´óÏó´«Ã½

Sit up, arms folded, and pay attention. Today's topic: musical demographics! Bet you never heard of that one? Actually, it's musical chairs – we inadvertently played it at our massive music party called 'Listen Here', a four day bonanza of seven free events. Some interesting demographics occurred or, to put it in the vernacular, "Whose bum ended up on which seat?" This open house weekend was a wow. Lots turned up and had lots of fun. Lots of buzz. But, who turned up to what, and why? If you were there, contact us, via questionnaire, BlogSpot or pigeon post.
The context
The RSNO had run a popular summer prom season for decades. But it's been sagging in recent years, and so it was binned. Last Thursday they had their own new fun type experimental bash, and a good bunch of new faces turned up.....and then they're doing it with Elvis Costello. On the same day we had the first do of our open weekend, a free performance of Beethoven 8 and the inimitable Christian Tetzlaff playing the Brahms Violin Concerto. Lots of new faces appeared, very few of our regulars. Were they stateless wanderers from the defunct RSNO proms? On Friday we did 'Classics Unwrapped', popular extracts showcasing three very young Scottish soloists. All tickets for Thursday and Friday went. Then on Saturday we did a 'Here and Now', cutting edge Radio Three stuff, consisting of three (yes three) brand new violin concertos. By squeaky gate standards, a very good turnout, though not our usuals. It was free, but would a huge number stomp out, having not realised what was on the menu? Three or four left at the interval. The violin and piano recital on Friday morning was packed, by any chamber music standards. Our 'if-you-can-hold-it-bring-it-and-play-it', Play It Again, session on Saturday morning was the best yet (there was a sea of 'cellists). All the ´óÏó´«Ã½ groups have done this Play It Again programme all over the UK, and ours is the only one that seems to have taken root. Lastly, the two family shows, Our Planet, on Sunday afternoon were equally well attended, with lots and lots of children.
The observations
Way back in the Jurassic period, when I came to Glasgow, The SNO Proms were a major feature. The old Kelvin hall was full for a fortnight, you couldn't get tickets, and, if there was actually room to sit on the floor, the hard concrete focused your attention – this whole listening experience being enriched by the reek of elephant pee, deeply engrained in the building from the Christmas circus. The programmes were far reaching: slam bang Tchaikovsky nights, yes, but modern music, first performances as well ..... eek! We, the ´óÏó´«Ã½ SSO, always had a guest appearance. It wasn't just Gibson's ample charisma that created such a good season, was it? Thousands of you must have really had fun with the music.
That's it. There's got to be fun. And I'm not going tell anyone what that fun 'should' be.
In our Here And Now programme, oor ain Elizabeth Layton gave an inspiring airing of Oliver Knussen's concerto, and Tetzlaff played Jörg Widman's concerto, even more inimitably than the Brahms on Thursday. As I mentioned, you didn't all stomp out. It struck me, as things do, that the sound world of both these concertos was very much the same as the Berg violin concerto. A struggling hero playing an intense solo line, emotional evisceration with very little let up, except in the last movement of the Knussen. The solo line in Scena by Harvey, played by Liz, was similarly operatic, though in a sound world more like Messaien's. The next step, as I suggested in my last blog, is to think one stage beyond the immediate sound world, and tune into the person behind the music. What is being said? Well, and don't be shocked, is it the same in these pieces as in the Brahms? Are the Knussen and Widman ever going to be as popular as the Berg, let alone the Brahms? Obviously not? So, what are we all going to be listening to in 50 years, if we can't get past the 150 year classical and romantic stratum? If you heard some of the China Focus programmes you'll have heard deep discussions about this. They've got 80M kids learning Bach two part inventions. Who knows?
Your homework
So you, you musical psephologists, you tell us what folk are going to come to listen to, or participate in, in future. What should music managers here, or there in China, be talking about? Most important, what do you really find to be fun?

Anthony

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We've been back a week. Those sights and sounds left hanging around in my brain (ear worms) have quietened down, the jet lag has gone..... and the Beeb's busy doing its Big China Thing. There's no let up. Playing Mendelssohn's Scottish to pretty small audiences in stunning new concert halls seems to pale somewhat, compared to the sheer range of exciting and vital China stuff the ´óÏó´«Ã½ is putting out. Someone commented that we'd had sell out audiences – none of them were – most were just about OK, a couple were embarrassing. However, the tour was as exciting as any tour that I have done, and all those who turned up went away smiling. I haven't got it in for old Felix, I'm as aware of and as sensitive to the greatness of his music as anyone. But I want to summarize some of the questions that I threw up in my blogs from China. Those fantastic concert halls blew my mind. They're screaming out, "Think, imagine, innovate!" Is there a risk that one or two of them might become dusty white elephants in fifteen years time? Are they just going to be museums for the informed élite? I was about to visit the big museum in Hong Kong (stunning new building in the spectacular new water-front concert hall complex), and the friend I was with commented, "I can't face any more Chinese porcelain". Unwittingly, that summed up the dilemma. I'd be the last person on the planet to undervalue the need for museums and public libraries. But. At the end of a long and insignificant career in orchestral playing I find myself obsessing over and over about what it is that we're supposed to be doing. So often we seem to be sitting there performing stylised and anaesthetized versions of nineteenth century music. Don't misunderstand me, I'll never tire of Beethoven 5 or the Grieg piano concerto. Is the lifeblood of music going to be museum curatorship? Some of it, yes. What is the future of creativity – performance and management? We play music from about 150 years of European tradition. Is this tiny stratum of European culture the final destination of global musical art? After a hundred years not one piece by Schoenberg has made it to the charts (though you might catch Verklärte Nacht on Classic FM). None of the 'names' of the twentieth century has established any sort of popularity. I'm neither saying that they should, nor that you should like their stuff. I'm just posing the questions. When I joined the orchestra in '69 we played more first performances than we do now. Before virtually every first performance I groaned to myself, "Are we actually going to hit you with this stuff?" The cerebral stuff that was so 'fashionable' at that time was mostly dire, meaningless and an insult to the vocation of a performing musician. Not one of us had any faith in what we were about to play. Are the players all ignorant proles who don't know anything about music? So, have we all retreated into the safety of museum creativity – just keep showing the same stuff, carefully polishing it up so that it looks its best, and leave new music outside in the ghetto where it belongs? Mercifully, a lot of recent new music is trying to re-connect. But great damage has been done. You don't trust us anymore. You've had your ears and brains battered by nonsense, and your mind is justifiably closed. I'm not a reactionary old codger! I love working with composers, I'm fascinated by new music, and I never tire of hearing new ideas and sounds. Bringing a new composition to life gives me as much of a buzz as any aspect of our job. Some of what we have to play is going to be duff, that's inevitable, but that's never going to be a reason to stop being open. I often hear the cry, "I don't understand that stuff". The chances are that if you don't understand something, someone is speaking nonsense. And that goes for a lot of contemporary art. Hey, enough of us are intelligent enough to know the difference – n'est-ce pas? Tune into Lucy Duran's World Routes on Radio 3, and you'll often hear completely untrained musicians absolutely letting rip. Forget the strangeness of the sounds – and they can be strange – tune into the human being behind it. This week she was the far side of the back of beyond in south west China recording a bunch of human beings (that's you's and me's) playing bits of grass and leaves – you could hear that they knew where music is at. Listen to Hilary Hahn playing the Schoenberg violin concerto (now, there's some odd sounds) and you'll hear a musician letting rip – really making music, really telling you a story. Are you ready for it? That's me finished my drum banging bit. But it just so happens that this weekend we have a four day open house at the City Hall, which is the biggest single outreach event that the orchestra has ever done. There's all sorts of goodies on show, including our good selves, so come along – and let's hear what you think.

An abiding image from our trip to China: the crowded streets of Shanghai, a city of 20M, one of the zazziest cities in the world, thousands of young people out on the streets, and on one a T shirt with 'YOU CHOOSE' emblazoned on it. Here, in the west, that would simply be a bit of woolly teen-think, there, in China........? Have you heard, they've started a massive educational programme in which, by the stadium-full, they are learning to shout louder in English to make sure they are understood – they've learned something from us, then?

Anthony

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After 6 airports, 6 hotels, 8 concerts, about 50 litres of bottled water, 1 entire spray can of insect repellent and more terrifying coach-miles than I care to remember, we're finally on our way back to Glasgow (currently blogging in Dubai, don't you know...). My blogs fizzled out in Zhongshan, sorry about that. The last few days of the tour have been manic, all self-inflicted (shopping! sights! snake-meat!...only kidding). Last night Douglas Templeton said that he thought Hong Kong was "like a China theme park". I agree and I loved it all the same.

So, since it's about 5am here I'll skip the details and get straight to my cheers and boos. In no particular order...

Cheers:

1) Decadent afternoon tea at the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong
2) Nicola's Sibelius
3) Food (see no. 5 below)
4) The ever-patient, ever-efficient, never-off duty management team
5) The great wall
6) Airports with free WIFI
7) Killie and Ian's Auld Lang Syne
8) Cocktails at the top of our hotel in Hong Kong
9) Tour hero, Allan Hannah
10) Fantastic halls

Boos:

1) Rushing in and out of Shanghai
2) Things that bite
3) Finally conceding and buying a pair of fake 'Crocs' for the monsoon weather
4) Hotels being changed at the last minute
5) Scales (not the musical kind) in almost every hotel bathroom
6) 'Dynasty' and 'Great Wall' wine
7) Jetlag
8) The utter shame of giving in to a McDonalds
9) Getting sunburn when it was raining
10) Squidslice – Air China's idea of a mid-flight snack

A couple of Quotes of the Day, over tea at the Peninsula Hotel...

Julia Carpenter - "who'd have thought happiness could be found in a de-crusted cucumber sandwich?"

Jo Sutherland - "we are lucky...this is a fantastic job, sometimes"

And one more...a notice at the hotel in Shenzhen (does it make anyone else think of ?):

David Chadwick

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We were to be off to Macau for our last show of this tour. That fell through, and Hong Kong agreed to arrange a replacement concert – very convenient, because our flight back was from Hong Kong. Then, more problems, not least the earthquake aftermath, and Hong Kong cancelled, just a week before our departure. The flight back couldn't be re-jigged. Our management had a very sweaty day examining a very large pear shaped thing on their desk. They didn't cancel, and today, off we go to Hong Kong. A couple of days to kill – the annual dragon boat race, the shops (I don't want to know), the monsoon. The SSO did a memorable fortnight's residency in the Hong Kong festival in '77 – a few of us oldsters remember it well. Hugh MacDonald was on the staff at the Chinese University and invited us out to hear some Chinese classical music. Years later, as our director, he was the impetus behind our two trips to China, and our move to the Glasgow City Halls. He was on the staff at Stirling University in '80, fighting to save the SSO. At that point, there was even talk of moving the band to Stirling! Life in the MacRobert Centre might (might) have been better than extinction. In describing stuff here in China, I'm always slipping into generalisations and caricatures. That's bad. I was dismissive about this place, Shenzhen. Sure, I wouldn't choose to live here, but I don't need to live here. If I was a poor Chinaman from the sticks, and I had an opportunity to work here.........? We all have our own world to live in, an infinitely precious capsule of our own aspirations and fears, and we can only start where life plonked us down. To understand China you have to grasp geographical scale and population densities that are beyond our imagination. Vastly different imperatives operate here. We see the one child policy as a gross imposition by the totalitarian regime, a bullying denial of human rights. Here, whether you like the policy or not, it is a policy that will save you from chaos and death. The burocracy here drives you nuts. Perhaps this is the flip side of a much deeper need. Here, with thousands of years' experience of massive population densities, the need for order is an over-riding imperative. Things must be where you left them, because when things go pear shaped, the pears are very big – and thousands die. Is that just mindless inflexibility? Everyone has their role and their place. This can lead to stifling inefficiency, and petty autocracy on every rung of the system. We have our equivalent as we individually abrogate responsibility for just about everything, we shun initiative and blame 'them'. Written on the side of one of our busses in Suchou: "Think, imagine, innovate". That was the soccer chant of Greg Dykes' ´óÏó´«Ã½.

Last night, what shouldn't have been the last concert turned out a winner. Circumstances meant that there was a bit of an interruptus feeling left in the air. Nicola gave everything and everybody noticed. Special qualities are needed to be the figurehead of a tour, and she has them. We were brilliant (need I say it?) – showing off in the fantastic acoustic, and with that 'last day of term' abandon. But the Mendelssohn symphony? Yeah, OK, the beautiful bits were beautiful. My problem with the piece is that playing it feels a bit like taking the children around a stately home and trying to get them excited about the wonderful furniture, when they would really rather be outside climbing trees and making bonfires (and so would I!). Rehearsing that sort of music is like polishing the furniture, so that the light can show it up better – reflecting and revealing. We did all of that yesterday. Music has to tell a story, and that story has to grab the audience. Mendelssohn's story is so stylised, well dressed, urbane and well spoken – I yearn for something a bit more open air and sweaty. But then, Chinese culture is the ultimate in stylisation and correct dress. I'd love a chance to hear what some of them thought about while we were playing it, or even better, what they felt. But I won't get that chance, because we're on the way home now. 'Here' and 'there' are going to mercifully merge into the same thing, and stay that way for a while. I hope plenty of us will keep up the habit of eating fresh greens three times a day. I grew pak choi in my allotment last year – we could revolutionise the Scottish diet. Innovate!

Anthony

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Here, the big man looking down on us from the park is Deng Xiaoping. One of the good guys? He outwitted Mao, then, as leader, went on to be the inspiration for this astounding commercial revolution. "I don't care what colour the cat is, as long as it catches mice". A new form of socialism is born. And Shenzhen. This is Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Think big – square it – you've got China. Think big – cube it – you've got Shenzhen. This was a fishing village in 1977 when we looked over from the Hong Kong border. Now it's a giant money farm. Mile after mile of housing slabs, stacked close like at a container depot. Words fail me, it's brain battering, my adjectives crumble like a biscuit on the pavement. This place is a money mono-culture. And still, a slap up hotel meal costs £3. A lot less round the corner, if you don't mind the rats on your feet! (Could do with one of Deng's cats.) The biggest concert hall complex we've seen yet. Our bit of the complex includes a concert hall (visually and acoustically equal to the Berlin Filharmonie), a theatre, recording studio and lavish peripheral facilities, all in a huge world class elegant new building. This whole structure has a mirror copy, the mirror side containing the biggest public library that I have ever seen. Around the spacious piazzas are huge book shops, record shops, electronics shops...... Have you got the message yet? A lot of us are asking, "Why are we here?" We wouldn't be unless we've got something they want, and that 'want' will have money in the mix somewhere, even though there is no profit for anyone in our particular little venture. Is it just that they want us to see their big one, and tell you about it? Do they want to be seen chumming around with the ´óÏó´«Ã½? Our new ´óÏó´«Ã½ job descriptions say stuff about our ambassadorial duties. Actually, I'm for that.

China has built a physical infrastructure for the arts like nobody in their wildest dreams could have imagined. Have they built the infrastructure for education and management that will fill these buildings? No. Not yet, anyway. Is that part of what they want from us? If they pump in money in the way they have with the building projects........look out, World. Maybe. Can you buy a cultured public – off the peg, complete with a tradition of concert going? How long might it take to create a concert going society – for any genre of music – people who play instruments, know about music and have the income to buy tickets? The world-wide tidal wave of technological toys and distractions has inundated Chinese towns even more than in the UK. How will the 'high arts' compete? We, with all our wisdom and experience, are gasping for the answer to that question; it's a sword of Damocles hanging over us all. Those arts that need patience, a bit of education and training, and free time. Does society, do communities, need 'high art'? Here there is a post-Tiananmen Square generation (19 years last Wednesday), only briefly here in this city for the feeding frenzy. This is a 'Special Economic Zone', a protected zone. Allan will tell you about that protection: he had four machine guns stuck in his ribs, and a turret machine gun behind those, to show just how well protected it is. After a sleepless night in a flea ridden dump of a hotel his nuclear smile malfunctioned. His £1m cargo, tenderly transported in a clonking rust bucket, will bring them Mendelssohn. Will Mendelssohn do it for them? My answer to that comes in four letter words. But I'll tell you what did do it for them: Alistair Savage and Ian Crawford (fiddle and bass) doing Scots stuff at our childrens' concert last night. Nicola also. Here Auld Lang Syne is well known as the Friendship Song. Alistair and Ian played a hauntingly beautiful version, dedicated to the earthquake victims. That did it for them. There's been a massive wave of goodwill and nationalism following the quake, a focussing on the immediate task, cutting red tape, naming and shaming where there's corrupt use of charity money. We have a 'proper' concert tonight, with Elgar, Sibelius and the full Mendelssohn symphony experience. I'll let you know how we get on. That's if we get to the hall through the monsoon deluge.

Anthony

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Ten hours travel got us down here yesterday, the monsoon waiting to greet us, ending with a two hour coach trip across the Pearl delta, a stretched out rollercoaster of huge motorway bridges. I lost all sense of direction, further confused by sitting in a revolving restaurant. This morning, the dying stutter of my tourist conscience egged me out – don't sit on your lazy arse, get out and soak up the new tropical world. It turned out to be a cheap sauna. I walked up a sort of Tottenham court road, solicited to buy a £3 Rolex or more carnal delights (wow, in this heat!), passed shops, each blasting its own music out onto the pavement. Why do we do this? Is this din anything to do with music? What does it do to the brains of folk standing in it, seven days a week? ........I decided to let my colleagues do the tourist duties today.

Nicola is playing the Sibelius. It is less obviously about the Finnish landscape than most of his music and I'm wondering what sort of response it evinces here in China? What shared resonance is struck? The lonely soul, striving across an unforgiving landscape? Could I discuss those mythological undertones here, even if I had fluent Chinese? Their culture is based on taming nature. The inscrutable orient. Are we forever separated by incompatible systems of language and thought? Does the music somehow sail over that chasm of non comprehension? Music, especially western music, was virtually banned for years. Beethoven was burnt, and now the phoenix is rising. And what about the Elgar, we are playing Froissart and the string Serenade? Might Elgar evince the Edwardian gent living up the river in Guangzhou (Canton) dressed in his ridiculous clothes, an occidental curio for ridicule and distrust? Froissart is a miniature tone poem about chivalry. Its Englishness verges on the embarrassing even to me, an Englishman. Was that chivalry just a fantasy, stemming from the need to justify the rabid selfishness of the Victorian 'Great Game' – exploitation under the guise of exploration? The sort of chivalry displayed by Francis Younghusband, who invaded and defeated (!?) Tibet in 1904, massacring medievally armed Tibetans – widely perceived as a noble venture, which then led on to Younghusband being in a position to commission Parry's setting of Jerusalem? Do I feel a little cringe coming on? I hope I don't sound too negative about these things; I'm an enthusiast, and I also happen to love ironic juxtapositions. Incidentally, my vision of chivalry has been permanently sullied. I was brought up on the usual English diet of King Arthur and Richard the Lionheart. I don't buy into that stuff now. Recently I suddenly realised that a knight in armour on a horse had no possibility of dismounting and attending to nature's calls.......all day. Quite takes the romance out of it. (I'm sorry, but in hotter climes one tends to get a bit focussed on these matters.) And Richard; he wasn't English, could hardly speak any, hated us, (I'll delicately avoid any mention of his outrageous relationship with the French king), and through sheer wanton brutality went on to do more than anyone to lay the foundations of the blood feud with Islam. He's the icon of chivalry we have standing high in front of the Houses of Parliament. Could we please have some statues of noble people – a new hagiography?

Back to the music. (Where have I heard that before?) Most of us are zonked by the tropical heat and travel fatigue. The audience was small for the size of hall, and we were sitting a long way back into the stage. There was a 'running on empty' feel. It was fine, we can at least imitate the real thing (like the Rolex). But Nicola, she played with an astounding heroic assurance, different from anything before! Where do they get it from?

Standing high on a hill by the theatre is Sun Yat-sen. He was the founding father of modern China, a sympathetic figure admired by all, a visionary democrat and socialist, who turned down the presidency; but who also didn't live long enough to see his great ideas taking root. Lucky he didn't see what was coming next. He stands in a beautiful park in his home town, looking down on a vast and elegant European style opera house complex. What was he thinking - about things now, about us? What does he think about China having just 'bought' the Congo? (The West needs to nip along quick to that supermarket.) Next up, Shenzhen, the massive manufacturing zone and export gateway. I read that if you bussed the entire population of Glasgow there, you still wouldn't be able to fill the current job vacancies.

Anthony

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I think it's fair to say that I didn't see Suzhou (pronounced Sue-Joe ...ish). The smog, humidity and low clouds meant that visibility was incredibly poor. Distant outlines of more skyscrapers was about all I could make out. Our hotel was a resort-style place, out of town and next to a lake (which seemed to be the spiritual home of the mosquito and all-things-bitey). If Shanghai was a hit & run gig, I don't know what that makes Suzhou...we didn't even make it into the city centre.

Here's the hall in Suzhou (pardon my below-par photography):

Yesterday we flew down from Shanghai to Guangzhou. The south is like a different country. It's lush and green - wherever there's a break in the concrete, there's something growing in it. I was feeling pretty proud of myself after adding 'you're welcome' and 'goodbye' to my Mandarin micro-vocabulary. Down here everyone speaks Cantonese...back to square one.

Playing 5 concerts in 5 days was tiring for all so a night off last night was very welcome, particularly when followed by a 4.30pm call today. Zhongshan didn't even get a mention in my guidebook, nor feature on the map (having a mere 2.4 million people). It was an unexpected treat; a climb up to the Fufeng Pagoda and the Buddhist Temple and a chance to continue honing our bartering skills at a few local shops. I said Suzhou was humid - I take it back. Suzhou wasn't a patch on Zhongshan.

(on the way up to the Fufeng Pagoda)

The concert in Zhongshan was a sticky affair, if there was any air-con, it was losing the battle. Another good hall but a very disappointing turnout. It would be generous to say it was 1/3 full (apparently the ticket prices had been set unreasonably high by the promoter/venue). What the audience lacked in numbers they made up for in warm appreciation and by the end we were cheered/waved off stage. The Eightsome Reel strikes again.

(the hall in Zhongshan)

The wardrobe boxes are getting distinctly pongy at this stage of the tour, or at least the blokes' are. What is it...ladies glow, gentlemen perspire but musicians drip? By the time they make it back to Glasgow, with 8 concerts-worth of effort soaked into them, they'll be positively steaming. If you come along to any of our Listen Here! concerts, you'd better hope we've had time to do some laundry!

Quote of the Day:

Jessica Sullivan, over breakfast - "this cereal tastes like it was posted from Britain...4 years ago"

David Chadwick

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Beautiful. Early sun, peaceful lake, timeless ancient image fishing boat, singing birds, heron poised. A notice warning me, "Not playing in water. Attention matter". That's Chinese: no grammar (lucky them). All welling up in my mind. Much more than the music. A notice at the motorway toll gate, "Parking and swiping card". Why would you want to park here? That's Chinese again: no verbs – that's how they order you to stop and swipe your card. They only have images, written as pictograms, which you can read whatever your dialect, or even if you're Japanese. Today's question. If this is how your language works, how will this affect how you think and feel about things, and how you will go about doing things?

We are doing the music, our biz, well. Another great concert in Suzhou last night. Nicola played like an angel, with passion and abandon. At the hushed start of the Sibelius violin concerto, a baby, one of several in the audience, started squalling. It didn't throw her one iota. She seemed to direct herself deeper into the music; maybe the sound of the baby tapped into an instinctive emotional or hormonal wellspring. Will you forgive me such an un-PC comment? ...... I wonder how the babies got on last week with the Frankfurt Symphony's Mahler nine?

I have to get back to the theme of 'size'. Bear with me. I'll try to be brief. The concert hall complex in Suzhou is bigger than in Beijing. An opera house, a theatre, a concert hall, a science centre, a Cineplex and an IMAX, plus some shops, restaurants – all contained under a huge canopy the shape of a crescent moon. The crescent enfolds a giant pearl, itself the size of Perth's new concert hall, the pearl's roof is a waterfall coming down to the ground over rocks dotted with full size trees. Outside the crescent are house sized pearls – exclusive shops (and Starbucks). The whole thing in a lakeside setting, with expansive walkways, seats, trees, shrubberies and sculpted flower beds – botanic gardens, actually. The crescent is covered with an organic silk worm type web of metal work, lit from behind at night.

The little flash of poetry at the beginning (cute, wasn't it?) fluttered into my mind at our hotel first thing this morning. Though as I write we are already nearly a thousand miles south, and the monsoon has just started. That hotel has been surrounded by beautifully laid out gardens and lakeside walkways – exactly what the Chinese excel at. They've built a new city there. Probably the size of Glasgow....... give or take a few kilometres....... who cares. Miles and miles of roads – six lane dual carriageways with cycle tracks either side, each section separated with lines of mature trees and shrubs (that makes five rows), hundreds of thousands transplanted from those nurseries that I mentioned. But in this city they haven't built the houses yet! In the far distance you catch sight of an occasional new factory, an up-market block of flats, temple or pagoda, and eventually our extravagantly sumptuous hotel. The entire city infrastructure is in place, beckoning huge investment. Meant to impress? I might have been an exec for some European business, looking for new locations and profits. I'd have done what I did – sat by the lake, breathed in the picture, and sighed, "Yes, we'll do it here". Dozens of hotel staff carefully picked – to smile and anticipate our every need. We beat them with our invasion at lunch time, but they got the bar organised for our return. I expect we each drunk (corporately) a week's worth of their salary. What did they think of this crumpled troupe as they pocketed the profits? Sweaty barbarians.....don't know the value of anything! When they have a flourishing city, and we're dependent on their products, who'll have 'face'? Have you read Sun Tzu's 'The Art of War' (sixth century BC)? It's about gaining the upper hand over you – without you ever knowing. Steve Bingham assures me the heron was a black-crowned night heron.

Anthony

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What about the music, though? Well, you know how I'm always going on about the 'what is it', and 'why on earth do we do it' of music. Tours are grist to this particular mill. We've done three programmes now, over four nights. Nicola Benedetti has done Vaughan Williams' The Lark Ascending three times as a sort of savoury sorbet after her Mendelssohn or Sibelius. I thought this was a great choice for China; it's nature music, which they're heavily into here, and it's full of the pentatonic sounds , these are made with the black note scale which you hear in a film whenever they want to tell you, "We're in China now, folks". In Beijing and Shanghai The Lark didn't work, despite Nicola's ravishing playing. It has long, very quiet bits, where the lark disappears up into the sunlight and the whole world seems to stop in a blur of heat haze. I love it. They coughed and fidgeted. Then, last night, in Hangzhou, they really listened – I don't think there was one cough during the lingering evaporation bit at the end. What happened that was different? What do we (that's you) as an audience bring to a performance that will make it a unique experience – for our self and for anyone else in the hall with us? If you'd been in Shanghai you'd have thought, 'this is duff'; and if you'd been in Hangzhou you'd have thought, 'this is great'. My first guess was, 'they don't do stasis here'. Their nature music is beautiful, but it tends to bubble and burble like a brook, and flitter and dance like a butterfly. Blink, and they've finished the job and are onto the next thing – if you'll forgive me the shallow generalisation. I wouldn't want to have to sell Bruckner's music here. The boring answer is that we all obviously hear each piece of music through our own particular sieve – of experiences, familiarities, prejudices, temperament, and mood of the day – to name but a few. But, before you start shuggling that sieve, what are those ingredients that we share, that we share across all cultures and reaching down to the deepest roots of our common humanity? You'll be relieved to hear that I'm not going to try to answer that – just now, anyway.

Here in Hangzhou (and 'here' is going to be 'there' in Suchou before I get this finished) we had a few laughs on stage. They like their music here. We were in a ginormous well used opera house, liberally adorned with pictures of past opera productions and their stars. The audience call bell is a great long ponderous set of chimes, and the guy pressing the button for it really likes his job. Whatever the first piece, at the beginning or after the interval, we had to listen to it – all the way through – just before playing. On the second night rather more players than might be good for decorum started playing along with and harmonising the chimes – those players that weren't already corpsing. I hope our hosts weren't offended! Nicola had just finished the Sibelius (you know it? – big flourish, all our arms up in the air) and turned round to start for the wings, expecting to return for several curtain calls, and the house lights were up and the interval announcements had started. Even worse: up until the start, and immediately after the final clapping had finished, they played Chinese muzak over the tannoy. You could be all of a jitter in anticipation before the performance, or in a daze of rapture after it – you would have to manage to sieve out that muzak. As I sit here in my room, I have to sieve out Chinese muzak that is playing in the corridor outside – and has been since early each morning.

Anthony

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Traditionally, at some point everybody gets a mid-tour lull. Long journeys, short sleeps and always being in a large group gets a bit much and energies dip. Mine occurred in Hangzhou – a strange place. To be honest, I hadn't even heard of Hangzhou before I read the tour schedule; the population here is 6.4 million, almost twice as many people as in Berlin – does my Sino-ignorance know no bounds?

The city itself was pretty dreary, smog-ridden and humid but all of a sudden the 8-lane roads and honking cars cease and you're faced with an enormous lake. Not just any lake, this is the lake, the West Lake, a must-see tourist spot. It was curiously devoid of westerners but absolutely crammed with locals out for a Sunday afternoon stroll. It's a real beauty - think willow trees and distant pagodas. I enjoyed spending most of today there (no rehearsal until 5pm – bonus); a boat ride, a glass of green tea and a good soaking in the rain. The hall in Hangzhou was impressively quirky on the outside but bizarre inside (and by inside, I mean backstage). I wasn't alone in sensing an odd atmosphere there, the long (mostly dark) corridors made it feel like an abandoned school and the whole place had a very foosty smell (can you tell that I've been in Glasgow for over a year now?!). The hotel was an odd one too, some rooms were great, others pretty grim and the 3rd floor was basically a brothel masquerading as a karaoke bar. Perhaps it's just that I've seen Hangzhou through the grey-tinted specs of my mid-tour lull.

Here's the hall:

And the lake, just before it tipped it down:

I can't believe I'm about to say this.....tonight I really enjoyed playing Tchaikovsky 5. Normally I find it really shallow and bombastic but from the opening clarinet melody, tonight's performance took risks and it paid off. The score is littered with f, ff, fff and even ffff, so pacing the climaxes is a hard job. Christoph did this brilliantly tonight, finding space where it often sounds stodgy and curbing the temptation to peak at every fortissimo. By the end, I'd forgotten all about that lull.

Quote of the Day:

A 2nd violinist, yesterday – "have we played Tchaik 5 recently?" *

*bearing in mind a) they weren't joking, b) we rehearsed it last week and c) it's been in the pads for 2 weeks now!

David Chadwick

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