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[THE WEEKENDER] ‘The fiancee of feeling’ and the sultans of swing

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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.

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