STRAUSS, RACHMANINOFF, SIBELIUS
Highlights of Shao-chia Lu & Taiwan Philharmonic Live
2-CDs
MU 150001/ NSO 025
This pair of CDs contains three items that are more or less negligible, and one that is a superb masterpiece by any standards.
Taiwan Philharmonic Live is the name by which Taipei’s National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) goes in the international market place when issuing live recordings of its frequently striking performances. We’ll review some of the earlier samples in the coming months, but here we have the latest to appear, two CDs packaged together and issued under the title of the main work included, Strauss’s Symphonia Domestica.
The NSO is one of Asia’s great orchestras. It’s been conducted by such illustrious names as Lorin Maazel, Leonard Slatkin and Christopher Hogwood, performed with soloists of the caliber of Mischa Maisky, Hilary Hahn and Yo-Yo Ma (馬友友), and collaborated with world-class opera houses such as Opera Australia and Deutsche Oper am Rhein. Most of all, it’s the cream of Taiwan’s enormously prolific classical music scene, without parallel anywhere in the region.
These new CDs, published in October, contain Rachmaninov’s symphonic poem Isle of the Dead and Sibelius’s Symphony No 2, as well as Richard Strauss’s 45-minute symphony and the short string sextet from his opera Capriccio.
Rachmaninov’s Isle of the Dead has never, unlike his four piano concertos, established itself as a major work. It remains a concert-filler, something that, based as it is on the 19th century Swiss artist Arnold Bocklin’s series of paintings, has the promise of mystery and foreboding, but only ever achieves the latter. Lu Shao-chia (呂紹嘉) gives of his best, but as a work it’s not something anyone will buy these CDs for in its own right.
Sibelius’s first two symphonies have always been more attractive than his later ones. They summon up the romantic aspect of the frozen north of his native Finland, and are endlessly melodic and evocative, while the subsequent five symphonies toyed with modernism in ways that were only intermittently successful.
I first heard this symphony when I was a teenager. I was sick, and it was the only music I had. I therefore tend to associate it with lemon and honey, and a solitary test pilot high up in a wintry English sky. At first I thought I rather liked it, but then I changed my mind. It was only later that I discovered critics who thought his music heavy-handed and repetitive. But even then, how I longed for Mozart!
Nonetheless, Symphony No 2 is Sibelius’s most popular symphony. There are apparently 138 recordings of it in existence. For decades Colin Davis’s version with the Boston Symphony Orchestra was considered incomparable — maybe it was the one I listened to from my sick-bed all those years ago. Anyway, it’s now available on a bargain label (Decca Duo 4461572). Several other versions appeared last year, the 150th anniversary of Sibelius’s birth, including one from the Halle under Mark Elder (CDHLL7516) and an acclaimed version of all the symphonies on three CDS from the Lahti Symphony Orchestra (BIS — BIS2076).
The Taiwan version is dynamic and vividly recorded — it is greeted at the end by shouts and screams — but it’s the Strauss symphony that will appeal to true connoisseurs.
Strauss is the true heir of Mozart (though anyone happening to stumble on his Elektra will understandably disagree), and this outstanding performance shows the NSO at their very best. It brought tears to my eyes and joy to my heart over and over again. It’s not really a symphony at all but a tone-poem, like Don Juan or Death and Transfiguration, only longer and more virtuosic. As for the “domestica” part, this is best forgotten altogether, along with jokes like the fall of the gods in Wagner’s Ring being less of an orchestral sensation than a baby in its bath in Strauss. This is a major musical masterpiece, and there’s no need to say anything further, let alone anything demeaning, about it.
It’s hard to overpraise the Taiwan Philharmonic/ NSO here. Everything is stupendous, and the performance — recorded live over two evenings — achieves the almost impossible in equaling Strauss’s staggering, almost unbelievable inspiration. I will never need another version now that I’ve got this one.
The recorded sound is diamond-sharp, and the feeling manages to alternate between the sumptuous and the skittish, with the simply awe-inspiring thrown in for good measure. You can almost tell by listening to any five minutes of the music how simply happy the orchestra is. People know when they’re doing something supremely well, and these men and woman certainly know it here.
Strauss seems to be especially suited to Lu’s temperament, and he could scarcely find a more exalted mentor (the 20th century’s greatest composer for my money). This work has sometimes been mocked for its ostensible subject-matter, the composer’s home life, but only by the ignorant. It’s one of the greatest orchestral constructions that has ever been achieved, with its emotion just as big as its extraordinary ingenuity.
If you want to hear what 100 and more instrumentalists can do when a genius sets them to work, you can hardly do better than listen to the Sinfonia Domestica, and as performances go it would be very hard indeed to beat this one.
■ The CD is available on the Net: goods.ruten.com.tw/item/show?21546076663444
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s