Gone from here, halfway to there
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
