Taiwanese Festival Closes on Conservative, Folk Song Note

Inexperienced expectations of Taiwanese music and art would surely have been confounded by Taiwan Facets. The mini-festival at Cal State L.A. opened Friday with the unreconstructed modernism of African American composer Maurice Weddington, using Taiwanese modern dance in some of the works. It closed Sunday with an afternoon of unabashedly conservative music by Jong-Teh Lin, a composer-poet-painter-educator with pronounced environmental concerns articulated here in three pictorial pieces, all based to some degree on Taiwanese folk songs and cloaked in 19th century Western symphonic fabrics.

Born in 1937, Lin studied with Carl Orff, among others, and his craft is clearly well-founded. His stylistic propensities, however, might have been learned from Carl Maria von Weber. Lin’s paintings, on concurrent display at the Luckman Fine Arts Complex, appear far bolder than his cheerful, genteel music.

There are modest exceptions, to be sure, in “The Dream Journey of the Little Balloon,” a one-act children’s opera unstaged here, and really more an oratorio in any case. A few passages for the chorus seem inspired by modern Western musical theater, and there is a heavily insistent instrumental dance that would have made Orff proud.

The text traces the flight of a balloon, which observes scenes of bucolic wonders and ominous pollution, with descriptive lyrics attractively sung by operatically trained Taiwanese singers of variable voice, soprano Li-Chan Chen, mezzo Hsing-An Chen and tenor Wen-Chun Lin. Chao-Hui Liu Kuo and Tsuann Kuo provided the connecting narration, and the important choral parts were entrusted to a splendidly responsive contingent from the Chinese Children’s Chorus, bolstered by women from the Los Angeles Chinese Chorus.

Conductor David Buck led Cal State L.A.’s Symphonic Camerata stolidly and Anli Lin Tong played the solo piano parts with pointed grace. The composer took a bow and delivered a long speech, and the audience sang and clapped along with two excerpts in encore.

Lin’s “White Stork” Violin Concerto is an amiable, tuneful work, respectful of its predecessors in the genre--particularly the concertos of Tchaikovsky and Beethoven--to the point of steady homage. Robert Chen, a member of the Philadelphia Orchestra well-embarked on a solo career, played the solo part with ready eloquence and sweet tone.

The concert began with “Ah! Formosa!,” a symphonic poem based on three folk songs, including one that reappeared in the opera. Buck and his Camerata projected its simple charms with stop-and-go understatement.