The photo above is from a press conference/open rehearsal we did a few weeks ago at the Huashan Cultural Park. Here's one of the English-language articles I could find about the show (which opens a week from today): The black-bearded Canadian cometh
A doughnut sandwich, in other words.
Like I said the other day, one of the most noteworthy things about
Mackay: the Black Bearded Bible Man (besides the awesome title) is that
it's the first western style opera written in Taiwanese. When I took
on this role, I originally planned to study Taiwanese (just as I would
if I were to sing a role in Czech or Portuguese or some other language
that I didn't know), but was frustrated to find that there were almost
no instructional materials out there. I guess there's minimal demand
nowadays because it's mainly older people here who speak Taiwanese
fluently. Some people my age and younger here speak it well, but many
can hardly speak it at all. It's a language whose existence is fragile
because it has almost no written tradition, and because over the years,
depending on the political climate, it's often been suppressed. I have
friends here who vividly remember being forced by their schoolteachers
to wear humiliating signs, like dunce caps, for speaking Taiwanese in
school instead of Taiwan's official language, Mandarin. I'm only beginning
to understand and appreciate the deep historical, political and
emotional significance that the Taiwanese language has here.
Greetings from Taipei, where I'm in the middle of a very fun and
interesting new opera production at the National Theater: Mackay: The Black Bearded Bible Man,
composed by Gordon Shi-Wen Chin. It's the first western-style opera in
the Taiwanese dialect (i.e., not including traditional Taiwanese folk
opera), and chronicles the life of George Leslie Mackay, a Canadian Presbyterian
missionary who came to northern Taiwan in 1871, founding churches, hospitals, schools (including the first girls' schools), learning Taiwanese, and extracting over 21,000 teeth.
It's difficult to imagine a more poignant place for us (three Americans and a German) to perform Ned Rorem's Aftermath than inside Saint-Nazaire's old U-boat base. Built with a 30-foot-thick concrete roof to withstand aerial bombardment, British and American forces eventually neutralized the base by destroying the town itself in a firebombing raid (preceded three days earlier by a leaflet drop warning citizens to evacuate). Two poems from the piece below:
Greetings from Saint-Nazaire, France, where I'm singing some Brahms and Rorem at the Festival Consonances. I haven't done much sight-seeing yet, but I couldn't help noticing the mammoth concrete Nazi submarine base outside my Holiday Inn window.
It's my first time in France and, as was the case the first time I visited Germany*, I spent a few hours on a train watching the countryside scroll by, greedily absorbing and filing away the passing images so that the next time I sang a French song about a sunset, or a field of wheat, or a small village, or a girl on a bicycle, etc. I would have something very specific in mind.
*[In Germany ten years ago, it was wintertime, and as the train wound through the snowy forest with its gnarled ancient-looking bare trees, frozen brooks, and villages of cute little houses with steamed windows and puffing chimneys, Schubert's song cycle Winterreise sprung involuntarily to mind, shaking my imagination by the lapels and saying "Look! This is Winter [with a "v"]! This is Schnee! This is a what a frozen Bächlein looks like!" Up until then, whenever I happened to sing through that cycle (which apart from one largely clueless go at it when I was 19, was mainly to myself), my stock mental images of snow and ice came from memories of sledding at Van Saun Park in Hackensack, or going door to door shoveling driveways in Pines Lake, or skiing at Vernon Valley, all of which are very nice, but more New Jerseyan than Schubertian.]
I fly north tomorrow for a Schubert/Schumann/Wolf recital on Thursday at the Lanaudière Festival. I also look forward to eating a Montreal bagel (pictured on the left, next to its pudgy Upper West Side counterpart).
