Spanish a capella group B Vocal returns to Taiwan for their third visit this weekend. They’re five men from Zaragoza, currently on tour in Asia. How to categorize them is difficult, except to say that they are very, very funny.
They’re not in their first youth, yet they perform a huge variety of songs and other musical items. All you see is five men in black suits with hand-held microphones, and indeed that’s all they are. But with their voices alone they impersonate famous artists past and present from Elvis Presley to Robbie Williams, together with opera singers and Renaissance madrigalists, and in addition fill in any instrumental backing that’s appropriate (or not), all with their voices alone.
They’ve been hugely popular, both in concert halls, on Spanish TV, and at all kinds of receptions, expos and festivals. They’re just what’s required, it seems, to get everyone into a good mood, and there’s no limit to the events that welcome exactly that.
Is it possible to take a serious line on them? Only in as far as comedy always has its serious implications. They’re certainly satiric, but because they’re satiric of just about everything and anything it’s hard to discern any particular point of view.
Do they ever take anything at face value? Yes. They perform madrigals and jazz classics, and indeed just what they’re going to come up with in any particular appearance is always part of the attraction. Comedy isn’t often far away, though, with a dog barking and a cat howling emerging above at least one Renaissance vocal line.
The only way to find out
what they have in store for
Taiwan this time is to go along. They’re appearing in Kaohsiung tonight, at Novel Hall (新舞臺) in Taipei on Sunday and in Taichung on Monday.
Meanwhile, the National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) is offering altogether more weighty material in Taipei’s National Concert Hall next weekend. We’re not giving advance notice in any expectation that tickets will sell out — far from it. Bruckner has never appealed much to Taiwanese tastes, and it’s not hard to see why. Long ago he was coupled with Mahler as one of a pair of eccentric Viennese. Today Mahler’s stock is riding high, while poor old Bruckner continues to puff his way laboriously along, often at enormous length. Some modern conductors have even expressed their uncertainly as to whether his symphonies are really worth the effort.
But the NSO is plunging into his Fourth Symphony as if there were no tomorrow, with conductor Lu Shao-chia (呂紹嘉) opting for the work’s 1878-1880 version. Bruckner, country bumpkin that he always thought he was, was forever re-writing his works in the hope of making them more attractive to his sophisticated city patrons. In the case of the Fourth Symphony, he actually wrote seven versions. The one the NSO will play was the one performed at the work’s premiere in 1881. It lasts 70 minutes, so if you go along you’d better go prepared for the long haul. On the other hand, this symphony, in this version, was Bruckner’s first major success with the smart Viennese, and it remains his most popular composition today.
The concert begins with Webern’s Sechs Stucke (“six pieces”) for Large Orchestra,
also in a revised version, in
this case undertaken in 1928.
This work, though important in the history of serial composition (i.e. a composition not in any specific key, and so sounding excessively dissonant to most ears), will doubtless make many grateful for the courtly harmoniousness of Haydn’s First Cello Concerto, which follows. The soloist will be the charismatic German cellist Alban Gerhardt (also on an Asian tour). You can see him and hear him playing on his Web site, and also read his blog, at www.albangerhardt.com/english/index.html.
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