The amount of past music is necessarily finite, and many fans of the euphonious orchestral works of, say, Dvorak and Grieg may well wish there was more where that came from. Well, maybe there is. There’s, for example, the work of Johan Halvorsen to consider, a Norwegian composer who died in 1935. Until recently he’d been almost totally forgotten, if indeed he was ever widely known outside Norway. But now the ever-enterprising Chandos label has completed an issue of three CDs featuring his orchestral work. Most importantly, they contain Halvorsen’s three symphonies, one on each disc.
These symphonies resemble the early Dvorak, but with none of Dvorak’s distinctive flavor. The second is said to be the most successful of the three, but I found it as boring as the other two. It’s the kind of music you might hear mid-afternoon on a classical radio station, wonder vaguely who it was by, but not take the trouble to find out. The symphonies date from 1923, 1928 and 1929, and when you consider what Mahler and Richard Strauss had already achieved two decades earlier, well, words fail me. Some of the shorter works featured here may please some listeners, but Halvorsen as a symphonist is dullness personified.
Now for something far more interesting. Dec. 1 saw the closing performance of the New York Met’s latest revival of Philip Glass’s extraordinary opera Satyagraha. The production was enthusiastically reviewed, and Glass himself was present to take an onstage bow at the end, before reportedly going off to join the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.
It’s an unusual opera for many reasons. The text is entirely in Sanskrit, it’s about Gandhi’s experiences as a young man in South Africa fighting for the rights of the Indian minority, yet it’s in three acts named after Tolstoy, the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, and Martin Luther King Jr.
The problem is to find an appropriate DVD of the work. Currently there’s only one available, a recording of a production in Stuttgart in 1983. It has received both howls of derision and ecstatic, five-star praise from online critics. I’m going to join the latter group — by and large, I adored it.
For much of the time it’s the opera given an expressionistic dressing. White-clad crowds mill around, brandish white balloons, and indulge in repetitive actions reflecting the endless repetitions of Glass’ music. Act One closes with the Gandhi figure advancing on the audience along a raised-up ramp as if in a state of transcendental giggling.
The citizens are essentially portrayed as if in an ecstatic trance, and it’s arguable that this is precisely what the music itself is attempting to induce. I found that this explained the wide discrepancy in the critical reactions — those who didn’t like it focused on the mediocre sound and visual quality, but the few who really fell for it did so with abandon. From the outside it was merely an excess of pointless posturing and unconvincing
noise, but to those open to such things it was more like a
religious conversion.
Act Two (“Tagore”) is almost as exciting as Act One and focuses on Gandhi’s establishment of a radical newspaper; it reaches its zenith in the snowing down of endless shreds of torn-up paper. Act Three is totally different — a group of black Americans progressing at an infinitesimally slow pace across the stage, in fact barely moving at all. It’s a test of anyone’s powers of endurance, and to me the major shortcoming of the production.
The show has two things going for it, however. One is that the music is played with far greater dramatic passion than in the original 1990 audio recording. The other is that seeing a performance of any sort immeasurably enhances the work’s power. This is in spite of the fact that the text is from the Bhagavad Gita and appears to bear no relation to either Gandhi or any of the three figures nominally featured in the three acts.
To get some idea of this DVD’s strange power, take a look at a clip on YouTube. Search for “Satyagraha Stuttgart” and then choose “Excerpt 2” uploaded by vinix178.
While on the subject of so-called “minimalists” like Glass, Peter Greenaway’s superb 1991 film Prospero’s Books, with haunting music by the UK minimalist Michael Nyman, is now available on DVD. It has been so since 2009, but I’d gotten so used to lamenting that it remained inexplicably unavailable that I missed its release.
It’s loosely based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest and has an unusual, but very welcome, feature: All the roles are spoken by John Gielgud (who, in later life, seemed to be Prospero personified). There couldn’t be a better Christmas present for anyone remotely interested in modern music, or in Shakespeare. It seems to me the finest film ever made on (you can’t really say “of” when the text is as fragmented as it is here) any Shakespeare play. There’s enough nudity to please even the most ardent enthusiast, but it’s all in the interests of dreams and the Earth’s fecundity. Fans of Nyman, Greenaway, and even Shakespeare will all adore this film.
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
In a stark demonstration of how award-winning breakthroughs can come from the most unlikely directions, researchers have won an Ig Nobel prize for discovering that mammals can breathe through their anuses. After a series of tests on mice, rats and pigs, Japanese scientists found the animals absorb oxygen delivered through the rectum, work that underpins a clinical trial to see whether the procedure can treat respiratory failure. The team is among 10 recognized in this year’s Ig Nobel awards (see below for more), the irreverent accolades given for achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” They are not
This Qing Dynasty trail takes hikers from renowned hot springs in the East Rift Valley, up to the top of the Coastal Mountain Range, and down to the Pacific Short vacations to eastern Taiwan often require choosing between the Rift Valley with its pineapple fields, rice paddies and broader range of amenities, or the less populated coastal route for its ocean scenery. For those who can’t decide, why not try both? The Antong Traversing Trail (安通越嶺道) provides just such an opportunity. Built 149 years ago, the trail linked up these two formerly isolated parts of the island by crossing over the Coastal Mountain Range. After decades of serving as a convenient path for local Amis, Han settlers, missionaries and smugglers, the trail fell into disuse once modern roadways were built