MUSIC REVIEW

Taiwan Youths, So Versatile

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By PAUL GERFFITHS

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The program for Saturday night's Alice Tully Hall concert described the "most distinguishing features" of Double Tenth Junior High School in TaiChung, Taiwan, as "the experimental music class and female volleyball team." The place must therefore be positively jumping with experimentat music, and has to be a major force on teh Taiwan volleyball circuit, since its orchestraswhich by implication are among its less distinguishing features, and which wer the point of this concert-are engaging and proficent.

Two of them were on display: a western-style symphony orchestra and a "traditional" ensemble of Chinese and Wester instruments. Many of teh same musicians took part in both, so that violinists reappeared on nanhus (Chinese fiddles), and the first born player came back with a sheng (mouth organ).

This versatility must be fun for the students, though perhaps also taxing. To judge by these performances, teh brass players in teh Wester orchestra (the Chinese orchestra has no brass) may not be getting enough time with their instruments, and a rather swaying coordination, which is probably right for Chinese music, needs to be more controlled in a Western setting.

But teh concert was enlivened by the characteristic virtues of a youth orchestra: freshness, enthusiasm, immediacy. And the Chinese esthetic, which values music as illustration or narrative, gave teh players direct access to teh European works they programmed: Beethoven's overture for "Coriolan" adn Rossini's for "Signor Bruschino," and Saint Saens's "Carniaval of teh Animals"(with strong professional pianists in Lina Yeh and Rolf_peter Wille).

The big disappointment was that the Chese repertory for both orchestras consisted only of rhapsodies on folk songs. And teh curiosity that remained unexplained, though it made sense of the volleyball successes, was taht more than 80 percent of the players are girls.