In the News

Taiwan performs on world stage

• Publication Date：02/08/2010
• Source： China Times

Piano duo Lina Yeh and Rolf-Peter Wille will play at the Vatican Feb. 10, while four Taiwanese performance groups are appearing in the Cultural Olympiad in Vancouver, Canada.

Yeh and Wille were recommended by ROC Ambassador to the Holy See Larry Yu-yuang Wang to Archbishop Zygmunt Zimonski, president of the Pontifical Council for Health Care Workers, for a concert on the occasion of the council’s 25th anniversary.

They will play in Paul VI Hall, the Vatican’s concert hall, seating 6,000 people, before an audience made up of Vatican officials, diplomatic personnel, clerics and Catholic laypeople. Their piano duets will be themed around joy, purity and love, including works by Pope Benedict XVI’s favorite composer Johann Sebastian Bach, as well as Johannes Brahms and Edvard Grieg, plus “The Joyous Chinese Holidays” by Taiwanese composer Chen Yang.

The Vancouver Winter Olympics will soon get underway, and the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre kicked off performances by Taiwanese groups in the Cultural Olympiad Feb. 5. In a feature article “The Vancouver Sun” called Lin Hwai-min, the troupe’s founder, “Taiwan’s Baryshnikov.”

The Chai Found Music Workshop, using classical Chinese instruments to perform contemporary music, “evokes a Taiwan both traditional and experimental,” the article said, while the U Theatre’s “Sound of the Ocean” amazes audiences with the percussive work’s “sheer speed and co-ordination.” Lafa & Artists Dance Company will present “37 Arts,” which “interweaves storylines of wit and humour, cruelty and violence.” (THN)

(This article originally appeared in the “ China Times” Feb. 6, 2010.)