The DVD I enjoyed most this month was Sony BMG Van Cliburn, Concert Pianist, a US TV film, narrated by Dan Rather, about the 1.93m Texan who in 1958 won the International Tchaikovsky Competition at the age of 23. It was the height of the Cold War, and a committee of commissars had tried to bar him from victory in favor of someone Russian. "Is he the best?" asked Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. "Then give it to him." He was presented the gold medal by Dmitri Shostakovich.
Van Cliburn's fame may have been partly political -- he played in the White House for every US president from Eisenhower to Reagan, and yet always said how much he loved both Russian culture and the Russian people. But what comes over on this film is his artistry, and how that preserved, even created, a lifeline between two great peoples when their hostility and rivalry could well have annihilated all life on the planet. This very moving DVD, which has the option of Japanese subtitles, comes with a CD of Cliburn playing in full some of the items featured in the movie.
Eight of the most famous pianists alive performing Richard Wagner's The Ride of the Valkyries on eight Steinway grand pianos in a tent in the Swiss Alps is surely an unusual spectacle. It's surprisingly almost enjoyable as well, and definitely instructive with regard to the music's inner structure.
Martha Argerich, James Levine, Evgeny Kissin, Gidon Kremer, Mischa Maisky, Mikhail Pletnev, Emanuel Ax, Lang Lang and Sarah Chang -- the annual summer Verbier Festival manages to attract just about every classical celebrity. All of the above and more feature on the event's 10th Anniversary Piano Extravaganza, a DVD which has as its climax eight of them playing a Steinway piece simultaneously. As well as the Wagner, they also play a version of Gioachino Rossini's Semiradime overture and, just to show how serious the whole enterprise is, The Stars and Stripes Forever.
As Levine explains on the bonus feature, almost all the great composers created transcriptions for piano of their most popular orchestral works. These were made for domestic use by amateurs, but these days such things have fallen out of fashion. A few are resurrected here, however, and others were made specially to celebrate the festival's 10th birthday in 2003. And a line-up of some of the best-paid classical artists alive playing Happy Birthday to You is surely destined to become a popular track to accompany the cutting of the cake at many a birthday celebration.
There are times, it's true, when it seems as if the organizers have the Guinness Book of Records in mind rather than musical quality, and Levine himself refers to the problems of coordination in an eight-piano situation. But there are some serious items too. Martha Argerich (absent from the eight-pianist extravaganza) playing a Mozart piano sonata for four hands with Evgeny Kissin, and a JS Bach concerto for four pianos, are the musical highlights of this DVD.
For the rest, it's rather akin to a Three Tenors concert -- some of the participants must have been asking themselves why on earth they were doing it at all. Levine anticipates such skepticism by saying on camera that it was essentially fun to do, and hopes it was fun to listen to as well.
One of the advantages of the proliferation of DVDs featuring classical music is that you quickly get to know the major personalities of the music world. Figures who were merely names on CDs become recognizable people, albeit sometimes as they looked ten or more years ago. The reason for the time lapse is that there is a huge backlog of musical performances on video that are now being transferred onto the much more convenient DVD format.
Thus it is that EMI has just released three DVDs of Itzhak Perlman dating from the early 1990s. Perlman in Russia contains two disks. One is a documentary on his 1990 trip, in which we see him talking to Jewish figures (and hearing the opinion that four out of five of them wanted to emigrate to Israel), and visiting a center where people with disabilities similar to his own receive treatment that can't compare with what he's able to get in the US. We also learn that the violin he plays used to belong to Yehudi Menuhin. The second DVD shows a Moscow recital with pianist Janet Goodman Guggenheim.
Perlman's trip to Russia was particularly significant because he went there with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, and a visit a decade earlier had been canceled at the last moment by the then Soviet authorities. Russian anti-Semitism, including earlier government anti-Semitism, in other words, formed the background to the entire visit, and made the rapturous reception the musicians received all the more gratifying.
A separate item, Beethoven, Brahms: Violin Concertos, is of a 1992 concert in Berlin with the Berlin Philharmonic under Daniel Barenboim. These are much-recorded works, but high sound quality on this DVD is particularly remarkable. Both of these Perlman products contain electronic booklets accessable via a DVD-ROM drive and Adobe Acrobat Reader 6.0.
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
The latest Formosa poll released at the end of last month shows confidence in President William Lai (賴清德) plunged 8.1 percent, while satisfaction with the Lai administration fared worse with a drop of 8.5 percent. Those lacking confidence in Lai jumped by 6 percent and dissatisfaction in his administration spiked up 6.7 percent. Confidence in Lai is still strong at 48.6 percent, compared to 43 percent lacking confidence — but this is his worst result overall since he took office. For the first time, dissatisfaction with his administration surpassed satisfaction, 47.3 to 47.1 percent. Though statistically a tie, for most
Wooden houses wedged between concrete, crumbling brick facades with roofs gaping to the sky, and tiled art deco buildings down narrow alleyways: Taichung Central District’s (中區) aging architecture reveals both the allure and reality of the old downtown. From Indigenous settlement to capital under Qing Dynasty rule through to Japanese colonization, Taichung’s Central District holds a long and layered history. The bygone beauty of its streets once earned it the nickname “Little Kyoto.” Since the late eighties, however, the shifting of economic and government centers westward signaled a gradual decline in the area’s evolving fortunes. With the regeneration of the once
In February of this year the Taipei Times reported on the visit of Lienchiang County Commissioner Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a delegation to a lantern festival in Fuzhou’s Mawei District in Fujian Province. “Today, Mawei and Matsu jointly marked the lantern festival,” Wang was quoted as saying, adding that both sides “being of one people,” is a cause for joy. Wang was passing around a common claim of officials of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the PRC’s allies and supporters in Taiwan — KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party — and elsewhere: Taiwan and
RSS