One reason Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie has enhanced its reputation is by packing its annual programmes with visiting orchestras: some four dozen different ensembles in the current season, not including local bands. That is quite an achievement. A rare international visitor this time was the Taiwan Philharmonic, that country’s national symphony orchestra founded in 1986, with its Music Director Jun Märkl. Another rarity was the discovery that this orchestra is staffed almost entirely with Taiwanese players. Given the internationalisation and increasing homogeneity of orchestras on the world’s stage, I was intrigued to learn whether it had a distinctive aural profile of its own.
It does. Its character comes from a woodwind section that sparkles with the freshness of fountains in a Persian garden, yet capable of subtle shifts in weight and colour. The strings are a little on the light side, but there was no mistaking their commitment. Most of the players are still young and they play with palpable enthusiasm, though retaining a soft-grained sound without any hint of forcefulness. Underpinning it all is a brass section admirably secure and well blended.
An obvious thread ran through the programme: the influence of folk music. Yuan-Chen Li’s 15-minute piece Tao of Meinong pays tribute to the Hakkas, a distinct Han Chinese ethnic group from whom most Taiwanese derive their ancestry. Unlike so much of contemporary western music, this was soft and impressionistic, displaying a benevolent face to the outside world, an ebb and flow of lyrical soulfulness and a gentleness even in the metallic keyboard contributions. I found myself reminded of the trance-inducing effect of Indian ragas, not least in the central movement with its strumming for lower strings. Altogether it was an enchanting visiting-card.
Can anybody play the notes of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1 in B flat minor faster than Khatia Buniatishvili? She despatched the work in little more than 30 minutes, with an insanely fast start to the Allegro con fuoco part of the Finale. When she shoots from the hip, the bullets are charged with such velocity that they defeat the naked eye. She does strong and powerful like nobody else, but she can also do soft and dreamy. It was these quicksilver contrasts that gave her playing a mesmerising quality, her expressive freedoms giving this old warhorse a chameleon-like, entirely improvisatory manifestation. I found myself marvelling at the daintiness of the lyrical episodes, the feathery textures beautifully matched by the hushed strings, her Debussy-like clarity reflected in the purity of the woodwind section. None of what she did appeared remotely attention-seeking. Indeed, in the central Andantino semplice she proved herself to be a highly sensitive accompanist, duetting magically with cello and oboe in their important solo contributions. A final round of spellbinding virtuosity came in her encore, Liszt/Horowitz’s Hungarian Rhapsody no. 2.
Unlike the works by Li and Tchaikovsky, there are no direct quotations from folk melodies in Dvořák’s Symphony no. 8 in G major. Conducting from memory, Märkl delivered a performance that radiated sunshine from start to finish. Agility came in the pointed rhythms of the first movement, elegance in the waltz-like sweep of the third. This orchestra might not roar ferociously, but it can whisper wonderfully. This was most apparent in the Adagio, where in the undergrowth the strings provided cushions of downy support while the woodwind players in the canopy above floated streams of exquisite birdsong. These were not dark woods with sinister undercurrents but open, sun-lit, sylvan spaces. Pure shinrin-yoku, or Japanese forest bathing. Once in a while it’s good to enjoy steady warmth from gentle sunbeams, untroubled by any meteorological uncertainty.
