On Tuesday, I caught Gil Shaham playing with the SSO at the Esplanade, and I had the pleasure of the company of my favourite MEP student - PaRaDoX aka Francis.

Rossini - Overture to Semiramide

The night was opened by an overture, to act as a buffer for concert lategoers. It was rather dramatic for my tastes, but then I'm not really a fan of operatic tunes. The thing about the piece that stuck out was the way the brass overpowered the other instruments, especially the strings, and this was also evident in the later pieces. Quanxing also pointed out that the French Horns were off when they came in, but then I didn't play that instrument for 6 years, so.

Chen Gang/He Zhaohao - Butterfly Lovers Concerto

This piece was an interesting blend of West and East. It involved mainly western instruments (with a few odds and ends, like a gong and a tambourine) playing an interesting blend influenced by Chinese melodies. It was also in this piece that the star of the evening, Gil Shaham, appeared onstage, with noticeably less hair than in his picture for the program.

He was skilful enough, but struck me as being a show-off - not musically, but physically. His body language was overly confident, and the way he jerked his torso and limbs when ending his bars was especially irritating. Hell, just looking at the way he played annoyed me. It might be in vogue to express your emotions while playing, but surely it is possible to play without looking as if you are having an epileptic fit.

I want to be the gong player. Then I'd get paid for banging the gong a few times for the occasional piece.

Tchaikovsky - Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35

This, placed at the end, was the highlight of the evening. So Quanxing came with a score of the piece, borrowed from the NUS library, to pick out the mistakes in the performance. Having a few mistakes is understandable, but according to Quanxing there were 3 distinct tempos during the song - one (rushing) when the orchestra was playing alone, one when the soloist was playing alone, and one (very slow, to avoid mistakes) when the soloist was playing with the orchestra. Not being so musically accomplished, I only noticed that there was something vaguely wrong, and when they played a part markes 'p' at 'f' volume. At least Gil Shaham dampened his movements a bit, so he wasn't so disconcerting to look at.

Even with this many quibbles, Quanxing gave him a standing ovation at the end, "for memorising 500 pages of the score". Though we were pissed off by the lack of an encore, as with the time Quanxing attended a concert with Anne-Sophie Mutter a few years back.


After the concert, Quanxing and I lined up to get Gil Shaham's autograph. Just in front of us in the queue was Andrew Lim (of Under One Roof fame). His hair was half-greyed, he was wearing a black Jewish skullcap, growing Jewish-style facial hair (not shaving so the sideburns flow into the beard and also merge with the moustache) and had white threads attached to his belt. Maybe he was going incognito so no one would recognise him, but his disguise didn't fool the sharp-eyed PaRaDoX! Meanwhile I suggested showing Gil Shaham the part in the SSO concert schedule book where Andrew Lim (sans facial hair and skullcap) was listing which concerts he had his eye on (but didn't shortlist his particular one).

When we finally got to get Gil Shaham's autograph, Quanxing commented on the lack of an encore, at which one of the two sweet young things flanking him interjected: "too tired". Bah. Later, as we walked to Lau Pa Sat for supper, we observed that, for all the security measures - policemen and bag checks, it would be incredibly easy to shoot Gil Shaham, since he was sitting with his back to a pane of glass, and there were bushes nearby in which a gunman could hide and still get a clear shot.

Last note from the night: As we were walking across the Esplanade Bridge, this trishaw zoomed past us - with a radio blasting ah beng techno music. Wth.

***

My friend was on ujournal.com - one of the many LiveJournal clones which set themselves up on different domains while no new features whatsoever, but still are bitches in requiring you to register to properly view your friends' journals, but it suddenly disappeared recently, and he doesn't have any backups on his hard drive.

I suggested using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine and Google's Cache to retrieve his entries, and it turned out that he'd disabled spidering in robots.txt.

This is called gey kiang (hokkien for trying to be too smart).


I gave away one gmail invite and then I got 6 more. Indeed, it is blessed to give :P

Meanwhile, people are selling gmail invites for $4-$20 on Yahoo Auctions. Bah.


Xiaxue gets 1500 hits per day, mostly from rabid fans and raving flamers, but I only get 108, mostly from people looking for schoolgirl porn and zaogengs. Boo hoo.