That seemingly dwindling group of Christians who call
themselves Catholics believe in the power of saints. To touch their remains, to
visit their shrine or simply to invoke their name in prayer is said to
bring great rewards to the faithful.
Little wonder, then, that the homage Catholics throughout the ages have
performed in the names of various saints has led to a certain distribution of
labour between them. Instead of all these
poor dead saints being barraged on all sides with requests for this, that and
the other, the practice of assigning each human need or activity a Patron Saint
has evolved. Thus we have a Patron Saint
of Music (St Cecilia) who, if you pay due respect and homage to her, especially
on her assigned feast day (22nd November), will bless your
endeavours with success. And, of course,
there is a Patron Saint of Love who is said to perform similar miracles for
those who approach him with due reverence and unquestioning faith. That saint is St Valentine who was beheaded in
the year 270 for refusing to denounce his faith. In 496 Pope Gelasius decreed that he would be
Patron Saint of “affianced couples, bee keepers, engaged couples, epilepsy,
fainting, greetings, happy marriages, love, lovers, plague, travellers, young
people”, and that February 14th, the day on which it is said he was
beheaded, should be his feast day.
While most Catholics no longer pay much heed to St Valentine
(they generally have bigger sanctified fish to fry), the rest of the world does, and February 14th sees vast numbers of people - including those for
whom religious devotion begins and ends with beheading other people and
refusing to eat bacon sandwiches - buying an over-priced red rose and forking
out on an horrendously expensive dinner at a table adorned with a single candle
stuttering out of an old Chianti bottle in the name of a long-dead saint in
whom few believe. The marketing people
have got hold of it and now no February 14th is complete without
lurid red heart-shaped balloons, re-packaged chocolates, special hair-dos and “romantic
getaways”. Even orchestras have got in
on the act and, with St Valentine’s Day this year falling on a Saturday – a pretty
standard concert day for most orchestras – there was no shortage of “Valentine’s
Day Concerts” marketed to serve as an alternative to going to church and
invoking the martyred man’s name in prayer.
Naturally enough, in a place where St Valentine’s Day is treated as
being just about on a par with Chinese New Year or Christmas, the Singapore Symphony
Orchestra got in on the act with a “Valentine’s Day Concert”.
Dozens of young couples, him grasping his mobile phone (nothing
special about that – he’s not let go of it since he was 8), her grasping a
single red rose in a plastic sheath, took the opportunity to have joint selfies
taken with the undeniably gorgeous Victoria Hall as a backdrop, before settling
down for a couple of hours of romantic music.
At least, that was the plan.
As it was, the programme they were treated to was about as
vehemently anti-love as you could get. Whether by accident (which I suspect) or
design (which I’m quite happy to believe was the intent ion all along), the SSO
had programmed three works which did not have an ounce of romance in them and
which, either because of the composer’s background or the music’s origins,
served more as a warning against deep human relationships.
When it comes to love Tchaikovsky is about the worst role-model
you could select. When a young girl
became so besotted with him that she demanded they get married, he agreed: the
experience of married life so appalled him that within weeks he had run away,
sought psychological help and gone so far as to contemplate suicide. Deciding, once the shock of that had died
down, to take another tack, as it were, Tchaikovsky then had an affair with a
young man, only to be accused by his peers of endangering the reputation of his
old school and, if credible recent scholarship is to be believed, handed a jar
of arsenic and told to do the “decent thing”.
On this occasion suicide was not so much considered as successfully accomplished
and, because of love, a great composer’s life was cut short.
The rest of the programme was devoted to the Tango; a dance
which involves a man and a woman getting about as close to each other as they
can without actual physical contact, and performing a series of suggestive movements. The Tango’s origins lay deep in the seedy bars
of Buenos Aires where, if the woman ever allowed the man to come closer in
private than he did on the dance floor, it was usually at the point of a knife
or the exchange of cash. Again, not a
particularly wholesome notion to set before Singapore’s young lovers.
Nevertheless love was in the air during this concert,
although we all had to wait a jolly long time to find it; the opening work,
delayed by some 10 minutes and further extended by an inordinately long gap
between the first and second movements while a goodly chunk of the audience
decided to come into the hall and take their appointed seats. If there is love in Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence it is that of a
Russian composer well into his 50s taking a liking to a certain Italian town,
and I’m not sure St Valentine would ever have regarded that as falling within
his ambit, despite the unusually broad-range of his patron saintly portfolio. There was certainly no love in the
performance we experienced. Possibly taking
the message from the composer and keeping each other very much at bow’s length
both physically and musically, the six string players led by Chan Yoong-Han
played away largely regardless of each other.
The result was some horribly straggly ensemble and such persistently bad
tuning that one wondered how long before the concert started most of them had actually
tuned their instruments; they certainly didn’t bother to do it on stage. Only with the pulsating rhythms of the third movement
did the performance start to feel a little committed, but such was the poor
communication within the ensemble that those lovely little moments where Tchaikovsky
passes a figure between the instruments, were almost wholly lost.
Love came after the interval when Jin Ta and Kevin Loh took
to the stage with Piazzolla’s History of
the Tango. Producing an
extraordinary, disproportionately hefty tone from his golden flute, Jin Ta left
us in no doubt who wore the trousers in this relationship, but through his
marvellously empathetic guitar playing, Kevin Loh was the one who attracted our
attention. Both musicians clearly loved
what they were doing; eye contact, every bit as much as the wonderful musical results,
showed that. As the music progressed,
however, I became almost hypnotised by the effortless fluency of Loh’s playing,
the lovely clarity of his tone and, perhaps more than anything, the instinctive
feel he had for this music and for the antics of his performing partner. The programme booklet told us he was just 14;
if he were twice that age I would still be amazed and deeply in love with his
immaculate guitar playing. I suspect he
is destined to become the next star in the guitar world, and I pray that he
maintains his discreet and subtle virtuosity; it’s just the sort of antidote
the musical world needs to safeguard its future credibility.
The final work, Mike Mower’s Sonata Latino, saw Jin Ta joined on stage with a motley collection
of saxophones, brass and percussion, with a piano and bass guitar thrown into
the mix. More tangos and Latin-American
dances, but this time delivered as a simple piece of fun. Our young lovers may not have left the hall
with their hearts intertwined, but by the end of the concert, the music would certainly have
given them a real lift.
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