“I love music, but sometimes I think I don’t understand it. I can perhaps say why a composer writes this or that note, but that’s not understanding in the way you understand the workings of, say, a machine. With music, unlike a machine, there are simply so many mysteries.”
So said Gernot Schmalfuss last week. He’s in every way a highly charismatic figure. You feel it the moment he begins to conduct his Evergreen Symphony Orchestra (ESO). His enthusiasm is manifest, and it’s hardly surprising that the sounds the orchestra produces are the sweetest, clearest and often the most heartfelt to be heard anywhere in Taiwan.
“Take the fugue,” he continued. “There are rules for how to write one, but then you find Bach going in some totally different direction. Why? We can admire the end product, and we can love it, but can we really say we understand it? In the end it’s a bit like religion. Who can honestly say he understands God?”
The ESO receives no public funding, but is instead the brainchild of the Evergreen Group’s (長榮集團) Chang Yung-fa Foundation. It’s the only wholly-privately-funded orchestra anywhere in the world. And if that isn’t enough to mark it out as unique, it also has an exceptionally youthful composition — something special even in Taiwan, where the ages of all orchestral musicians are far below the global average.
“The ESO’s average age is somewhere in the 20s, just as it is in a good football team,” Schmalfuss told me smiling.
“One of the results of being privately funded,” he went on, “is that we have to develop our own talents rather than rely on bringing in soloists from abroad, though the ESO has played with many celebrated foreigners. And it’s true — the orchestra does play from the heart, not only because it’s our duty, but also because that’s how the musicians genuinely want to play.
“Because they’re young, they’re immensely enthusiastic. Whenever we have a week free from rehearsing for concerts we play other scores, just for the pleasure of it — Bruckner, for example, a composer who’s rather difficult to understand but who presents a challenge that the instrumentalists relish.
“We try to get close to the heart of things. Working with such a young ensemble is a dream because their desire is the same as mine, to get to the inner heart of what we’re playing. We never actually reach the heart, of course. But sometimes, perhaps, we come near it.”
I asked him what the orchestra’s particular strengths were.
“First of all, technique. Everyone is able to play in all the different musical styles. Secondly, commitment. Thirdly, openness of mind — they’re very quick to accept new ideas. And finally, they’re more than willing to adapt their sound to the various requirements of different kinds of music.”
No one who heard the ESO’s fabulous rendering of Bach’s B Minor Mass last March, performed with the Taipei Philharmonic Chorus and soloists, will doubt for a moment the truth of this. Their mastery of the baroque style was manifest, even though a guest conductor, rather than Schmalfuss, was on the podium on that occasion.
“They also learn very quickly,” Gernot Schmalfuss continued. “If you give them a particular direction for a certain passage early on, and that passage recurs, they remember what you said and play it that way themselves the second time, without having to be reminded.
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