Tseng Han-jung (曾涵榕) considers the flute the problem child of Taiwan’s classical music scene. This instrument is always hanging around, is both seen and heard, but rarely ever reaches its full potential.
“Sometimes you hear the flute in wind ensembles, where it goes bong-qia-bong-qia, a bit like circus music,” said Tseng, a teacher and performance flautist who studied under Andrea Wild and Claus-Christian Schuster at the City of Vienna University.
“Or you hear the flute in unaccompanied pieces, which usually focus on displaying technique and go hua-la-la-la-la, up and down and up and down.”
Photo courtesy of Tseng Han-jung
For Tseng, classical flute performances are trending toward these selections in part because musicians have relatively few Baroque, Classical or Romantic flute pieces to choose from.
Beethoven wrote countless sonatas for piano, cello and violin, but none for the flute. And though Mozart’s best-known opera is The Magic Flute, the composer himself did not favor the flute, which up until the 1850s was an intractable recorder-like instrument.
“He received requests for flute concertos, but he didn’t want to write them. Once he just rearranged his oboe concerto, from C major to D major, and said, ‘Here you go,” she said.
Shortlist
At an upcoming recital, Tseng will play a program of just four pieces, but she hopes they present traits of the flute that are rarely seen.
She opens with Johann Nepomuk Hummel’s flute and piano sonata in D major, a repartee between her and pianist Liu Hui-ping (劉慧平): The piano asks questions, and the flute has a bright simple voice that sings back flirtatiously.
From the Romantic repertoire, she has chosen Franz Schubert’s Introduction and Variations on Trockne Blumen, a 25-minute showcase of sadness. Each of the seven variations is slightly and differently mournful — even the last one, when the flute shifts to a joyous E major.
Tseng will also play two 20th century pieces, Jindrich Feld’s Flute Sonata and Nino Rota’s Trio. Rota, composer for the first two Godfather films, features the flute as the most nimble character in a tense standoff against piano and violin.
Feld’s sonata sounds like “a hamster running a wheel,” said Tseng. The flute moves awkwardly and sometimes humorously along a percussive piano score. Along the way, the duo produces a pileup of pretty but mostly dissonant notes.
“It will sound like the performers are doing something wrong,” Tseng said.
Tseng is a proponent of Feld and other contemporary classical composers of ear-bending music: pieces that do not trade on pleasing melody or dazzling speed. She tries consciously to perform their works. “Musicality isn’t just about beautiful and driving melodies — music can be like drawing, telling a story. Sometimes there are no melodic lines, just a series of effects.”
“I don’t think it’s that people cannot accept it, it’s that they don’t have much exposure or knowledge of how to receive it,” she said.
Growing up in a rural, religious community in western Canada, Kyle McCarthy loved hockey, but once he came out at 19, he quit, convinced being openly gay and an active player was untenable. So the 32-year-old says he is “very surprised” by the runaway success of Heated Rivalry, a Canadian-made series about the romance between two closeted gay players in a sport that has historically made gay men feel unwelcome. Ben Baby, the 43-year-old commissioner of the Toronto Gay Hockey Association (TGHA), calls the success of the show — which has catapulted its young lead actors to stardom -- “shocking,” and says
The 2018 nine-in-one local elections were a wild ride that no one saw coming. Entering that year, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was demoralized and in disarray — and fearing an existential crisis. By the end of the year, the party was riding high and swept most of the country in a landslide, including toppling the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in their Kaohsiung stronghold. Could something like that happen again on the DPP side in this year’s nine-in-one elections? The short answer is not exactly; the conditions were very specific. However, it does illustrate how swiftly every assumption early in an
Inside an ordinary-looking townhouse on a narrow road in central Kaohsiung, Tsai A-li (蔡阿李) raised her three children alone for 15 years. As far as the children knew, their father was away working in the US. They were kept in the dark for as long as possible by their mother, for the truth was perhaps too sad and unjust for their young minds to bear. The family home of White Terror victim Ko Chi-hua (柯旗化) is now open to the public. Admission is free and it is just a short walk from the Kaohsiung train station. Walk two blocks south along Jhongshan
Francis William White, an Englishman who late in the 1860s served as Commissioner of the Imperial Customs Service in Tainan, published the tale of a jaunt he took one winter in 1868: A visit to the interior of south Formosa (1870). White’s journey took him into the mountains, where he mused on the difficult terrain and the ease with which his little group could be ambushed in the crags and dense vegetation. At one point he stays at the house of a local near a stream on the border of indigenous territory: “Their matchlocks, which were kept in excellent order,
RSS