JULY 7, 2:30 P.M.
by Ruth Wilson
Lecturer in Horn, Sonoma State University
The ninth concert of WASBE 2011 took place Thursday afternoon and featured the Taiwan Wind Ensemble, Lian-Chang Kuo and Yu-Chou Chen, conductors. Conference chairman Yeh Shu Han gave a gracious introduction in both Chinese and English before a packed house that came out to support the local band.
The program was an adventuresome mix representing works by four Taiwanese composers along with Igor Stravinsky and the young American composer Brett Abigana. The performers shined best on the second half of the program with Gordon Shi-Wen Chin’s This Land and on the world premiere of Yiu-Kwong Chung’s Totem Pole
Yiu-Kwong Chung is Taiwan’s leading composer. Besides his wind band music, he has composed Chinese operas and numerous concertos, including Beyond the Silk Road for string quartet and orchestra, which will receive its premiere by the Kronos Quartet. Totem Pole for Wind Orchestra depicts in ear-shattering detail the violent clashes between the “civilized” world and the indigenous peoples they displace. The nine-minute work begins like a Disney animated film score that very quickly (nasty flutter-tonguing in the trombone, agitated drums) becomes a primal scream (polyrhythmic percussion, brass and wind shrieks). The highlight of the piece is the compelling rhythmic writing (Chung is a percussionist) employing the full battery of percussion with complex meters inspired by African, Mayan and aboriginal Taiwanese music. A master storyteller, Chung writes with a bold expressiveness that could come across as phony- yet it does not. It was a pleasure to hear, for example, simple unison melodies and sections of chorale writing as a direct form of expression. Conductor Lian-Chang Kuo, professor and conductor at Fu Jen Catholic University, led his charges with passionate intensity and drew from them their best playing of the day. The composer humbly accepted the accolades of appreciation from the audience. This is a name to watch for.
Born in Taiwan, composer Gordon Shi-Wen Chin has spent much of his life in Japan and the United States, earning his doctorate at the Eastman School of Music where he studied with Samuel Adler and Christopher Rouse. Chin describes This Land, composed in 1997, as using personal soul searching as a means to achieving a true Taiwanese identity. In my experience, the piece, conducted by Lian-Chang Kuo, stands tall on its own merits. Its main motive, a phrase built around a melodic turn, is passed around to various solo players. This gives way to several aleatoric passages – various patterns that are played in free time – and a fast section of dizzying agitation and special effects. At one point, the saxophone section is called on to blow loudly through the mouthpiece of their instruments. Are the piercing shrieks that result intended to sound like wailing animals? Though Chin’s program note states that he no longer uses proportional (graphic) notation, its use in This Land seems appropriate to the piece. The turning-note motive from the beginning comes back, is heard across the ensemble and intoned one final time between flute, oboe and bowed cymbal.
Listeners heard Che-Yi Lee’s Rhapsody “Makattao” (2008), a lovely piece in rounded binary form that is based on traditional Pingpu melodies from Taiwan’s aboriginal Plain Tribes. Also on the program was a violin concerto by Ssu-Yu Huang, performed with sensitivity by Ting-Yu Wu, entitled Butterfly Lovers Concerto for Violin and Wind Ensemble – Dedicated to Dr. Jau-Jen Yang (2006), based the popular Chinese legend.
The Taiwan ensemble is to be commended for programming two formidable Western works, Sketches on Paintings No. 2 (2009) by Brett Abigana and Stravinsky’s Octet for Wind Instruments (1923). The Octet was a bit of a bumpy ride but, as they say, nobody got hurt – least of all Stravinsky. Special accolades to the executors of Stravinsky’s “super-bassoon” writing in the second movement. Sketches on Paintings No. 2 was commissioned and premiered by the U.S. Naval Academy Band in Annapolis, MD in 2009. Today’s reading was guest conducted by the Taiwanese percussionist and composer Yu-Chou Chen. I approached my first hearing of the work with some admitted bias, thinking “another piece of program music…” Those thoughts went away quickly and I very much enjoyed the composer’s ability to capture the flavors of artwork and stimulate the imagination. My only quibble is that all four movements begin the same way (woodwind passagework). Maybe it is intended to symbolize the artist’s untouched palette. The four movements describe paintings by Monet (Water Lilies), Degas (L’Etoile), Jackson Pollock (Lavender Mist) and Joseph Turner (Norham Castle: Sunrise). Memorable moments include the ethereal little waltz in L’Etoile (fine solos by the oboe and E Flat clarinet) and the minimalist Lavender Mist (not quite what I think of when I think of Jackson Pollock) with a short but exciting tuba solo played exceptionally well.