Italian opera in Japan got started in the mid-1950s. The series title was Lirica Italiana, and back in the early days the international stars who appeared would have had to make at least six stops when flying out from Europe. Despite this exhausting journey the productions, mounted with the help of Japanese orchestras and choruses, were often legendary, and they are now being issued on DVD by the admirable American company Video Artists International.
Last month I said that the black-and-white Tosca from 1961 was essentially a collectors’ item. The Lucia di Lammermoor, also from Tokyo’s Lirica Italiana, and dating from only six years later, but by now in full color, is a very different story. Starring Renata Scotto as Lucia, Caro Bergonzi as her lover Edgardo, Mario Zanasi as her wicked brother Enrico, and Plinio Clabassi as the pastor Raimondo, this is one of the finest performances of Donizetti’s masterpiece ever to be captured on film.
Scotto is famous in some quarters for her diamond-edged soprano voice, but here she displays a mellow warmth as well, to which she adds an eye for demurely-blushing high drama (not to mention a touch of self-advertisement to boot). But this is opera of something approaching the highest order — tuneful, passionate, and given with maximum dedication and vigor — and Scotto is perfectly matched by Carlo Bergonzi, perhaps the finest Italian tenor of his day.
The story is of a Scottish girl who, being forced to marry a rich man to pay off her family’s debts rather than the man she genuinely loves, goes spectacularly mad. It’s operatic dynamite, and like so many Italian operas of its decade is based on a novel by Walter Scott. (British subjects were very popular at the time — there’s even a rarely-revived Emilia di Liverpool dating from 1824, also by Donizetti).
Scotto and Bergonzi are eaten alive by the voracious Japanese audience. Even back home in Italy they could rarely have been cheered for as long as they are here. Plinio Clabassi (so wonderful as Rodolpho in Bellini’s La Sonambula, reviewed in Taipei Times on March 8, 2007) gets less audience attention but is nonetheless superb throughout, his bass voice instantly recognizable and his human warmth totally appealing.
The second installment of Valery Gergiev’s survey of Russian music, All the Russias (Well Go USA), contains two contrasting films, Devils and Once Upon a Time. The first deals with Russia’s perceived need, from Peter the Great onwards, for a strong ruling hand, and the resulting oppression of artists, thinkers and eventually, under Stalin, the entire population. Sequences portraying the operatic Boris Godunov and the real-life Boris Yeltsin are juxtaposed, Gergiev reads Pushkin in a snow storm, and one artist recalls that he delayed moving into an apartment specially built for him by the Soviet authorities because he was “waiting for the microphones to rust.”
The second film deals with fairytales and storytelling. Children, puppets, ballet, and the music of Borodin and Prokofiev feature prominently, and there’s an amazing sequence of percussionist and virtual one-man-band Mark Pekarsky. The astute point is made that under the Communists a robotic, childish simplicity was imposed on all the arts. “The Russian Revolution was the greatest fairy tale of them all,” someone remarks.
These DVDs are particularly fine because they root music in history, mixing archive footage, musical and performance extracts, and modern interviews. Gergiev takes a conservative stand, saying that rule by the crowd can never work in a country like his, and the dark harmonies of Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 8 make you almost believe him.
Opus Arte’s 2005 DVD Chopin Piano Music (containing a BBC film made in 2003) has Alfredo Pearl playing all the Preludes, Freddy Kempf playing all the Etudes, and Angela Hewitt playing the Sonata in B Minor. Filmed in stately homes, with over two hours of keyboard close-ups, the effect is, in the final analysis, fatiguing. An element of creative fantasy such as is routine on popular music videos would have been welcome. As it is, pianists and music students will benefit most from the low-risk approach adopted here, fine as the performances undoubtedly are.
Lastly, Taiwan’s Evergreen Symphony Orchestra has a wonderful DVD of its Inaugural Concert in Taipei back in 2003. The most moving items are three Taiwanese folk songs, two set by Tu Min-hsin (杜鳴心), one by Masaaki Hayakawa. But the feeling of youthfulness and excited commitment is everywhere inescapable and, under the baton of Lim Kek-tjiang, the newly-formed ESO finally won me over to Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, something that even Taiwan’s National Symphony Orchestra hadn’t quite managed to do.
All these DVDs of ESO concerts are well worth watching, and this one is as good as any to begin with.
The unexpected collapse of the recall campaigns is being viewed through many lenses, most of them skewed and self-absorbed. The international media unsurprisingly focuses on what they perceive as the message that Taiwanese voters were sending in the failure of the mass recall, especially to China, the US and to friendly Western nations. This made some sense prior to early last month. One of the main arguments used by recall campaigners for recalling Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers was that they were too pro-China, and by extension not to be trusted with defending the nation. Also by extension, that argument could be
Aug. 4 to Aug. 10 When Coca-Cola finally pushed its way into Taiwan’s market in 1968, it allegedly vowed to wipe out its major domestic rival Hey Song within five years. But Hey Song, which began as a manual operation in a family cow shed in 1925, had proven its resilience, surviving numerous setbacks — including the loss of autonomy and nearly all its assets due to the Japanese colonial government’s wartime economic policy. By the 1960s, Hey Song had risen to the top of Taiwan’s beverage industry. This success was driven not only by president Chang Wen-chi’s
Last week, on the heels of the recall election that turned out so badly for Taiwan, came the news that US President Donald Trump had blocked the transit of President William Lai (賴清德) through the US on his way to Latin America. A few days later the international media reported that in June a scheduled visit by Minister of National Defense Wellington Koo (顧立雄) for high level meetings was canceled by the US after China’s President Xi Jinping (習近平) asked Trump to curb US engagement with Taiwan during a June phone call. The cancellation of Lai’s transit was a gaudy
The centuries-old fiery Chinese spirit baijiu (白酒), long associated with business dinners, is being reshaped to appeal to younger generations as its makers adapt to changing times. Mostly distilled from sorghum, the clear but pungent liquor contains as much as 60 percent alcohol. It’s the usual choice for toasts of gan bei (乾杯), the Chinese expression for bottoms up, and raucous drinking games. “If you like to drink spirits and you’ve never had baijiu, it’s kind of like eating noodles but you’ve never had spaghetti,” said Jim Boyce, a Canadian writer and wine expert who founded World Baijiu Day a decade
RSS