West by East…, far East

Monday evenings are supposed to be quiet evenings, just relax a bit and hang out in front of the television and let the emptiness of the average TV show, take you away from what often seems to be the longest working day of the week.

This week my Monday did start out relatively relaxed with very nice home cooked dinner, but the TV would have to wait for later. A colleague of mine had been promoting a music performance that included his girl friend. He themed it more or less, classical. 

It had been ages since we went to a classical music performance. We used to go often enough back in New York. Especially in the winter it was nice to catch a matinee in Carnegie Hall or Lincoln Center, or on hot summer evenings on a rooftop somewhere in Manhattan.  There was plenty being offered and access was usually easier than to the more popular music genres. Regretfully, as mentioned before, here in Singapore we are not very much (made) aware of what is being offered in the fringes of the Esplanade. So when Richard suggested to attend his girlfriends gig, I thought it was a nice change and I could move my Monday couch night to Tuesday. And then came this invitation to a birthday party at east coast . That of course was the immediate end of our quiet Monday evening. We did decide first to go the concert though.

We arrived slightly early at the Arts House. This however turned out to be a good thing because we had the opportunity to check out this photo exhibit, of images from the Middle East, a nice way to kill some of that time.  

The flyer of the music event looked promising, with what I thought was  an interesting twist, 5 female performance and all from  what I know as former eastern bloc countries, playing music from  'when new music genres appeared across North and South Americas’ presented in Singapore, a global experience I thought.

Gayane Vardanyan (vocal, Armenia)

Tanya Vlaeva (piano Bulgaria)

 Linda Collati (cello, Hungary)

Kseniia Vokhmianina (piano, Ukraine)

Ani Umedyan (violin, Armenia)

As I am by now so much used to, I brought my camera to the event. That turned out to be a bit of a miscalculation. I never realized how loud that shutter is. I managed to take a couple of shots waiting for the louder segments of the compositions, but that was basically impossible during the vocal parts of the performance. Of course everything was fully acoustic. 

So to snap a picture of the vocalist I waited for the first applause to kick in, so I would not bother either musicians or audience. You do what you can. Personally I was most impressed with the first section, The Four seasons by A. Piazzolla performed by violin cello and piano, in my opinion a great music piece with strong Latin American influences. 

But it was altogether as hoped for and expected a nice relaxing evening. That of course only until we arrived at the party, that had been going on for two hours already and left everyone in a very happy state.