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Conductor spreads music from world stage to rural communities
2009/10/08 14:11:06 |
photos 33,34 By Lillian Lin CNA staff writer Taiwanese conductor Chiang Ching-po is auctioning one his batons, known as "Little Henry," which he has taken with him to numerous concerts around the world for 15 years. "Little Henry" was also on stage with him when he won the third prize in the prestigious Sir Georg Solti Competition for Conductors at the Alte Oper Frankfurt in Germany in September 2002.
"I would like to donate the proceeds from the auction to the Eden Social Welfare Foundation as a tribute to the physically disabled," he said.
"Little Henry was chosen among my many batons because it reflects many very significant moments in my life and because the twice damaged baton signifies the possibility that beautiful things, such as music, can be created out of imperfection," he explained.
The music career of the 39-year-old Chiang began long before he won the Georg Solti competition. He started as a violinist, and by the age of 15 he was already a chamber musician performing at the Munich Gasteig in Germany.
In 1990, at the invitation of Professor Alice Schoenfeld, he attended the University of Southern California (USC) where he met the man who would become his mentor, Professor Daniel Lewis. Lewis encouraged him to develop his potential to be an orchestra leader.
As a college student, Chiang performed with the USC Chamber Orchestra, YMF Debut Orchestra, Antelope Valley Symphony Orchestra, and Grand Teton Festival Orchestra. He also had the opportunity to interact with several notable teachers, including Gustav Meier, Robert Spano, John Nelson, Oliver Knussen, and Seiji Osawas at Tanglewood in Massachusetts.
Tanglewood has been the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra since 1937 and the New England resort is considered a cradle of musical talent.
Chiang, who became a Tanglewood fellow in 1995, had opportunities to pursue a music career in the United States, but the young conductor had more ambitious plans. His goal was to form an orchestra of Taiwanese musicians, take them to see the world and let the world see them.
In 1996, Chiang returned to Taiwan and soon grew busy teaching at Soochow University and collaborating with ensembles on their productions. However, he held on to his creed that "high art has a social responsibility to enlighten, to reconcile, to challenge, and to entertain the souls and minds of the people of its community."
In 1998, he founded the Philharmonia Moment Musical, a symphony orchestra of young Taiwanese musicians.
"Unlike other genres, classical music allows a good performer to work alone in his or her artistic pursuits, and consequently, musicians very often give the impression that they are not keen on team work," Chiang said.
"I believe all this can change if someone takes the lead and makes consistent and continuous efforts to coordinate the progress," he added.
The number of Taiwanese students at prominent music schools in Europe and the United States is impressive, and many of these top students have returned to Taiwan over the past two decades. In addition, classical music concerts have been drawing increasingly larger audiences of all generations.
Against this backdrop, Chiang, as musical director of Philharmonia Moment Musical, has been seeking greater international exposure for himself and the orchestra.
In 2003, he contacted Claudio Abbado, the music director and principal conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra and the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra, hoping to audition for the summer music festival of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, which was founded by Abbado in 2003.
A video audition of Chiang conducting an orchestra won him the valuable opportunity to spend summer 2003 in Lucerne. In the next three years, he also took some members of the Philharmonia Moment Musical to the festival in Switzerland.
In the last two years, Chiang and Philharmonia Moment Musical have made great strides toward his goal of taking his orchestra to see the world and showing the world the standard of classical music in Taiwan.
On June 19, 2007, Chiang made a highly acclaimed New York debut at Carnegie Hall, conducting the New England Symphonic Ensemble in a program that featured Beethoven and Mozart. In August 2007, he led his orchestra on a five-performance tour of Italy and Germany.
"The invitation to the prestigious Young Euro Classic Festival in Berlin in August 2008 was a great honor for our 99-member orchestra," Chiang said. "We impressed audiences there with our interpretation of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 5 and with the Germany premiere of Taiwanese composer Lai Deh-ho's Concerto for pipa, bamboo flute, xiao and chamber orchestra." The highly regarded German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine gave Chiang and the orchestra a good review, saying it was no surprise that Mahler's Symphony No. 5 was performed in a Berlin concert hall, but it was impressive to see a Taiwanese orchestra established in 1998 dare to perform such a symphony, which is traditionally dubbed "an ironclad tank".
Even as he strives to make his mark internationally, Chiang has set himself the task of bringing music to local communities around Taiwan.
In addition to its performances at metropolitan concert halls, Philharmonia Moment Musical has given open-air concerts at parks and schools and played chamber music at reform schools and prisons.
"After our performances in local communities, many of our musicians have said that they found the interactive responses from people who had never sat in a concert hall very rewarding, " Chiang said.
The orchestra has given particular attention to aboriginal tribal communities, holding dozens of concerts in remote areas of southern Taiwan prior to the recent devastation that was wrought in those regions by floods and mudslides from Typhoon Morakot in August.
In the wake of the typhoon, Chiang said that he and his orchestra were especially concerned about post-disaster rehabilitation in those remote regions.
In an effort to help raise funds for typhoon victims in the affected communities, the orchestra staged a charity concert at Huashan Culture Park in Taipei on Sept 11.
The orchestra has also scheduled performance tours of southern Taiwan with the aim of brightening the lives of the people there.
"The feedback we've had from ordinary people in rural communities has invigorated our young musicians who are as convinced as I am that music can enlighten, challenge and entertain souls and minds," Chiang said. ENDITEM/pc
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