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[THE WEEKENDER] Sonic blooms in Taipei

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Pianist Hiromi Uehara and her three-piece ensemble Sonicbloom performed for a rapt audience last Thursday at the National Concert Hall in Taipei, in an intense, imaginative show that spanned jazz, funk, and classical music.

Being in Taipei revived strong memories for the 29-year-old Japanese musician, who said at a press conference the day before the show that her first-ever public performance was in Taipei at the Sun Yat Sen Memorial Hall (國父紀念館) when she was 12.

Uehara started the evening with a short piano solo in 1920s stride-style, which immediately broke into a fusion jazz rendition of Softly as in a Morning Sunrise. Images of the moon and stars were projected onto the curtains behind the band, which set the mood for the aptly-titled Time Travel. In this challenging but engaging tune, Uehara’s spacy synthesizer sounds and Dave Fiuczynski’s electric guitar riffs built oblique melodic themes around shifting rhythms.

Uehara often sounds like she’s trying to squeeze as many notes as she can in one phrase, yet her playing still manages to sound lyrical and soulful, as it did in the band’s rendition of the Duke Ellington classic Caravan. Her playing has a light, joyful quality, even at rapid speeds. At times she sounded like she was playing cartoon chase scenes; other times her melody lines were so astonishingly frantic, you could hear people in the audience laughing as if to say “Is this for real?”

Overall the song selection was well balanced. The first set included an abstract but beautifully quiet rendition of My Favorite Things, while the second set featured a fun, funky version of Sukiyaki and a solo performance of Gershwin’s I’ve Got Rhythm, one of the evening’s highlights.

The National Concert Hall was only just over half full, but this hardly dampened the sense of enthusiasm towards Uehara and her top-notch backing band, which gave an outstanding performance. The audience clamored for, and received two encores. Before the final encore, Uehara, nearly out of breath and perhaps overcome with emotion, told the audience “thanks for giving me a place to be,” then played a tune she recorded with Chick Corea, Place to Be.

Over at the National Theater, the Russian Festival Ballet’s version of Swan Lake was a pared down traveling version, with the bare minimum of dancers needed. That meant Prince Siegfried was one lonely prince, with no friends or companions, there were no courtiers dancing in attendance around his mother the queen, and the ball that opened Act 2 had hardly any partygoers. The usual four acts were pared down to three, though this did not shorten the ballet by much.

I’d like to be able to credit the court jester who took over most of the Act 1 action that is usually given to Siegfried’s tutor or friends, and von Rothbart, the evil sorcerer who turned the young women into a flock of swans, for they were the only two performers to show much emotion. Unfortunately, this is not possible as the program only gave a brief synopsis of the three ballets being performed over the weekend and the name of two of the leads (Dmitry Smirnove and Anastasia Chumakova) — nothing else. So whoever you are, thank you for showing some spark in an otherwise remarkable flat performance on Saturday night.

This flatness could have been the result of the company having already done one Swan Lake that afternoon, but whatever the reason, I found myself thinking that this production was as close to factory work as ballet can get. The corps de ballet hit all their marks, the swans all had lovely arms, the baby swans were symmetry in motion, all the dancers smiled or looked distraught when needed, the grand jetes and lifts were all very grand, but there was about as much emoting going on as there is in a junior high school band concert.

The other odd note was that the role of Odette-Odile was danced by two women, instead of just one. I couldn’t say who was who, because the photo of Chumakova in the program was taken at such an angle that you couldn’t really make out her face.

Nevertheless, Saturday night’s audience seemed please with the results, calling the prince, von Rothbart, Odette and Odile back out for repeated curtain calls.

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