All the officials of the Taipei Symphony Orchestra were wearing formal shoes on Wednesday, but Martin Fischer-Dieskau, their newly elected music director-designate, was in trainers. It was a statement. Fischer-Dieskau is a strong believer in the contemporary relevance of classical music and its importance for the young.
“Young people are not quite aware of how strong classical music’s influence is,” he said. “Someone who lets himself be touched by this music learns to think with the heart.”
Fischer-Dieskau is in Taipei for eight weeks in order, as he put it, to familiarize himself with the place as it is today. He already finds it “vibrant, busy and cosmopolitan.” He will conduct four concerts with the TSO, beginning next Wednesday.
PHOTO COURTESY OF TSO
“I feel proud to be here,” the 55-year-old German said. “I’m the winner of a competition for this post after all, not someone who was invited in by a committee. I’ve had to fight for this.”
He wanted the TSO to be a rising and broadly shining star in Taipei, he said, and was amazed at what talent there was within the orchestra.
“When a group of people comes together with a common aim, the results can be astonishing,” he said. “Symphony orchestras are an example of this. And it’s all a communal effort. When you stand up to conduct an orchestra you can’t hide anything. The instrumentalists know all there is to know about you in five minutes.”
Fischer-Dieskau hopes to attract world-famous names to perform with the orchestra. Already the piano duet Duo d’Accord will be appearing next Wednesday, while the Vienna Philharmonic’s Wolfgang Schulz, one of the most eminent flautists of our time, will feature on May 14.
“But I don’t want the focus to be on the soloists, with the orchestra as just a background band. No, I want the TSO to be the star. I’d also like to invite the best conductors to Taiwan to conduct the TSO — better conductors than me!” he said.
And then there was opera. What plans did he have in that direction, I asked.
“Well,” he replied, “2009 is the TSO’s 40th anniversary, and if I’m confirmed in this post I’d like to stage something rather special. It so happens it’s also the 100th anniversary of Richard Strauss’s opera Elektra. Now wouldn’t it be amazing to stage that here! We’d need the National Theatre, of course, plus invited soloists … .” The names of the greatest modern exponents of the main roles were running through his head, he said, and who knows, maybe they could be persuaded to come for less than their usual fees. Giuseppe Sinopoli and the Staatskapelle Dresden brought Elektra to Taiwan some 20 years ago, but only in an incomplete version, Fischer-Dieskau added.
The opera represents the furthest Strauss went in the direction of dissonant modernism. It was described by the classical scholar Gilbert Highet as a drama of “outrageous violence … set to psychopathic music by Strauss.”
Though Fischer-Dieskau has still to be confirmed as the permanent holder of the TSO job, the operatic double-bill of Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi and Wolf-Ferrari’s Il segreto di Susanna scheduled for September is something separate and will happen anyway, he said.
The performances will coincide with a major symposium on Puccini’s music to be held in Taipei at the same time to mark this year’s 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth.
As for the four concerts he will conduct in Taipei this month and next, Fischer-Dieskau said that they had thematic links that loosely bound them together. The main one was change, which led to mutation, variation and transformation, he said.
Consequently on April 25 there’s the Paganini Variations of Boris Blacher, a German composer who was born and spent his early life in northeastern China, with Elgar’s better-known Enigma Variations on May 24.
But the theme also covered the way a musical form like the concerto had evolved, he said. Next Wednesday’s concert features Mendelssohn’s colorful yet traditional Concerto for Two Pianos, but also a modern concerto for gu zheng (古箏) and orchestra by the very eminent Taiwanese composer Ma Shuei-long (馬水龍).
“The instrumentalist is the winner in this newer work, with the orchestra only commenting here and there. That’s different from the traditional conception and really interests me,” Fischer-Dieskau said.
The concert will end with Brahms’s Second Symphony, the most popular of the composer’s four according to an American survey. “It represents where I come from,” the maestro said with a characteristic smile.
Fischer-Dieskau’s second concert with the TSO, on April 25, will feature guest soloist Wu Wei, internationally acclaimed master of the 3,000-year-old Chinese instrument, the sheng (笙). Also on the program is the Symphony No. 1 (premiered in 1900) by Reinhold Gliere, a Russian composer who wrote melodic and dramatic works in the tradition of Scriabin and Glinka.
Returning to the topic of classical music and the young, Fischer-Dieskau said it would be nice if the TSO could have its own youth orchestra. But there were many possibilities, he added, citing Simon Rattle’s venture of inviting 250 underprivileged adolescents to dance to music played by the Berlin Philharmonic (the results are available on a DVD entitled Rhythm Is It!).
As for his father, the world-famous baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, his son said that he’d sent Taiwan his warmest regards. “He’s 83 now, and a bit old to travel. But I’d love to persuade him to come here. He doesn’t sing much any more, but he likes to conduct. So maybe I’d be a bit jealous! After all, he’d be competition, wouldn’t he?”
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