This is probably my favorite piece to play right now. It is so beautiful and it just evokes a lot of emotion when I hear the melodies and the timbre of the piece.
Whenever I hear and play it, I create imagery in my head and I reminisce on my time in my homeland Taiwan - I’ve associated the structure of the piece with the structure of my trip to Taiwan section by section, essentially making it a underscore for my journey.
1. The opening, in G major, represents my arrival in Taipei, Taiwan, and just getting to know the nature and environment that the land is made of (and how hot it is!).
2. We then get to the G minor section, where I embarked on a church mission trip in Dongshi County - I met a lot of good friends on this trip and had a lot of fun teaching kids English, while also becoming closer with the people I had already known. Afterward, the section is repeated in B minor, where our church group traveled to Ershui and saw beautiful sights such as Sun Moon Lake. But despite being the same material transposed, it felt a bit melancholy this time around, as we were saying goodbye to more and more people along the way.
3. The opening theme returns - as I did to Taipei after my friends all flew back to America. As the cello cadenza plays, sparks of sound fill the silence in small bursts, as I see my extended family again for the first time in years. The piece keeps gaining momentum follow the cadenza, as our family started to embark on a road trip around the borders of Taiwan.
4. The second part of the original opening theme returns, as our family returned to Taipei. This feels like a reflection for me on all my experiences in Taiwan this far and how much I’ve done over the whole month I had already been here. As the cello enters another small cadenza, my extended family leaves Taiwan first, while my family stays a little while longer in the coda, grasping onto however much of Taiwan we could, with the amount of time we had left. In the end, as the harmonics start to ring, we say goodbye to the land we had returned to after seven years.
Jenny Chou, piano