Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

Comments on the Finalist

The Taipei Chinese Orchestra has extended numerous invitations for collaboration to well-known classical music soloists from the West, and after a few years the initiative is bearing fruit. French saxophonist Claude Delangle is known as an eccentric who is always eager to take on the challenge of avant-garde works. River of Sorrow is a song from northeast China, and Sunshine on Taxkorgan is a folk song of one of China’s ethnic minorities. Delangle creates a fusion of Western horn techniques with the musical language and sounds of Chinese woodwinds and reed instruments, including the sheng, and in the process gives the songs a completely new life. Composer Chung Yao-Kuang’s Concerto for Saxophone No. 2 takes Chinese landscape painting as inspiration and poses the saxophone as an ink-bearing brush. Tian Lei-Le’s Open Secret develops the rich sonorities of Eastern and Western instruments. The concert is both traditional and modern. In it, Chinese and Western instruments converge, and a successful East-West fusion is achieved. ( Committee member/ Lin, Tsai-Yun)

Artwork Introduction

When Taipei Chinese Orchestra (TCO) collaborated with renowned Sweden-based BIS Records, they produced a new series of concerts called New Dynamic of Innovative Chinese Music. One of the concerts was Claude Delangle & TCO, which was a preview concert of the new release of their second album of the same title. The concert premiered December 5, 2009 at the Taipei Zhongshan Hall Square.

With this album and concert, renowned saxophonist Claude Delangle and TCO create a new genre of music in the 21st century that merges the Western-style with traditional Chinese music. Together, they performed composer Chung, Yiu-Kwong’s Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Taipei Chinese Orchestra No. 1 & 2 and a newly commissioned piece, Open Secret, Concerto for Saxophone and Taipei Chinese Orchestra, composed by Paris-based Chinese composer Tian, Lei-Lei.

Open Secret is a three-movement concerto, composed for alto saxophone and the TCO and was inspired by three famous Chinese paintings. One movement is a quintet written for alto saxophone and four distinctive traditional Chinese instruments: erhu, guzheng, sanxian, metallophone. These instruments take on the qualities of percussion, string and wind instruments to conjure up the free-flowing lines of a Chinese painting.

For Open Secret, Claude Delangle’s saxophone playing imitates the melancholic sounds of the Chinese traditional woodwind instrument, the guanzi, in River of Sorrow. For the complicated composition, Sunshine on Taxkorgan, a rearrangement of a XinJian folk song, the collaborative sounds of saxophone and full orchestra test the boundaries of traditional Chinese music and Western music. The piece is divided into four sections of an ABCA pattern. Here, the composer emphasizes the color change in sound between the solo instrument and orchestra, as well as the contrast between musical lines. The melody and harmony are loosely kept in pentatonic scale, which allow new ideas to develop in the music.

About the Artist

The Taipei Chinese Orchestra (TCO) was established in 1979 by the Department of Education, Taipei City Government. Twenty years later, TCO became affiliated with the City’s Department of Cultural Affairs and moved to its permanent residence in Zhongshan Hall in 2001.

TCO performs more than 50 concerts annually and has toured many countries such as Japan, the US, China, the Philippines, Malaysia, Australia, Germany, France, and Austria.

TCO publishes the bimonthly magazine SILK ROAD and organizes the annual National Chinese Instrumental Competition and Summer Camp. TCO has presently established seven affiliated musical organizations to nurture musical interest in the community.