Secreted away on the top floor of Singapore’s
Victoria Concert Hall is a visual exhibition – I would say an audio-visual one,
but someone has vandalised the audio devices – which presents a skeletal but
informative outline of the building’s history as a concert hall, theatre and
public meeting place. It is well worth
seeking out, especially for those who regularly visit the place and never think
of looking beyond the auditoria and toilet facilities. Having turned up too early for Saturday
evening’s concert and finding the doors barred, I took the opportunity to
revisit some of the exhibits and was struck by a faded newspaper page from the
1930s which noted that concerts given by the Singapore Musical Society had
brought the starting time forward – from 9.55pm to 9.45pm (I think – I know it
was sometime well after 9pm!). As the
concert I was too early to attend was due to start at 7.30pm, this set me
wondering about changes to concert-going habits in Singapore.
For the past five years I have been heavily
involved in a major research project into the role of western (classical) music
in Singapore society and in the history of its practitioners and performance
venues. That research has amassed a huge
body of data gathered by students interviewing concert-goers at every kind of
concert and in every venue imaginable. To
date, I have material from 1092 individuals, covering such things as dress
code, musical quality, performance expectations, audience behaviour and
programme choices. I have tried not to
tie the hands of those students who collect this data by giving them specific
goals; instead I have sent them out with a general request to find out what
Singapore audiences like and dislike about attending classical concerts.
Without wishing to pre-empt the research findings,
which I expect to publish in the next two or three years, one issue which is
hardly ever raised by audience members is the starting time of concerts. It seems that Singaporeans are happy with the
current near-standard start time of 7.30pm. When one of Singapore’s newer orchestras, re:Sound,
declared that they were going to “break with tradition” and begin their
concerts at 8.15pm, some comments were made, but it’s too early yet to find any
quantifiable resistance to this later start-time. In any case, Singapore concerts notoriously
start later than advertised and audiences seem to make a point of arriving even
later.
The Thailand Philharmonic starts its evening
concerts at 7pm, the Hong Kong Philharmonic’s concerts usually start at 8pm,
while the Malaysian Philharmonic begins its main stage concerts at 8.30pm (in
its very early stages, part of my job was to run down to the bar in the
shopping complex outside the hall to warn them to remain open beyond their
usual 10pm closing time on those weekdays when concerts were held; and the fact
that they did has kept them securely in business for the last 20 years).
What dictates the ideal concert start time
and why does it vary from country to country?
The answer is simple; local lifestyles.
The 7.00pm start time for the Bangkok orchestra is necessitated by the problems
of getting around the city after dark, while the 8.30pm start in Kuala Lumpur
was decided upon to avoid any potential clash with Muslim prayer times. 7.30pm seems to suit Singaporeans, who finish
work usually around 6.30pm. and like to catch the concert before going on to
eat or heading off home. But while
nobody in our research registered any strong feeling about the 7.30pm concert
start time, many showed a distinct preference for knowing in advance concert
ending times.
When I wrote the programme notes I made a point
of putting in the most accurate timing for each individual work I could find,
based on previous performances by the conductor or messages coming out of
rehearsals. But this only told people
who were already at the concert, and only now are the powers-that-be putting
out estimates of concert ending times in advance for potential ticket
purchasers. Our research has shown that
this is something Singapore concert-goers would dearly appreciate; yet it seems
beyond the wit of anyone to get it right. Most announcements about concert length are
grotesquely inaccurate - the idiocy of looking at the CD tracklist and assuming
it works in a live concert is still very much the way many concert-organisers in
Singapore guess timings.
The ultimate failure of this came on Saturday’s
concert. Billed as lasting 60 minutes,
it actually lasted 100 – and did not even have an interval. Quite how such a monumental miscalculation
over timing was made defies belief. After
all, this was new concert series, modelled on the “Swire Denim” series in Hong
Kong, where evening concerts offer unusual repertory but encased tightly within
a 60 minute time frame. Those who might
have been tempted to attend in the knowledge that they would still be able to
catch a movie or an extended dinner after the concert, will know better next
time.
Back in the 1930s people worked later,
dined longer, and ended their evening with the concert. We live in a different age, and the idea of
grabbing a bite to eat both before and after the concert is the norm; as is the
idea that the concert comes at the beginning of the evening, not at its climax. It is time we appreciated this change in
lifestyle amongst Singaporeans and looked to a more precise and reliable way of
letting them know, not when the concert begins, but when it ends.
I reviewed Saturday’s concert for the Straits Times. A sub-editor didn’t like my piece as it “didn’t
say enough about the music”; I would argue that my job is to review the
performance not the repertory, but changes were made to the published piece
(not all by me). Here’s the original;
Reich
in 60 Minutes
Singapore
Symphony Orchestra/Brad Lubman (conductor)
Victoria
Concert Hall
Saturday
(12 January)
Marc
Rochester
The first of the
Singapore Symphony Orchestra’s new Red Balloon concert series did not quite go
according to plan. Billed as programmes of unusual repertory contained within
an hour’s concert, instead of the promised 60 minutes of Reich, we had 40
minutes of his music and around another 40 of music by Bela Bartok.
Add to that the
concert’s late start and two extended on-stage commentaries given to drown out
the clutter of major stage reorganisations, and we had a concert which lasted
as long a full-length evening concert.
A part of the plan
which did survive was that of lifting the SSO up and above its familiar territory
of late-19th/early-20th century repertory. The music of Steve Reich may be about the
most accessible there is by a contemporary composer, and it has already
attracted an enthusiastic following in Singapore in the wake of recent visits
by high-profile Reich-performing ensembles.
The Great Man himself came here a while back and performed before a
packed and adulatory Esplanade audience.
But Reich’s music is
not a frequent feature of the SSO repertory, and we might have hoped that Brad
Lubman, who has regularly collaborated with Reich, could have inspired the musicians
to find something in this music other than sheer hard labour.
Pulse, apparently
receiving its Singapore premiere, carried on relentlessly above a pounding bass
guitar – incongruously played by a bald-headed guy in white tie and tails – but
lacked any variety of tone or colour, while the famous City Lights, cleverly
intermingling sampled sounds from the New York streets with orchestral effects,
never fails to amaze, but managed, here, to sound remarkably ordinary despite
Lubman’s obvious involvement in the music.
What emerged most powerfully from these performances was a sense of such
intense concentration from the players that one expected to see smoke billowing
from their ears.
There was plenty
of musical smoke wafting around, but that was part of the weird, almost spooky
soundworld of Bela Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. The sole reason for its incongruous inclusion
in this concert appeared to be that it was written the same year that Reich was
born. But it was a good choice in that
it gave the SSO the opportunity to play something more firmly in their
comfort-zone.
From the
desiccated, eerie viola theme which opens the work to the raucous razzmatazz of
the finale, the orchestra was clearly in its element. The gentlemen of the percussion section
delivered their parts with the flair, dynamism and brilliance we have come to
expect of them, while Shane Thio was a rock-solid presence on the piano. Whether or not Aya Sakou was equally adept must
remain a mystery – from my vantage point in the balcony, her celesta was
totally inaudible.
Only one person
seemed uneasy with all this musical fun; Maestro Lubman. His rigid, sharply-focused beat gave the work
a certain militaristic character, but marched right past all the many moments
of musical magic with barely a sideways glance.
And how happy are we to have contributed to that business! (Paragraph 4)
ReplyDeleteDifferent countries do seem to have quite different preferences for concert start times, duration, interval length, punctuality or otherwise, formality, etiquette, clapping, expectations for encours... the list is endless. Touring musicians must feel quite at sea. It would be fascinating if you end up with some data based observations.
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