...Anthropologist as well as musician, François-Bernard Mâche is at the heart of this encounter. With the young Taiwanese composer Chien-Hui Hung... they propose a grand concert based on the astrological year of the snake, whose temperament inspires encounters. This great connoisseur of Chinese music was the first Western composer, along with Xenakis, to have one of his works premiered in China in 1982. He was also inspired by Bunun songs. With a Taiwanese sister-in-law and composition courses in Beijing, he was certainly the right man for the job. He also works a lot with Asia, his latest composition being on Indonesian instruments. To Chien-Hui Hung the winter and summer... to François-Bernard Mâche the spring and autumn, the two seasons of transformation.
"We worked independently. I was in Taiwan in January, but I only discovered on Thursday what my colleague had done: it's very Chinese. These will be very contrasting seasons. It was I who suggested the idea of these four seasons, to show that musical time can be the time of life. I introduced a piano, for my own pieces, into this no-man's-land between the two groups, to play four-handed. For Spring, I also use recorded sounds: rain, birdsong, frogsong... I'm the only composer who uses these substrate tones, to which I add very precisely transcribed sounds for the instruments. Finally, I used Chinese instruments that have no equivalent in Europe. But let's not forget that many of our percussion instruments come from Asia, such as the gong and the tam-tam," confides the French composer.
And the result? It's comforting to know that there are still differences! I hope that there will always be a dialogue between cultures. It's up to the audience to find something in common between the two types of music.
Rare and unmissable.

                 Jérôme Montchal, Le Dauphiné libéré 1 December 2001

The seasons of pleasure

The stage is invaded by a multitude of instruments, giant xylophones, a profusion of gongs, impressive timpani... It gets dark. The two groups greet each other. And so begins Mâche's Spring. The French composer had chosen this season along with autumn, because they express the passage, the entry into wakefulness or sleep. Here, Mâche is closer to the Orient in a kind of musical minimalism. In this season, he has added recorded sounds to his gentle score: rain, frogs singing, wind... all of which need to be in perfect harmony with the musicians' playing.
A difficult task, but one brilliantly accomplished by the Percussions de Strasbourg, whom the composer seems to have used more than the Taiwanese. Perhaps because he knows them better. So this season was all about impressions, like a Monet painting, made up of small splashes of colour that stand on their own, while at the same time expressing a coherent and meaningful whole. In fact, that spring was as refreshing as dew...
Autumn is a passage, and Mâche has had the difficult task of rendering this season a mixed one. He does so intelligently with a score licked by an intimate vein...
The Percussions de Strasbourg... were moving away from the Western repertoire with which they are more familiar. "You can feel the passage of time, it's a year in an hour", Mâche told us after the concert.

                  Jérôme Montchal, le Dauphiné libéré 4 December 2001

The eagerly awaited premiere of 12 Lunes du serpent marks the meeting of French composer François-Bernard Mâche and his female counterpart, Taiwanese composer Chien-Hui Hung. The dialogue was placed under the emblematic sign of the snake (whose year it will be in 2002) - ultimately four seasons divided between the two composers, the extremes (winter and summer) being entrusted to the young Chinese composer.
François-Bernard Mâche is responsible for the spring of rebirth. In a world of concentration, almost impressionistic, Mâche's writing displays great refinement, where the use of natural sounds (rain, frogs, birdsong) transcends the anecdotal to reach the symbolic. The bird whistling "hands in pockets" like a man, counterpointed by piano and marimba, is also the voice of nature speaking in oracular legends.
As much as Mâche's music is based on earthly concreteness to reach the unchanging soul of the seasons (in Autumn, the piano, a vector of abstraction, has become omnipresent), Chien-Hui Hung, on the other hand, relies on the structure of the narrative (in this case that of the "White Snake Tale") to create a highly visual and scenic score. The result is straightforward, direct and effective, alternating spectacular effects (generalized rolling to a crescendo like an initiation ritual) and variety music (a mix of film music, sentimental songs, traditional melodies and hints of post-Ravellian music, magnificently "sung" on marimbas).
It's a pity, though, that the whole thing comes across as a dichotomy between two temperaments that have little in common apart from their shared instrumentarium (although Chien-Hui Hung has deliberately left out the piano). These dual, even antithetical, worlds could have been a major stumbling block had it not been for the performance of the Percussions de Strasbourg and the Ju Percussion Group from Taipei, their shared attentiveness and their desire for beautiful confluences, which masterfully won over a delighted audience.

                       Marie-Aude Roux, Le Monde 7 December 2001

A work of synthesis that combines the Percussions de Strasbourg with their Taiwanese counterparts, Le printemps du serpent (2001) models the instrumental contribution on the animal reference in a desire to abolish borders (between nature and culture, between East and West, between yesterday and today) whose origins are sufficiently deep (in time and space) to ensure that it is not confused with the factitious world music.

                 Pierre Gervasoni, La musique contemporaine en 100 disques, MF, Paris 2007