Photos + music
IT WAS dark and stormy. There was a jam down the road and I was at the mercy of public transport. Did I say there was a jam? There was a huge jam. I was anti-social and grim-faced and ready to pull out my semi-automatic weapon and mow down the traffic cops or start some mild rioting against the authorities or at least pelt those people who programmed traffic lights with soft vegetables.
There were several other things on my mind. I was fantasising about someone. Someone who made me ready to rip him a new asshole. I was planning for Brown interviews and hoped they wouldn’t turn out boring. “Like being forced to read the diary of a dull-witted teen who is breathlessly beginning a lifelong fascination with himself.”
If I could, I would be flying about on a broomstick and raining down thunder bolts. Dear reader, I was not in the mood for concerts.
So I hopped off the bus, hopped into a cab, fumed as the cab got stuck in traffic and then barked into the phone: “I got caught in a jam!” at my poor friend and rushed into the concert hall as the bell was ringing incessantly. I didn’t know what the concert would be about, and I was sore as I’d to fork out $30 for the cab fare and the concert cost what seems like pots of money to my giam-gu unemployed self.
SPH concert, the programme said. Huh. It’s the company I just left. Tony Tan beamed at me from inside the brochure: “long rant long rant SPH long rant blah…I wish everyone a pleasant evening.” His face gleamed with a gentle pride. Oh no, nation-building music, I thought. Pull out all my teeth now1. I may like National Day songs, but I didn’t pay $50+ to listen to Count On Me Singapore. Would this play more to the gag reflex than to the heart?
Then the music started. OK. Blood pressure down. I adore Shanghai-born conductor Tsung Yeh, who joined the SCO as music director in 2002. He’s such a cute old man! So full of energy! Innovative and collaborative and brimming over with love for what he does! I occasionally think about adopting a Shanghai-born child as Tsung Yeh is everything I’d want in a son.
There’s something powerfully reassuring about the first note of a piece that moves me out of tempestuous grouch mode. And there’s something charming about Bartok’s folk dances played on the erhu and guzheng and other chingchong instruments…intemperate grumpy thoughts slow, then disappear.
Oooh…Then the stunning pictures of Costa Rican rainforests came on the three large projector screens as the lights dimmed and the soloist played Vaughan William’s The Lark Ascending. Enchanted at this point. I thought it may turn out to be some cheesy save-the-earth pastiche but the whole thing worked.
The work was a collaboration between the orchestra and James Westwater. Over the course of the performance, he personally directs the projection of hundreds of his photographic images onto a 3-panel panoramic screen suspended above the orchestra. While the orchestra performs, giant-screen images blend, dissolve, sweep, cut, and fade in and out with the music.
The last piece was a showcase of works by SPH photojournalists combined with music used in the 2007 National Day Parade — Sea-Source Of Life and People. I snorted at the nation building parts, but I wish I could share the lovely images with you — the first section used images of Singaporeans and the sea, with a keen sensitivity to nature that underpins all human life and on which all our lives depend.
The second section was more obvious, with the photos of us doing sports and painted up in opera costumes and all that would attract a first-time visitor to Asia as Westwater was when he visited in April. Varied and harmonious and colourful, as life is here, the usual rainbow of cultures and races.
We stayed for the post-concert chat with Tsung Yeh and Westwater, who said he thought of two words when he thought of Singapore: “The first is Singapore…(duh)…the second is works. Singapore works.”
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1
Had a conversation with my mom about how lazy I am. I’m so lazy, I told her, that if someone invented decay-proof teeth implants I’d pull out all my teeth under general anesthesia and replace all of them with implants so I don’t need to brush my teeth for the rest of my life. She said: “But you’ll continue to eat right. And the food will get stuck in between your rot-proof teeth. And your breath will smell so much nobody will want to talk to you any more.” Good point.