. . . le plaisir délicieux et toujours nouveau d'une occupation inutile
It occurred to me a few minutes ago while I was trying to SMS someone using predictive text, that the button-combination for "genius" is the same as that of "idiots".
Go figure.
........................
Turns out that "genius" and "idoits" have the same button-combination. Looks like there's only one idiot, and that's me.
Well so I've been toying around with the idea of maybe, just maybe, trying out for the National Piano and Violin Competition, which will be held in December. It all depends how free I'll be once I start work (chances are I'll be totally swamped with work and have zero time to do anything else but work) to learn up the huge amount of music that is required. And so I came up with a possible program:
Bach: Toccata in E minor BWV 914
Debussy: 2 Etudes, "Pour les Agrements" and "Pour les Octaves"
Webern: Variations Op. 27
Brahms: Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel Op. 24
Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 23 in A, K. 488
Well so the arrangement is that I have to specify a work for the first round, which would most likely be the Bach, and the adjudicators would request for another to be played to make up around 15-20 minutes. With my current program, I'm hoping they would choose the Debussy, so that'd leave a very nice pairing of the 2 sets of Variations for the semi-finals.
Now all this is all rather wishful thinking. There's obviously a lot of work that needs to be put in before I'd even dare to show my face on stage. So I guess all that's left to do is to work on learning up the pieces and see how it goes by August, which is the application deadline. Not that it's particularly easy. Though I deliberately avoided overtly virtuosic works (not because I'm some puritan, but cos heck, I can't play them man), it's still quite a tall order, especially the Brahms - some of the variations are incredibly tough.
In any case, the competition these days are nothing like those of the yesteryears. Back in those days, I played things like Haydn sonatas for the senior section. Nowadays, people are playing Gaspard, Waldstein and what not in the senior section. Good lord, I'd be a laughing stork to go in with what I played back in those days now.
Ah well, even if eventually I don't participate, getting some of those works under my fingers can't be a bad thing. After all, part of the reason of joining in the first place is to motivate myself to learn the works. Then again I wonder about the prudence of even thinking about participating - I've been out of high-level performance for years now, and probably am suffering from delusions of grandeur.
Stephen Hough has been one of my favorite pianists in recent years. His recordings have been consistently of high quality and variety - from Liszt, to own his transcriptions, to Mompou, to Saint-Saens, and more recently the Rachmaninoff concerti. Hough's sound is also quite unique. Rather than a singing bel canto, his sound is clean, clear, bell-like and refined. There is this sec, glassy attack to it, and this incredible sensitivity to the sonorities and the decay of the sound which really works well for certain works, especially tonight's Paganini Variations. Lovely articulated runs, finely nuanced lyricism and a real sense of drama (Is there anything quite as exciting as the huge adrenaline rush right till the very end from right after the famous 18th variation?) - I'm glad I was there, especially since I only went because a friend sold his ticket to me as couldn't make it for the concert.
After the interval was Elgar's Enigma Variations which was really quite engaging. It's a really well-constructed work with such amazingly heartfelt moments - felt tears welling up right at the end. Lan Shui concluded the concert with an encore of the Pomp and Circumstance, which was definitely feeding off the emotional high of the conclusion of the Enigma - extroverted and high-energy.
A couple of issues also sprang to mind:
1) Someone should tell the orchestra members to smile when acknowledging the applause. As of now, only the principals and the conductor seem to be happy that the concert's finally over. The other players have either this dour or impatient expression plastered on their faces.
2) Someone should investigate the phenomenon of spontaneous coughing at the end of every movement. Why half the hall has a tickle in the throat that they must restrain till the end of a movement to relieve I'll never understand. I've been for so many concerts and have never felt such an urge.
Heard from a friend that an old friend is back in Singapore, after leaving to study music when she was 12, to relief-teach at her school. We shared the same piano teacher back then and I haven't seen or heard from her for more than a decade. I guess these are the people you'd really like to meet but when you do meet, it'd be really awkward.
Found this gem of a letter to the Forum, I believe, on the Vesak Day's papers:
Little Free Time in ArmyI am appalled at how little time my friends in national service get to spend with their family. Most of them book out only on Saturday night and book in on Sunday evening.
How enlightened! I wonder how the writer would have responded to the concept of regimental weekend duties...
While NS men are supposed to be operationally ready 24/7, is it fair to rob them of all their weekends? What happened to the five-day work week?
These 18-year-olds wake up at the crack of dawn, undergo strenuous physical activities and get to sleep only late at night. It would only be reasonable to give them the complete weekend to let them recuperate.
Was at the photocopy shop this afternoon to make a copy of the Brahms Horn Trio which I'm supposed to play for an up-coming concert.
Me: Auntie ah, can photocopy this book? Very short, only 40 pages.
Auntie: Aiyah I very busy, can leave here come back tomorrow?
Me: Er... how about I photocopy myself? You just show me how to do double-sided and I think I can manage.
Auntie: Ok lor.
I proceed to make the copies myself, on a pleasantly hi-tech machine - I didn't even have to flip to get double sided.
After I was done,
Me: Auntie can help me bind?
Auntie: Can, but can you teach my son this maths problem?
Me: Can, but got discount or not? Tuition must pay one you know.
After some cheery pleasantries, I proceeded to try to help explain how to solve the problems. Typical primary school math questions, "Six years ago, A's age was 4 times of B, and the sum of their current ages is 52, blah blah" . The kid wasn't too interested so I ended up teaching his mum and aunt in mix of English and Mandarin (wow!). Luckily for me, I had had experience solving problems via model drawing from teaching my brother just a few years back, so could still hack up some decently logical explanation. I kinda like teaching actually, explaining ideas to people and seeing the glint in their eyes when they start understanding what's going on is quite fun.
But after all that trouble (I mean, I did do the photocopying myself), still no discount. Quite cheap though, only $3.20. Man I should pirate these things more frequently. The original's probably like 15 times of that.
Some works of music are immediately appealing - they leap out and grab your attention the first time you hear them, no matter who performs them. Others, aren't quite so straightforward, and require a strong musician to interpret the music, to bring it to life, to reveal the hidden treasures, before their beauty becomes obvious.
Before today, Prokofiev's 1st violin concerto was to me, an average work. Structurally it just isn't very tight, and some how I felt that it just rambled on and on in a semi-dazed state. However Hilary Hahn's performance of it changed my opinion of the work quite a bit. Not only was her technical assurance and tone projection astounding, but her interpretive conviction made me a lot more convinced about the work as a whole. It seems to me as if the concerto is more of a fantasy than a formal concerto, drifting from a dream-like world, to grotesque waltz, to a sarcastic burlesque, and back disappearing to the ephermeral dream world - some real psychological drama at play here. For the encore, Hilary played a solo violin movement by Bach, which revealed her amazingly sophisticated tonal range and control. Imagination, control, conviction - a good mantra as any other to keep in mind when playing.
Following the Prokofiev was Rachmaninov's 2nd symphony. I unabashedly declare it to be one of my favorites despite many claims that it's "way over the top" and "like 10 tubs of ice cream". Sure, listening to it may be like swimming in caramel. Sure, the rising sequential build-ups to the climaxes are cliched, and heave along like an overweight hippo. Sure, it was completed in 1908, when reactions against hyper-romanticism was already in full swing. But the incredible melodies in every movement just about negates every bad thing there is to say about the work for me. I remember the first time I heard the 3rd movement was in a plane on my way to the US. It was one of those moments where you just forget everything, turn the volume to the max and try to absorb every single sound that was coming out of those headphones. The plaintive, soulful melody played by the clarinet, the surging harmonies - how to resist? And what about the climaxes? The conclusion? Certainly very formulaic - apotheosizing the lyrical 2nd subject of the last movement (bringing to mind the oft-repeated phrase, once more with feeling...), a strategy he uses again and again in the 2nd and 3rd piano concerti, the 2nd piano sonata, the cello sonata etc etc, followed by a whirlwind coda. But man is it effective (Just as an aside, the earliest example I know of this device is the Grieg piano concerto. Anyone else knows of an earlier use of this?). Structurally, Rachmaninov does some cool things too, weaving the themes from other earlier movements together, motivic development, incorporation of the dies irae, though admittedly if you listen hard to his other works they do sound quite similar. I guess the bottom-line is that for all its weaknesses and deficiencies, the overt romanticism really pulls you along with it, all those emotional surges demanding physical responses. It's a bit like going to a disco and jumping around like a maniac. After the event it feels really silly, but while you're at it, the emotional and physical carthasis is all that matters.
And yes, unlike the Prokofiev, this one grabbed me the first time I heard it. :)
A few days ago, my brother came back home all pissed-off after playing in a round of the inter-schools tennis tournament.
When asked why he was so miffed, he recounted how he was playing the final match when his team was already up 4-0, which meant they had already won the series. As it was getting late, and the end-result was an already forgone conclusion, his own teammates started turning against him, encouraging him to throw the match, while cheering for the opponent, who was a clearly better player. Even the coach had left ,and the teacher-in-charge expressed his impatience. Worse still, the umpire, who was his team captain (they have this interesting arrangement where the umpire's from one school while the linesmen are from the other), started making dubious calls against my brother, just to speed up the play. How incensed my brother must have been to have his friends turn against him. Where's the sportsmanship? Perhaps the organizers should consider forgoing all matches when the final result of the match-up is uncontestable, thus preventing such an ugly scenario from happening again.
Anyway, here's an interesting link, where some guy developed a context free grammar for generating pretty pictures. The syntax is easy enough to pick up but oh man, I couldn't get anything too exciting out of it. Sigh aesthetics and me just don't quite work out.
Another very cool link, where some guys at Stanford developed a cool algorithm for generating images from the viewpoint of the projector or lightsource. Check out the video, where they demonstrate how they can use their technique to see around corners. Way cool.
