Nowadays, it’s incredibly rare for a community festival to have its own orchestra. That’s just one of several reasons why the TAIWANfest Toronto Orchestra’s upcoming concert is so special. Entitled Islands in the Wind, this free event will begin at 7:30 p.m. on August 29 on the Concert Stage at Harbourfront Centre.
Conductor Ken Hsieh tells the Toronto Spark over Zoom that this group of some 40 musicians is modelled, in part, on the now-defunct CBC Radio Orchestra. When the Crown-owned broadcaster disbanded its orchestra due to budget cuts in 2008, it was roughly the same size.
“We’ve been together for 14 or 15 years,” Hsieh says. “It’s like a family.”
Hsieh, the Edmonton-born son of Taiwanese immigrants, has been leading the orchestra of local players at Toronto TAIWANfest since 2015. This year, the free concert will feature Canadian classical violinist and educator Dr. Lynn Kuo as the featured soloist.
Kuo is assistant concertmaster for the National Ballet of Canada and has performed across North America, Europe, and Asia. She is also the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants and grew up in a small town in Newfoundland. Her musical journey began in childhood on the piano.
“The day the ¼ size and ½ size violins arrived in the mail from my uncle in Taiwan meant that my sister, brother, and I were adding ‘violin lessons’ to our after-school explorations: namely Little League, soccer, art classes, Girl Guides, in addition to our piano lessons,” Kuo writes on her website.
TAIWANfest connects musicians to heritage
Eventually, her family moved to St. John’s where she reports that they were the only Kuos in the phone book. She graduated with a bachelor of music degree from Memorial University before settling in Toronto. There, she earned bachelor’s, master’s, and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees at the University of Toronto.
There is an intriguing geographic connection between Kuo and Hsieh, who lives in Vancouver
“Her father is from the same hometown as my mom—Tainan,” Hsieh reveals.
They discovered this after Kuo visited Vancouver with her parents. There, they met Hsieh’s mother and started talking about the southern Taiwanese city.
“They turned out to be one-and-a-half blocks away from each other in Tainan!” the maestro says. “See how small the world is?”
Hsieh mentions that Kuo has informed him how wonderful it is to connect to her ancestry through Toronto TAIWANfest.
“I say the exact same thing,” Hsieh declares. “What a great privilege to learn about my parents’ ancestry through music and through culture.”
Each year, Toronto TAIWANfest’s programming engages in dialogues with different countries to build meaningful, reciprocal connections between communities, cultures, and people. This year, the festival is holding its dialogue with Scotland.
Between August 28 and 30, the free festival at Harbourfront Centre will present an exhibition on how Scottish missionaries with the British Presbyterian Church brought modern medicine to the East Asian island nation. Another exhibition will trace ties between red brick buildings in northern Taiwan and Scottish-Canadian Presbyterian missionary George Mackay and his contemporaries.
In addition, the festival will also explore how cultural symbols—such as tartan in Scotland and bold, red floral fabrics in Taiwan—come to mark an entire culture.
Musical program inspired by Scotland
Hsieh is delighted with the Scottish emphasis because it offers the TAIWANfest Toronto Orchestra an opportunity to perform outstanding music linked to Scotland. For the outdoor concert, Hsieh will lead the orchestra through the two movements from Felix Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3 in A minor (“Scottish”). The 19th-century German composer’s walking tour of Scotland inspired this work, which concludes with a majestic finale.
“Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3 makes me think of Mel Gibson in the movie Braveheart,” Hsieh says with a smile. “It has that warrior kind of feel to it.”
Attendees will also hear another Mendelssohn piece, The Hebrides, Op. 26 (Fingal’s Cave) Overture. It came as a result of the composer’s visit to the island of Staffa, where Fingal’s Cave is located.
According to Hsieh, Kuo will perform 19th-century German composer Max Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy. Described as a “fantasy on Scottish melodies”, Bruch developed this composition for the violin and orchestra after studying a collection of Scottish music at Munich Library.
“It’s such a beautiful piece,” Hsieh says. “All of the Scottish elements are in there, which is fantastic.”
He has also included several pieces of popular music from East and West in the program, including the famous Taiwanese folk song “The Beautiful Island” and Teresa Teng’s “I Only Care About You”.
“Then, on top of that, I wanted to make the concert very accessible to the public, so I am throwing ‘Games of Thrones’ and ‘Harry Potter’ in there,” Hsieh adds. “It will make it fun.”
Toronto TAIWANfest will present Maestro Ken Hsieh and the TAIWANfest Toronto Orchestra in a featured performance called Islands in the Wind. This free event will be at 7:30 p.m. on August 29 on the Concert Stage at Harbourfront Centre. For more information, visit the Toronto TAIWANfest website. The Toronto Spark is on Bluesky @torontospark.bsky.social.
