New from Well Go USA Taiwan is a ballet danced to Bach's cello suites numbers two, three and six, In the Wind In the Void. It comes from Zurich Ballet and is the work of choreographer Heinz Spoerli.
Bach isn't natural ballet music. It's concentrated, for one thing, and semi-abstract for another. The cello suites don't tell a story, as much Romantic music does. This is the reason, Spoerli tells us in a bonus interview, why he has only come to Bach late in his professional life.
He's always found Bach's music a true friend in times of crisis, he says. But in his mature years he has felt the need to display Bach's balance and focus in dance. This current work follows his earlier Bach ballet set to the Goldberg Variations.
Here Spoerli sets simply dressed dancers in pools of colored light against a dark background. The items are predictably formal, but they also possess great inventiveness, energy and muscular strength. This is exactly right for Bach's music, which is nothing if not strong and energetic. The cello playing by Claudius Hermann, incidentally, is superb.
Two more DVDs from Well Go USA Taiwan feature Shostakovich's landmark Fifth Symphony. One is the final program of Andre Previn's 1984 TV series Sounds Magnificent (note the pun), while the other forms the first half of a Shostakovich Double Bill, two Shostakovich performances on the one disc. Both are arresting in their different ways.
Previn's series followed the development of the symphony as a musical form. By the 20th century the symphony was under threat, he explains, and many composers considered it finished. But there was plenty of mileage left in the old dinosaur, he argues. To support his argument he plays the entire slow movement from English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams's Fifth Symphony and the conclusion to American Roy Harris' Third Symphony, praising the "endearing, touching, personal" feeling of the one and the "generous, open-air quality" of the other.
What Previn is trying to do is compress the whole of the 20th century symphony into one TV program, concluding a series that had inevitably focused on the 18th and 19th centuries. He does a good job of it, ending by demonstrating how Shostakovich lay somewhere between the avant-garde serialists who rejected the form out of hand and stubbornly romantic loners like Harris and Vaughan Williams. Shostakovich was a modernist of a kind, but he also had a strong attraction to structure and musical development of the sort the symphony traditionally stood for.
He characterizes Shostakovich's mature music as "astringent, satirical, dissonant," stressing in addition its tendency to pessimism, skepticism and irony. This is very relevant to the Fifth Symphony because it was penned after a period of official displeasure and subtitled "A Soviet Artist's Practical Creative Reply to Just Criticism" (a subtitle, Previn notes, not written by Shostakovich at all but "suggested" by someone else).
With two schools of Shostakovich criticism currently at work - the old view that his music is harsh, unsubtle and propagandist, and the newer view that he was one of the 20th century's greatest composers - Previn, without mentioning such disagreements, entirely sides with the latter. This is interesting because Previn's manner is so self-effacing. You'd never guess what critical storms lie behind his quiet, reassuring statements.
The second DVD doesn't contain any commentary on the Fifth Symphony. Instead, you see it played straight by the London Symphony Orchestra in 1985, conducted by the composer's son Maxim Shostakovich. You can't help wondering if he's remembering his father's different moods as the work progresses. But as he leaves the podium at the end, beads of sweat gleaming on his brow, it's the sense of authenticity that stays with you. It was a passionate performance, and the man in charge knew what he was doing.
This is not to say that Previn's
rendition with the Royal Philharmonic is less compelling. Both are readings that sooth and thrill by turns, and each can be recommended. The Maxim Shostakovich version, though, is coupled with a performance of the Chamber Symphony conducted by Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki. This does have an introduction - Penderecki talking in German about his evolving attitudes to Shostakovich. Initially he didn't, as
a patriotic Pole, want anything to do with Russian music. Now he considers Shostakovich to have written the 20th century's finest chamber works, and his output in general to be "fabulous." The Chamber Symphony (an arrange-ment of one of Shostakovich's string quartets) is performed by the Sinfonietta Cracovia in the Alte Oper, Frankfurt, in a 1994 production.
Both these discs show that great music doesn't lose by being heard, and seen, in an old recording. But another product, Deutsche Grammophon's Wien Nach Noten (Vienna in Music) from 1973 now does feel woefully dated. Some people may detect a period charm here, but for my part I don't see how, with its kitsch pastry-cooks and sweetly smiling flaxen maidens, it could ever have been considered very compelling. DGM would have been well advised to give this one a miss from this year's re-issue list.
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
In a stark demonstration of how award-winning breakthroughs can come from the most unlikely directions, researchers have won an Ig Nobel prize for discovering that mammals can breathe through their anuses. After a series of tests on mice, rats and pigs, Japanese scientists found the animals absorb oxygen delivered through the rectum, work that underpins a clinical trial to see whether the procedure can treat respiratory failure. The team is among 10 recognized in this year’s Ig Nobel awards (see below for more), the irreverent accolades given for achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” They are not
This Qing Dynasty trail takes hikers from renowned hot springs in the East Rift Valley, up to the top of the Coastal Mountain Range, and down to the Pacific Short vacations to eastern Taiwan often require choosing between the Rift Valley with its pineapple fields, rice paddies and broader range of amenities, or the less populated coastal route for its ocean scenery. For those who can’t decide, why not try both? The Antong Traversing Trail (安通越嶺道) provides just such an opportunity. Built 149 years ago, the trail linked up these two formerly isolated parts of the island by crossing over the Coastal Mountain Range. After decades of serving as a convenient path for local Amis, Han settlers, missionaries and smugglers, the trail fell into disuse once modern roadways were built