After an absence of five years, world renown violinist Xue Wei (薛偉) is performing in Taipei again, Xue, currently residing in London, is being featured in an upcoming concert with Taipei Performers Union (台北演奏家聯盟管弦樂團). He will be playing the famous Butterfly Lovers violin concerto (梁祝小提琴協奏曲) for the first time in Taiwan.
As the only music professor from China at the Royal Academy of Music in London, Xue has had an extensive career as a viloinist. He want to a high school for talented musicians in Shanghai at the age of 15, before going on to study music in Beijing and London. He was under Yfrah Neaman's tutelage while studying at Guildhall School of Music. His competition record includes a second place in the Tchaikovsky International Competition and first place in the Carl Flesch International Violin Competition.
Gramophone has describe him as "one of the outstanding violinists of our time."
Xue's program for his Taipei performances will include the Butterfly Lovers violin concerto, besides western classics form Brahms, Bruch and Mendelssohn.
The Butterfly Lovers concerto was composed in 1959 by a group of music students in Shanghai. Based on a popular Chinese opera about the love between Liang Shan-po (梁山泊) and Zhu Ying-tai (祝英台), the concerto quickly became highly popular.
The tragic love story, a Chinese version of Romeo and Juliet, ends with the lovers transformed into butterflies.
In the March 9 edition of the Taipei Times a piece by Ninon Godefroy ran with the headine “The quiet, gentle rhythm of Taiwan.” It started with the line “Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention.” I laughed out loud at that. This was out of no disrespect for the author or the piece, which made some interesting analogies and good points about how both Din Tai Fung’s and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) meticulous attention to detail and quality are not quite up to
April 21 to April 27 Hsieh Er’s (謝娥) political fortunes were rising fast after she got out of jail and joined the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in December 1945. Not only did she hold key positions in various committees, she was elected the only woman on the Taipei City Council and headed to Nanjing in 1946 as the sole Taiwanese female representative to the National Constituent Assembly. With the support of first lady Soong May-ling (宋美齡), she started the Taipei Women’s Association and Taiwan Provincial Women’s Association, where she
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) hatched a bold plan to charge forward and seize the initiative when he held a protest in front of the Taipei City Prosecutors’ Office. Though risky, because illegal, its success would help tackle at least six problems facing both himself and the KMT. What he did not see coming was Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (將萬安) tripping him up out of the gate. In spite of Chu being the most consequential and successful KMT chairman since the early 2010s — arguably saving the party from financial ruin and restoring its electoral viability —
It is one of the more remarkable facts of Taiwan history that it was never occupied or claimed by any of the numerous kingdoms of southern China — Han or otherwise — that lay just across the water from it. None of their brilliant ministers ever discovered that Taiwan was a “core interest” of the state whose annexation was “inevitable.” As Paul Kua notes in an excellent monograph laying out how the Portuguese gave Taiwan the name “Formosa,” the first Europeans to express an interest in occupying Taiwan were the Spanish. Tonio Andrade in his seminal work, How Taiwan Became Chinese,