On Sept. 30, 2016, the avant garde Catalan theater group Fura del Baus opened the National Taichung Theater (NTT) with its production of Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold.
On Friday next week, the Barcelona-based troupe will complete its NTT Ring cycle with the first of three performances of Gotterdammerung as part of the NTT’s “Fall for Great Souls” series.
The music will be provided, as it was in 2016, by the National Symphony Orchestra (NSO, 國家交響樂團) under the baton of Lu Shao-chia (呂紹嘉).
Photo courtesy of Fura del Baus
Under Carlus Padrissa’s direction, the main theme of Fura del Baus’ The Ring of the Nibelung cycle was to show “the degradation of nature by technological man,” although he scrupulously followed Wagner’s original stage directions.
The video projections and use of acrobats are hallmarks of the troupe’s productions, and this is true of its four Wagner works, and Franc Aleu videos are certainly as much a star of the operas as the singers, not only creating whole worlds and creatures, but serving as set pieces as well.
The Gotterdammerung cast features Canadian tenor Lance Ryan as Siegfried, Estonian baritone Lauri Vasar as Gunther, Taiwanese baritone Chao Fang-hao (趙方豪) as Alberich, Italian bassi profondi Andrea Silvestrelli as Hagen, British soprano Rachel Nicholls as Brunnhilde, Austrian soprano Sandra Trattnig as Gutrune, German mezzo Roswitha Christina Muller as Waltraute and Taiwanese alto Fan Ting-yu (范婷玉) as the First Norn, as well as the Tunghai University Choir (東海大學合唱團).
As for the story line of Gotterdammerung, for those who might not be up on their Wagner or Norse folklore, think of H.R.R. Tolkein’s tales of an all-powerful golden ring, cursed of course, that must be destroyed to redeem the world. Dwarves, giants, dragons and star-crossed lovers all appear as well.
Siegfried, the hero, gives Brunnhilde the ring as a token of his love, but Hagen, the son of the dwarf king Alberich seeks to take the ring and its power for himself.
Fura del Baus’ Gotterdammerung runs five hours and 40 minutes, including 2 intermissions, and will be performed in German with Chinese and English surtitles.
While five-plus hours might seem long to some, although it is the norm for a Wagnerian opera, as many music critics have pointed out, including the Washington Post’s Anne Midgette, people today complain about the length of the operas, but they will binge-watch television series, Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies, while the Royal Shakespeare Company had a huge hit in the early 1980s with a nine-hour production of Nicholas Nickleby.
■ Friday next week at 7pm, Sunday next week and Oct. 10 at 3pm at the Opera House of the National Taichung Theater (台中國家歌劇院) 101, Huilai Rd Sec 2, Taichung City (台中市惠來路二段101號)
■ Tickets are NT$1,000 to NT$8,000, available at the NTT box office, Eslite ticket desks, online at www.artsticket.com and at convenience store ticket kiosks
It is barely 10am and the queue outside Onigiri Bongo already stretches around the block. Some of the 30 or so early-bird diners sit on stools, sipping green tea and poring over laminated menus. Further back it is standing-room only. “It’s always like this,” says Yumiko Ukon, who has run this modest rice ball shop and restaurant in the Otsuka neighbourhood of Tokyo for almost half a century. “But we never run out of rice,” she adds, seated in her office near a wall clock in the shape of a rice ball with a bite taken out. Bongo, opened in 1960 by
Common sense is not that common: a recent study from the University of Pennsylvania concludes the concept is “somewhat illusory.” Researchers collected statements from various sources that had been described as “common sense” and put them to test subjects. The mixed bag of results suggested there was “little evidence that more than a small fraction of beliefs is common to more than a small fraction of people.” It’s no surprise that there are few universally shared notions of what stands to reason. People took a horse worming drug to cure COVID! They think low-traffic neighborhoods are a communist plot and call
The sprawling port city of Kaohsiung seldom wins plaudits for its beauty or architectural history. That said, like any other metropolis of its size, it does have a number of strange or striking buildings. This article describes a few such curiosities, all but one of which I stumbled across by accident. BOMBPROOF HANGARS Just north of Kaohsiung International Airport, hidden among houses and small apartment buildings that look as though they were built between 15 and 30 years ago, are two mysterious bunker-like structures that date from the airport’s establishment as a Japanese base during World War II. Each is just about
Taiwan, once relegated to the backwaters of international news media and viewed as a subset topic of “greater China,” is now a hot topic. Words associated with Taiwan include “invasion,” “contingency” and, on the more cheerful side, “semiconductors” and “tourism.” It is worth noting that while Taiwanese companies play important roles in the semiconductor industry, there is no such thing as a “Taiwan semiconductor” or a “Taiwan chip.” If crucial suppliers are included, the supply chain is in the thousands and spans the globe. Both of the variants of the so-called “silicon shield” are pure fantasy. There are four primary drivers
RSS