concert from the Taipei Philharmonic Orchestra.

The Peace and Love event, featuring the National Experimental Chorus in Bach's wonderful Magnificat, plus many popular Christmas items after the interval, is unfortunately sold out. You might be lucky and pick up a return ticket, however. If not, try instead the TSO's Christmas Concert at Zhongshan Hall tomorrow evening. It opens with Mahler's 4th Symphony, not especially festive but a welcome serious item amid all the Silent Nights and Hallelujah Choruses (though the latter features too in the second part of the TSO's program).

Henry Mazer was the US conductor who launched the Taipei Philharmonic into international celebrity. He died in 2002 after running the orchestra for 18 years. The Christmas Day concert will feature Dvorak's ever-popular New World symphony, preceded by Sibelius' wonderful Violin Concerto, and to open the concert, a symphonic poem by Wong Fu-tong (黃輔棠).

This program is a very appropriate tribute to the great American who so loved Taiwan and the Taiwanese because it unites two of his enthusiasms — new music by local composers, and bringing the finest classics to wider audiences.

Amid all the overt festivity, there's another event worthy of notice, parallel in its refreshing seriousness to the Mazer event. It's tomorrow afternoon in the National Recital Hall at 2:30pm, and is the last of three illustrated lectures on chamber music during the classical period (essentially the last two decades of the 18th century and the first three of the 19th).

It was the era of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, all working in or near Vienna. It was a time when musical forms reached a perfection they'd been struggling towards for centuries, and which they afterwards fell away from.

Professor Liu Chiu-way (劉岠渭) will expound how this pinnacle of style was both treated and advanced by the greatest masters, with live examples played by eight National Symphony Orchestra instrumentalists. The lecture will be in Chinese, but at a mere NT$350 a ticket the musical illustrations in themselves should be well worth the entrance price. In addition, the National Recital Hall is the nicest performance venue in all Taipei.

For details of all the above Taipei events refer to the Classical Music listings below.
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