A mammoth trip

A couple of weeks ago I got back home for the first time in 5 weeks, to be greeted, of course, by a mound of post as well as all the emails I hadn't got around to dealing with while I was away. I'm only now through this backlog and able to give you an update on what has been happening.

After Iceland I went on to play at the opening of the Melbourne Recital Hall which turns out to be a wonderful place: beautifully designed, excellent acoustics, and 2 great pianos. Piers Lane chose them, and as I was talking to him about it I remembered the one time I chose a piano for a hall - the Horsecross in Perth. That is really a tough job because pianos sound completely different in a small-ish factory room compared to a hall. I learned this to my cost the first time I had to choose a piano for a recording - I went to Steinways and picked out a wonderful, colourful, ballsy instrument which in the recording venue turned out to be much less powerful than I expected. So three days of very hard work followed.

It was a strange experience to play in Melbourne during the recent fires; it was clear people were preoccupied and it makes you question the value of what you are doing. On September 11th 2001 I was due to give a house concert for some friends in London and after seeing these incredibly surreal images on television of planes flying into skyscrapers I really had to ask myself if it was possible to play, and for people to listen. In the end, we decided to continue with the concert and I think it a decision which everyone thought in retrospect was the right one: it turned out to be a very joyful shared experience, in spite of, or maybe even because of the context.

There followed a week in Japan with the NHK symphony, a wonderfully disciplined orchestra. Japan is one of the few places in the world left where you really struggle to get by without speaking their language. That doesn't particularly bother me - I actually quite enjoy the challenge of making myself understood - but I had a salutory experience going to a restaurant without menu where you just order from all the ingredients laid out in front of you. The food was rather good, and before the bill came the waiter showed me their photo album of previous diners - Sting, Britney Spears, Daniel Craig, Christina Aguilera, Brad Pitt etc. etc. I got a bit worried at this point. The bill ended up being just over £100. Still, I heard about someone who went to a hostess bar in the same area, had a few drinks with one of the hostesses, and ended up with a bill for £1000, so maybe I got off lightly.

The final concert of the trip was in Singapore, an old friend of an orchestra which a few years ago happily (for me!) gave up its associate principal clarinet to be my wife. I met up with Jeannie there because she had a concert herself, and then we went on to have a brief holiday in Cambodia and Thailand. I have to say that Cambodia is one of the most extraordinary places I've ever been to. Most famous is the 12th century temple of Angkor Wat which is astonishing, utterly ancient and even alien (and strangely reminiscent of Gaudi, I thought). Hardly less impressive are many other temples scattered around the Siem Reap area. It is impossible to be unaware of the great poverty there and on a trip to the 'floating village' (exactly what it sounds like), we were taken to a shop where you can buy items for the local school at outrageous prices, even by western standards. You then get taken to the school where you hand the items out to the children. I found this a very morally dubious enterprise: the shopkeeper is cheating the children out of the extra supplies they would receive if a fair price was charged, and us tourists are made to feel like heroes handing out measly packets of nuts or pencils to the kids when the main thing we're doing is interrupting their education. Still, it was actually a very valuable experience - to give something directly to people who have so little makes it much harder to ignore the fact that they are the same as you. It is very difficult to take in the reality of economic inequalities around the world, I think, and that experience forced me think about these things in a new way.

—

Comments

I went to your Messiaen concert in Melbourne and thoroughly enjoyed it. It felt really appropriate to hear/see Messiaen's music performed in a hall that looks like the inside of a tree. I certainly didn't have to think twice about booking my tickets when I heard you were coming back to Melbourne to do the Vingt Regards. The fires were the last thing on my mind when I was listening, so in that sense I believe what you were doing was absolutely valuable. Something puzzled me, though - during the concert you had something shiny tucked inside your ear. Was it some sort of microphone?

Posted by Jeff, Melbourne on 01 April 2009

Hi Jeff, I was wearing earplugs which I always use for concerts. Long story, but I'm going to write a blog entry about it in the next couple of days.

Posted by Steven Osborne on 02 April 2009