It must be difficult being a Vienna Choir boy. You travel the world in a sailor suit, making ports-of-call in Asia and the Americas before you're old enough to have a drink. When the boys arrive in Taipei for their Oct. 26 concert, they'll do so with chaperones in tow; hardly the way a sailor likes to travel.
Though the boys in the choir are aged between 10 and 14, the choir itself is now over 500 years old. It began when emperor Maximillan, moving his court from Innsbruck to Vienna, decreed in 1498 that his newly formed ensemble of musicians and singers include at least six boys. His stated interest at the time was in developing musical ability in children by awarding a post to the young singers. Until 1918 the Vienna Hofmusikkapelle, as it was known, sang exclusively for the court at masses, state events and private concerts.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Heinrich Isaac, Antonio Caldara, Antonio Salieri and Anton Bruckner worked with the choir. Composers and conductors such as Jacobus Gallus, Franz Schubert, and Hans Richter were one-time choristers.
PHOTO COURTESY OF VIENNA CHOIR
There weren't enough funds to pay for the boys' upkeep around 1926 so the choir started to give concerts outside the chapel, performing secular works, and -- at the boys' own request -- children's operas. Rarely has a debut been more well received and perhaps no other musical success story has been longer lasting. Within a year, the boys were performing in Berlin, Prague and Zurich. The next few years saw them in Athens, Riga, Spain, France, Denmark, Norway and Sweden. In 1932, they went to the US, Australia in 1934 and South America in 1936.
Today, some 100 choristers divided into four touring choirs give around 300 concerts to about half a million people each year. They travel to most every country in Europe and are frequent guests in Asia and the Americas,
spending 11 weeks of their school year on the road. Still, as the original Hofmusikkapelle, they provide the music for Sunday mass in Vienna's Imperial Chapel, as they have done since 1498. Though the boys no longer have swords, they wield an impressive repertoire. For their concerts in Taiwan, audiences can expect to hear Mozart, Schubert, European and Eastern folk songs, and the Strauss polkas for which they are famous.
Performance notes:
When: All performances are at 7:30pm.
■ Wednesday, Oct. 26, National Concert Hall, Taipei
■ Thursday, Oct. 27, Taichung Hall, Taichung
■ Friday, Oct. 28, Chinghua University Gymnasium, Hsinchu
■ Saturday, Oct. 29, Cultural Center Performance Hall, Tainan
■ Sunday, Oct. 30, Chengde Hall, CKS Cultural Center, Kaohsiung
Ticket Information:
Tickets cost from NT$400 to NT$2,000, depending on location, and are available through the ERA Ticketing system at www.ticket.com.tw or by calling the National Concert Hall box office at (02) 3393 9888.
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
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
Even by the standards of Ukraine’s International Legion, which comprises volunteers from over 55 countries, Han has an unusual backstory. Born in Taichung, he grew up in Costa Rica — then one of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies — where a relative worked for the embassy. After attending an American international high school in San Jose, Costa Rica’s capital, Han — who prefers to use only his given name for OPSEC (operations security) reasons — moved to the US in his teens. He attended Penn State University before returning to Taiwan to work in the semiconductor industry in Kaohsiung, where he
RSS