A Rare Opportunity

15.05
Now getting fired up for a performance this evening of Steve's Reich's Drumming by the Colin Currie Group. I'd not heard of this ensemble until last week at the Esplanade when I picked up a flyer for the concert, but they sound like the business to me. Let's face it, opportunities to hear Reich performed live in this part of the world come few and far between, and I'm pleased to take this one.

23.16
Magical concert. Reich may sound good in recordings but you've got to experience the music live to feel the sound as you need to. And when it's delivered by players of this calibre, then you're taken to another place.

I vaguely wondered in advance of the concert if the hypnotic qualities of Reich's work might have a narcotic effect in the concert hall. In the event, I've never felt more alert. And watching the performers move around the stage to their various instruments, movements effected with great care and a kind of stillness, gave the longer pieces played - Drumming especially - a kind of ritualised, dramatic quality.

A Perplexing Question

Late in the afternoon I was asked by a younger colleague, a much younger colleague if truth be told, Where do you get your energy from?

I was entirely stumped for an answer, the closest I could get being something along the lines of not being aware I had any energy at all. But that didn't sound even slightly elegant, and I like to keep a conversation humming along.

I suppose my inability to frame any kind of coherently suitable reply is linked to the fact that whatever I've got that keeps me moving and occasionally grooving doesn't seem to me to be energy in any real sense. I can't think of a word in English that captures the stubborn keep-going-ness that keeps me going. Just haven't the energy to think of one.

Sound And Visions

Had the happy thought today that some music is so innately visual it doesn't require a video to make you see it. Of course, Messiaen is the prime example of a composer who is obviously seeing what his music is saying. And for much of his work we are in the extraordinarily privileged position of being able to read his account of what, if we're lucky, we might just be able to construct in the mind's eye.

Was listening to La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jesus-Christ earlier and came across this, from Messiaen's notes on the fifth section of the First Septenary: The phrase is soft and tender in the male voices, louder and more emphatic when sung by the whole choir. Modal colours evolve: gold and violet, red and bluish-purple, blue-grey studded with gold and deep blue, green and orange, blue and gold, yellow and violet streaked with white. The solo cello sings of the simple clarity of everlasting light. The solo piano introduces the blue American robin, and the rock thrush (a mountain bird with bright orange and slate-blue livery) is heard amongst the ensemble of soloists. The movement concludes with the choir humming red and gold harmonies, a lush carpet of sound, a distant pianissimo, over which, in the night, there ascends on the piano the first strophe of the nightingale's song.

Blimey. Difficult to believe that any music could live up to that. But, of course, the Maestro's does.

Sound And Vision

I've never really come to terms with music videos. It's an odd thing to say, I know, since they've been around for so long, but when I try and think of ones that seem to me entirely successful in marrying image and sound I can only manage a very short list. Maybe some by Bowie - especially the more recent - and possibly Peter Gabriel - but those seem somewhat dated. Having said that, I'd be the first to admit that there are probably hundreds of good ones I don't know about simply because I don't watch all that much television, or view these things on-line.

Curiously enough I think I'd rate the stuff done by Prince as my favourites in this genre. I say 'curiously' not so much in relation to the music (of which any visitor to this Far Place would know I'm an unashamed fanboy of the first order) but in relation to the silly hyperbolic playing up of Prince's image as whatever His Purple Highness seemed to see himself as at any given time. What wins me over to the videos is the outright goofiness of so many of them in this respect, the idea that this is all mickey-taking on at least one important level, though engagingly serious on others.

Today, for example, I found myself goofing off in a spare moment to the brilliant Musicology, and enjoying the visuals as much as the groove. I love the irony in Prince's playing of the diva role to his younger fan-struck self, and the wonderfully rhythmic editing so perfectly in synch to the track. There really is a kind of education to be had here.

Slightly Melancholic

Noi has gone off to KL for some two and a half weeks to see to the work we're getting done to repair the roof of our house there. She's being accompanied by no fewer than four nieces, one thankfully of senior years, so she'll have her hands full. In stark contrast I find myself at something of a loose end. There's still plenty going on at work of course, hence my remaining here, but this place has felt more than a little bit empty today.

I took myself off to the gym this afternoon hoping for some improvement on my previous visit. That took place last Sunday, just before we took Fifi for her birthday dinner, and was strangely unimpressive. I say 'strangely' as I felt in pretty good nick before hitting the pedals on the elliptical trainer and I thought I would post good numbers. In the event I struggled through the last five minutes, knowing that if I pushed myself at all I'd be close to throwing up. Today saw a slight improvement - I felt okay over the final stretch, though I can't say I set the world alight over my designated forty-five minutes.

It's a melancholy, lonely truth that once you hit a certain age the kind of progress that might have been taken for granted is no longer automatic. And it feels that bit lonelier, that bit more melancholy, when there's no Missus around to complain to regarding that necessary truth.

Compulsion

Read Han Kang's short novel The Vegetarian over the weekend. Think this won the Booker International Award, or something like that. Actually it was Runima who passed me a copy, and I'm glad she did. My first ever Korean novel.

It starts off strange and gets steadily stranger - always a good sign. Han Kang is the kind of writer who seems to feel things with great intensity, as if she's missing a layer of protection against the world, I'm tempted to say a layer of skin, but hesitate to use such a trite image given her novel's deployment of a brilliantly original sequence of images of the body as the site of conflict. (Though the nods towards Kafka - think The Hunger Artist - suggest something less than original, but wonderfully allusive.) 

Very assured shifts of perspective also. It's a crafty novel, but hides its craftiness beneath the urgency of a compelling surface. I suppose many readers will see it as a novel of feminist protest, given the strikingly passive-aggressive figure at its centre, and the ways in which she is objectified by various males, but I think that's to underestimate the depth of its existential concerns.

A Jolly Good Time

Wonderful concert last night. I was in the right mood for a bit of Debussy and the SSO sounded sensationally good to me, especially in Jeux which has always seemed to get away from me in the past. It helped that Maestro Lan Shui provided an amusing introduction to the balletic aspects of the piece complete with musical illustrations before we were given the whole. Yes, it panders to the audience a wee bit, but if you can't have a bit of fun before playing Games when can you? (See what I did there?)

Noi and I managed to attend the pre-concert talk in the library upstairs in the Esplanade, not realising that it was to be delivered by my colleague Yi Fang. I think she was a little nonplussed to spot me in the audience. To my delight it featured an interview with Ye Xiaogang, the composer of Mount Emei, which was being premiered in Singapore by the SSO. He couldn't say all that much in the 10 or so minutes Yi Fang got to ask him questions, but what he said was down to earth and intriguing at the same time in terms of biographical detail - for example, talking about his experiences as a young man in the period of the Cultural Revolution. I'd never heard of the guy before, which doesn't say much for my knowledge of contemporary music I'm afraid, but it seems he's a really big cheese on the Chinese scene, and rightly so if Mount Emei is anything to go by. Lovely to listen to, highly accessible yet in an idiom that might fairly be termed modern, with glittering parts for the soloists - a violinist and an insanely gifted lady percussionist.

I also managed to purchase a couple of CDs featuring the SSO doing the business with lots of Debussy in the concert interval. These hit the turntable this morning, making for the best of starts to a thrillingly lazy day.

Goofing Off

Got a lot done today. And none of it was work. Well, some of the reading was vaguely work-related, but when was reading Shakespeare work in any real sense?

Just back from the concert hall, actually. Sort of the antithesis of work. More anon.

Hidden Treasure

Was luxuriating in a bit of Vaughan Williams earlier this evening. Well, quite a lot of VW, actually, the 'bit' being The Sea Symphony. Oddly it's the one of the magical nine I play least, yet I always find myself wondering why I don't air it more often when I do give it a spin. This time I found myself enjoying Whitman's poetry just in itself, as I was reading it from the accompanying booklet. I tend to blow hot and cold over his verse, but this time I think I grasped why VW felt compelled to set these particular words.

Then I decided to play through the Arnold Conducts Arnold set I downloaded a little while back and, do you know, for a moment there was a genuine contender for the title of My Favourite English Composer. In general I find much to admire and enjoy in Malcolm Arnold's oeuvre as represented in the pieces involved. He's a wonderful melodist and superb technician, but before this evening I'd not that crawling of the skin that RVW regularly evokes. Then tonight I found myself utterly spellbound by the slow movement of his Concerto for 2 Pianos. In fact, it's entirely bewildering to me that the concerto isn't regularly programmed by orchestras across the world. It's wonderfully accessible and would surely become an audience favourite anywhere. Yet I don't recall seeing it as part of a programme ever. 

How many treasures remain hidden. What an adventure it is seeking them out.

Impossible Choices

It's either Joyce or Conrad. And it's either Wordsworth or Keats. Agonising choices. Whichever way, not doing something that is really, really, really somehow necessary to do.