Omara Portuondo charmed Taiwan with her down-to-earth grace and masterful voice during her concert on Saturday night at the Taipei International Convention Center.
The audience was spellbound the moment she stepped on stage. With the mere wave of her hand, the Cuban diva, dressed in an elegant white robe, had everyone clapping the beat to Gracias, the title track of her newly released album. Throughout the evening, she peppered her lyrics and stage banter with well-practiced “thank you’s” in Mandarin.
There was a sense of preciousness to the evening as the 77-year-old sang her signature boleros with both the gusto and fragility that earned her the nickname as the “fiancee of filin” [feeling]; she occasionally broke into funky struts and jives on the dance numbers, much to the delight of the audience and her band.
If you went expecting the classic sounds of the Buena Vista Social Club, you might have been disappointed — but only for a moment. Portuondo has kept her sound fresh and engaging by featuring young and up-and-coming talent in her backing band. Pianist Harold Lopez-Nussa is one to watch in the future; the 24-year-old elicited robust applause from the audience with beautifully dissonant, chordal solos that hint at new possibilities for Cuban jazz.
Portuondo mostly sang songs from her new album, but she did oblige Buena Vista fans with a quiet, heartfelt rendition of Dos Gardenias, which she dedicated to her friend and fellow singer Ibrahim Ferrer, who died in 2005.
She and her band turned up the heat toward the end of their 90-minute set with Guantanamera, which had everyone dancing. Portuondo encouraged the audience to sing along on Besame Mucho, but graciously declined a second encore with a curtain call, saying “I’ll be back, maybe someday.”
One certainly hopes so, given moments in the evening such as the bittersweet Veinte Anos. As Portuondo ended the song with an operatic delivery of the final note, her eyes seemed to glisten with tears — or was it just the reflection of the lights? Either way, the audience had been swept off their feet.
The National Symphony Orchestra has always been very strong in the celebrated soloists it invites in. Last Thursday, Taipei was privileged to hear 23-year-old Spanish violinist Leticia Moreno in a stunning rendition of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto. It was a tour de force on all counts, with both orchestra and soloist excelling. Grandeur, pathos and displays of awesome technique combined ideally together under Gunther Herbig’s assured direction. A bleak Arctic splendor shone out even as expressions of an inner desolation lined up for their turn in the limelight. Of such contradictions great art is made.
Quite why I didn’t feel as enthusiastic about the rendition of Schubert’s Ninth Symphony that followed is hard to say. Two distinguished musicologists in the audience told me afterwards that Schubert is notoriously hard on musicians who are less than perfect. But the NSO is pretty close to perfect, so what was missing? The work calls for alternations of lyricism and grandeur, and perhaps the two were insufficiently differentiated. A loving lingering over its beauties doesn’t come amiss either, but this isn’t Herbig’s manner. And if Schubert on this occasion eluded him, the Sibelius concerto made up for just about everything.
It was a blast from the past on Friday night at Underworld (地下社會) — and what a blast it was! In a rare appearance, the veteran rockers of Celluloid (賽璐璐) swung into the club and mesmerized their audience with a lengthy set of blues-rock originals, along with a few covers of hits such as Neil Young’s My My, Hey Hey and Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Little Wings. The covers were good, but even better were the quintet’s own songs, including It Doesn’t Matter (無所謂), Spring Weather (春天の天氣) and The First Time (第一次).
Celluloid has the rich, filled-out sound of a band with chemistry and skilled musicians on the full compliment of blues-rock instruments. And frontman A-yi (王信義) — who runs a recording studio and has produced albums for Ladybug (瓢蟲) and Sugar Plum Ferry (甜梅) — is electrifying as a guitar soloist, as he showed with a note-perfect rendition of the solo from Lynard Skynard’s Free Bird. Audiences in Taipei invariably request encores, but when the crowd on Friday night asked for one, then another, they really, really meant it.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby