Saturday, December 02, 2006
First Three Days
Friday, December 1
Friday: the morning is dedicated to the first rehearsals. 9am sharp: Mozart. Hey, where’s Peter? [Gotta have a cello…Inka! go wake him up!]. Getting to know the acoustically dry and atmospherically wet space, all went without a hitch – musically that is. Thu Nga lost her wallet (her room? The internet café? The sidewalk…?) Credit cards to be cancelled, cash to be mourned, and a thumb drive full of info that will be missed… But after rehearsal, lunch at “Friends” (thank you Lonely Planet) though some preferred the open air river view at the Foreign Correspondents Club, known locally as the “FCC” (a coincidence? hmm…I don’t think Howard Stern eats there). Then on to the Royal Palace, or the National History Museum.
To travel the roads is to taste & smell the grinding poverty of peripheral Phnom Penh. Street level shops seem to cluster in districts – one for shoes, a block of cellphone merchants, another for stone Buddha carvers & masons, above which the grimy darkened apartments wave us past with fluttering, tattered laundry. Daily life is lived on the sidewalks – cooking, cutting hair, teaching a baby to walk, changing bandages, all in plain view. A peek down any side street reveals unpaved roads, with garbage sometimes piled down the center of the passageway, swarming with humanity of every age. It may as well be Dickens, were it not for the umber fleshtones and tropical heat.
To arrive at the Royal Palace is a bit like finding Disneyland in the middle of Tijuana. The contrasting opulence, with manicured pagoda-dotted lawns between pristine empty avenues & wide low buildings with fantastic flamelike roof adornments arching into the sky, is a stark reminder of the class differences in this re-emergent society. The acrid cooking smoke that drifts through the palace gates from the homeless encampment across the street casts a melancholy pall, a constant reminder that the power and the glory of any empire is born of human suffering. Beggars and amputees hover around the Palace entrance, while wide-eyed children with emaciated bodies plead with chilled water bottles in hand…
Once the Italian marble stairs have been climbed, hats and shoes removed and shoulders covered, the Silver Pagoda slowly reveals its treasures as the eyes become accustomed to the low light. It soon becomes apparent that this is indeed one of the most extraordinary rooms in the world. Southern Italy may indeed boast of a chapel floor completely covered with exquisite marble portraits of the dignitaries that are buried beneath, but imagine a floor that is entirely paved with 5000 solid silver tiles! Of course the visitors traverse this extraordinary surface treading protective Persian carpets, but enough of the shining surface is visible to take the breath away. And then the eyes raise up to see in the distance an accumulation of precious mineral & metal that is simply jaw dropping. A towering golden pyramidal structure is topped with a two foot seated Buddha carved from solid Emerald (though some guide books insist that it is Baccarat Crystal). In front this amazing dais is a life sized golden Buddha, encrusted with over 9,000 diamonds.
If this were the Metropolitan Museum or the Louvre, there would be armed guards at every corner, and two-inch plexiglass encasing each fantastic sculpture. But here, two skinny middle-aged attendants at either end of the room only occasionally glance up from their reading, usually to check their watches. The glittering Buddha gazes from a vertical sarcophagus made of 1/4” plastic, a simple box whose security is entrusted to a tiny luggage lock.
Cultural cognitive dissonance greets the visitors to the Throne Hall, once the eyes acclimatize to the glare of gold and white. The typical trappings of majesty are displayed in this overwrought display of pomp and circumstance. The culture clash becomes immediately apparent when viewing the high frescoed ceiling which is clearly inspired by countless European palaces. The form & structure is reminiscent of Versailles, but instead of the expected rosy bottomed cherubs, this ceiling is populated with the stylized dragons and demigods of Southeast Asia (you were expecting, maybe, Zeus?). Predictable, but unusual none the less.
Returning to our hotel through the center of town, it becomes immediately clear that Phnom Penh is booming, its renaissance made apparent by an extraordinary number of building sites. The ‘American’ war had ended just a few years before the horrors of the Khmer Rouge destroyed society, and it is gratifying to see such an exuberant response. This is one of the reasons that we are here, to participate in a cultural rebuilding that complements the regeneration of infrastructure.
---------------
Finally! the moment has arrived. After three years of careful planning, intercontinental phone calls and emails, incessant fundraising, travel documents, travel agents, hotels, airlines, etc., and after a morning of rehearsals, frantic running around town via tuk tuk (the ubiquitous motor scooter drawn richshaw/taxis) in search of a vibraphone and a drumset, the Chenla Theatre of the Amrita Performing Arts Center was ready for the Cambodian premiere of their native son’s Aura, preceded by two works of Mozart.
Lots of unknowns, too: how would the Cambodian audience react? Without a tradition of Classical concert going, would there be any problems? As it turned out, there were definitely some unusual activities during the concert. As the musicians filed out on stage for the opening Mozart Flute Quartet, an announcement came over the loudspeakers directing in two languages that all cellphones should be turned off, and that there should be no flash photography. But after the first thirty seconds of music, a young man with digital camera at the ready jumped up and headed right to the edge of the stage, and begins to frame his photograph. After trying a few initial angles, he finally settled on a vantage point, and took the shot (with no flash, thankfully), sauntering back to his seat while reviewing the results. Ten seconds later, a TV camera on a tripod switched on its Klieg lights (nobody said anything about floodlights, did they?) and calmly begins filming the audience reaction…for about three minutes. And did I mention that the air conditioning was never turned off? Not inconsequential, since the delicate ensemble of strings and flute were never designed to compete with 60Hz hum and the rushing of chilled air! The players later reported that they were playing at capacity to battle the dry acoustics and machine noise, but the results were marvelous.
Predictably, there was applause after each movement, but unpredictably, flutist Larry Kaplan was given a bouquet after the Flute Quartet! Jim Foschia’s beautiful solo artistry in the Mozart Clarinet Quintet which followed was greeted with warm and deeply appreciative applause (but no flowers).
Had this been a concert given in any city with a history of Classical Music performance, there would have been an intermission at this point in the program. But the Southwesters decided to carry straight on and, after brief introductory remarks given by Jeff von der Schmidt (ably translated by the Cambodian composer Dr. Him Sophy), the entire group assembled on stage and preceded to present a powerful performance of Aura. With the exception of a few talking children (and the audience was filled with young people), the crowd was spellbound for the full forty-five minutes. The local musicians surely recognized elements of Cambodian traditional music in the complex score, but the music is not easy listening by any standard, and the rapt attention and enthusiastic reaction of the audience proved that the evening was a great success.
At its end, Aura was greeted with loud applause, bouquets for the soprani, and one for the much appreciated composer – which he deflected and graciously offered to the conductor. In fact, before the applause had even begun to wane, one fan ran to the edge of the stage and requested an autograph from one of the singers. In a moment, the audience streamed onto the stage, bestowing every performer with a gorgeous thick rope lei woven from jasmine blossoms, each terminating in a pendant of exotic local blooms. It was an evening that will surely be remembered by Phnom Penh for years to come, and an auspicious beginning to what will surely be a historic cultural exchange.
Thursday, November 30
A hotel buffet with both European and Asian fare starts our first day in Phnom Penh. The brave ones broke their fast with chicken-rice soup & mystery meat mélange (with dandelion & other tasty greens), while others used the skills of the in-house omeleteer to whip something up right before our sleep-crusted eyes. Most reported a full eight hours of sleep, but a few bolted upright at 3 or 4am, ready to walk the dog, make the coffee, and head off to work – on another coast that was far, far away.
While some of the players took a morning On The Town, Chinary gave a presentation for the students of the Royal University of Fine Arts, focusing on his latest composition Rain of Tears that was premiered by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra just last month. He spoke in Cambodian (which was then translated phrase by phrase into English by Sophy Him, a composer from RUFA – a strange experience, since we all know that Chinary speaks fluently in both languages), telling of the piece’s genesis. It was inspired by a prophetic dream that Chinary had just ten days before the infamous Christmas tsunami, but the composition also reflected the watery disaster that happened in America soon after. The senseless deaths caused by Hurricane Katrina joined the Asian tragedy to generate what has become the third panel of the trilogy which was begun by Oracle and Aura, the featured repertoire for this tour. He then played a concert recording of the new work, and it proved to be as powerful and awe inspiring as the events which precipitated it.
A Question & Answer session followed, which focused on the composer’s relationship with Western & Eastern music. Dr. Ung revealed that his basic philosophy has changed, and that his oft quoted aesthetic, “If the West is Blue and the East is Yellow, then my music is Green” has evolved. Now he feels that the two styles must coexist rather than blend completely. The resulting music should not be a ‘melting pot’, but instead, a ‘salad’ in which separate qualities can still be distinguished. One of the Southwest musicians wondered if the performers should be conversant in Asian styles to play his music, and the answer was that acquaintance and not mastery was enough to adequately perform the music.
What followed was an extraordinary session where the RUFA students & faculty joined with Chinary to perform some of Cambodia’s most ancient and sacred music. The piece that was commissioned for Southwest Chamber Music by former Board President Sue Bienkowski and her husband Wang Chung Lee is Dr. Ung’s Aura, which deals with the Enlightenment of Buddha.
In this 45 minute work, Chinary has quoted from the ancient melody “Sathukar” which dates back to the Angkor period of Cambodian history almost a thousand years ago. It has long been embedded deep within the Royal court music, a complex weave of many related melodies whose warp and weft are rhythmically punctuated by drum & cymbal, but the composer has ‘excavated’ in from it’s original context and presented it in a very modern setting. In order to introduce the young Cambodian musicians to their ancient heritage, he planned to conduct them in singing the work, accompanied by the traditional pin peat ensemble of xylophones, gong circles, hand cymbals, a double headed drum and shawm-like reed instrument.
The irony was that Chinary had sent the music to the Royal University of Fine Arts several months ago, and the students were to have already learned it, so that the performance would take only a short rehearsal. But there had been a misunderstanding, and the musicians saw it for the very first time that very morning, just a few minutes before the scheduled performance. So Chinary literally taught it to them, both conducting and singing. The image was very powerful, and was the absolute essence of this historic tour: here was an internationally recognized American composer of Cambodian birth literally teaching his country its own past. And prophetically, using Cambodia’s past in his own modern music which points towards the future just as any living tradition should, even as the pin peat music of the past once did. The Cambodian students who performed the piece would hear it in its original form, and then hear it the following night re-embedded - but this time within an ensemble of Western instruments in a completely modern context.
After lunch, another exchange took place: the same Cambodian students now performed Western music for Southwest’s players in a format known as the ‘Master Class’. Each local student had prepared an excerpt of a work from the standard Western repertoire and, after performing it, benefited from comments by the appropriate ‘Master’. The afternoon session began with RUFA’s flute professor playing Mozart and Poulenc, during which Larry Kaplan gave both musical and technical tips on how to improve the performance. The joy of a good Master Class is that one can actually hear the difference after the suggestions are applied, a most satisfying transformation for student, teacher and audience alike. After the Professor had her turn, a few of her students went through the same process, much to their delight.
The lucky student violinist who performed had not one but two teachers, and it was fascinating to watch how both Lorenz and Lisa approached their student from different but completely complimentary points of view. Peter Jacobson applied charm, logic, technique and philosophy to his cellist, with much appreciated and satisfying results. Sopranos Elissa & Kathleen were treated to a small chorus of singers who began by singing a traditional melody, but then a young tenor volunteered a Korean folk song, and then the famed Japanese song “Sakura”. This time, the tips were clearly visual as the teachers altered the singer’s posture, breathing and facial expression to enhance his sound. Basic techniques, but sadly, he had never had a proper lesson, as that art form is very new to Cambodia. One must remember that when Chinary Ung had been a clarinet at the very same Royal University some forty years earlier, he was playing the only clarinet in the entire country!
Wednesday, November 29
“Walking through jello….” is how bassist Tom Peters described his journey through the mile-long airport mall in Singapore, in search of a meal and a massage (yes, both are available + rooms with showers & beds to be hired by the 6-hour block). Normally, Tom is a man with both feet firmly grounded, but there’s nothing like 23 hours of travel to erase any sense of reality - having been engulfed in darkness as we chased the sun’s shadow for 14 1/2 hours straight from LA to Taipei before our first plane change, and being served far too many breakfasts by stunning stewardesses, our minds anesthetized by (count’em) 80 different movies in at least 5 languages & nationalities instantly available on personal remote-controlled seat-back monitors. But if those feet need a helping hand, why not visit MY FOOT Reflexology while waiting for (gulp) another 3.5 hours until the next plane du jour, or a full body 30 minute massage (only $20, folks) as did Chinary & Susan Ung, and the aforementioned bass player.
Yes, wading through Jetlag Jello with (sorry, Mr. Frost) hours to go before we sleep, and yet another airline. The switch from Singapore Airlines to Silk Air meant not only new stewardess uniforms & nationalities, but actual aerial scenery: as we soared Northward towards Cambodia, those on the left side of the plane were treated to a magnificent towering cumulous sunset that would have made Max Parrish blush – why even those SoCal pollution oranges paled in comparison. Upon arriving in Phnom Penh soon after, the smell of woodsmoke in the Cambodian air solved the mystery of those amazing sherbet clouds, with the atmosphere so sweet & thick it must have had calories. What a delightful surprise to find a grand military welcome, complete with red carpet, flashing lights & bright white uniforms – but why are they facing the wrong way…? Oops! turns out they were there to greet the Sri Lankan Prime Minister.
A shortish trip through immigration put us in the capable hands of Chinary’s sister Helen, and a semi-ancient tour bus which battled its way through 6pm drive-time traffic, deftly avoiding the countless scooters carrying anywhere from one to four (!) people. The final arrival at Hotel La Parranda on Mao Tse Toung Boulevard marked a personal best for most of us: the grand total? 35 hours of travel, door to door. Some headed straight for bed, some didn’t dare since it was only 8:15pm, and some (being musicians) headed for the bar at the 5-star fancy-schmantzy InterContinental across the street, only to find that the ‘local’ Tiger beer was a few notches below Coors.
But what fun to arrive in your hotel room after 35 grueling hours, only to find that there was no electricity in the rooms. WHAT? Turns out that just as one must slide a special key card into the door to enter most 21st century hotels, La Parranda has an intriguing doorkey slot into which you must slide the key fob – or else, no lights. The trick is, it’s inside the darkened room, and with no bell boy and no experience…suffice it to say that the 3rd floor hallway was filled with very tired, very confused American travelers. Sweet dreams!
Friday: the morning is dedicated to the first rehearsals. 9am sharp: Mozart. Hey, where’s Peter? [Gotta have a cello…Inka! go wake him up!]. Getting to know the acoustically dry and atmospherically wet space, all went without a hitch – musically that is. Thu Nga lost her wallet (her room? The internet café? The sidewalk…?) Credit cards to be cancelled, cash to be mourned, and a thumb drive full of info that will be missed… But after rehearsal, lunch at “Friends” (thank you Lonely Planet) though some preferred the open air river view at the Foreign Correspondents Club, known locally as the “FCC” (a coincidence? hmm…I don’t think Howard Stern eats there). Then on to the Royal Palace, or the National History Museum.
To travel the roads is to taste & smell the grinding poverty of peripheral Phnom Penh. Street level shops seem to cluster in districts – one for shoes, a block of cellphone merchants, another for stone Buddha carvers & masons, above which the grimy darkened apartments wave us past with fluttering, tattered laundry. Daily life is lived on the sidewalks – cooking, cutting hair, teaching a baby to walk, changing bandages, all in plain view. A peek down any side street reveals unpaved roads, with garbage sometimes piled down the center of the passageway, swarming with humanity of every age. It may as well be Dickens, were it not for the umber fleshtones and tropical heat.
To arrive at the Royal Palace is a bit like finding Disneyland in the middle of Tijuana. The contrasting opulence, with manicured pagoda-dotted lawns between pristine empty avenues & wide low buildings with fantastic flamelike roof adornments arching into the sky, is a stark reminder of the class differences in this re-emergent society. The acrid cooking smoke that drifts through the palace gates from the homeless encampment across the street casts a melancholy pall, a constant reminder that the power and the glory of any empire is born of human suffering. Beggars and amputees hover around the Palace entrance, while wide-eyed children with emaciated bodies plead with chilled water bottles in hand…Once the Italian marble stairs have been climbed, hats and shoes removed and shoulders covered, the Silver Pagoda slowly reveals its treasures as the eyes become accustomed to the low light. It soon becomes apparent that this is indeed one of the most extraordinary rooms in the world. Southern Italy may indeed boast of a chapel floor completely covered with exquisite marble portraits of the dignitaries that are buried beneath, but imagine a floor that is entirely paved with 5000 solid silver tiles! Of course the visitors traverse this extraordinary surface treading protective Persian carpets, but enough of the shining surface is visible to take the breath away. And then the eyes raise up to see in the distance an accumulation of precious mineral & metal that is simply jaw dropping. A towering golden pyramidal structure is topped with a two foot seated Buddha carved from solid Emerald (though some guide books insist that it is Baccarat Crystal). In front this amazing dais is a life sized golden Buddha, encrusted with over 9,000 diamonds.
If this were the Metropolitan Museum or the Louvre, there would be armed guards at every corner, and two-inch plexiglass encasing each fantastic sculpture. But here, two skinny middle-aged attendants at either end of the room only occasionally glance up from their reading, usually to check their watches. The glittering Buddha gazes from a vertical sarcophagus made of 1/4” plastic, a simple box whose security is entrusted to a tiny luggage lock.
Cultural cognitive dissonance greets the visitors to the Throne Hall, once the eyes acclimatize to the glare of gold and white. The typical trappings of majesty are displayed in this overwrought display of pomp and circumstance. The culture clash becomes immediately apparent when viewing the high frescoed ceiling which is clearly inspired by countless European palaces. The form & structure is reminiscent of Versailles, but instead of the expected rosy bottomed cherubs, this ceiling is populated with the stylized dragons and demigods of Southeast Asia (you were expecting, maybe, Zeus?). Predictable, but unusual none the less.
Returning to our hotel through the center of town, it becomes immediately clear that Phnom Penh is booming, its renaissance made apparent by an extraordinary number of building sites. The ‘American’ war had ended just a few years before the horrors of the Khmer Rouge destroyed society, and it is gratifying to see such an exuberant response. This is one of the reasons that we are here, to participate in a cultural rebuilding that complements the regeneration of infrastructure.
---------------
Finally! the moment has arrived. After three years of careful planning, intercontinental phone calls and emails, incessant fundraising, travel documents, travel agents, hotels, airlines, etc., and after a morning of rehearsals, frantic running around town via tuk tuk (the ubiquitous motor scooter drawn richshaw/taxis) in search of a vibraphone and a drumset, the Chenla Theatre of the Amrita Performing Arts Center was ready for the Cambodian premiere of their native son’s Aura, preceded by two works of Mozart.Lots of unknowns, too: how would the Cambodian audience react? Without a tradition of Classical concert going, would there be any problems? As it turned out, there were definitely some unusual activities during the concert. As the musicians filed out on stage for the opening Mozart Flute Quartet, an announcement came over the loudspeakers directing in two languages that all cellphones should be turned off, and that there should be no flash photography. But after the first thirty seconds of music, a young man with digital camera at the ready jumped up and headed right to the edge of the stage, and begins to frame his photograph. After trying a few initial angles, he finally settled on a vantage point, and took the shot (with no flash, thankfully), sauntering back to his seat while reviewing the results. Ten seconds later, a TV camera on a tripod switched on its Klieg lights (nobody said anything about floodlights, did they?) and calmly begins filming the audience reaction…for about three minutes. And did I mention that the air conditioning was never turned off? Not inconsequential, since the delicate ensemble of strings and flute were never designed to compete with 60Hz hum and the rushing of chilled air! The players later reported that they were playing at capacity to battle the dry acoustics and machine noise, but the results were marvelous.
Predictably, there was applause after each movement, but unpredictably, flutist Larry Kaplan was given a bouquet after the Flute Quartet! Jim Foschia’s beautiful solo artistry in the Mozart Clarinet Quintet which followed was greeted with warm and deeply appreciative applause (but no flowers).
Had this been a concert given in any city with a history of Classical Music performance, there would have been an intermission at this point in the program. But the Southwesters decided to carry straight on and, after brief introductory remarks given by Jeff von der Schmidt (ably translated by the Cambodian composer Dr. Him Sophy), the entire group assembled on stage and preceded to present a powerful performance of Aura. With the exception of a few talking children (and the audience was filled with young people), the crowd was spellbound for the full forty-five minutes. The local musicians surely recognized elements of Cambodian traditional music in the complex score, but the music is not easy listening by any standard, and the rapt attention and enthusiastic reaction of the audience proved that the evening was a great success.
At its end, Aura was greeted with loud applause, bouquets for the soprani, and one for the much appreciated composer – which he deflected and graciously offered to the conductor. In fact, before the applause had even begun to wane, one fan ran to the edge of the stage and requested an autograph from one of the singers. In a moment, the audience streamed onto the stage, bestowing every performer with a gorgeous thick rope lei woven from jasmine blossoms, each terminating in a pendant of exotic local blooms. It was an evening that will surely be remembered by Phnom Penh for years to come, and an auspicious beginning to what will surely be a historic cultural exchange. Thursday, November 30
A hotel buffet with both European and Asian fare starts our first day in Phnom Penh. The brave ones broke their fast with chicken-rice soup & mystery meat mélange (with dandelion & other tasty greens), while others used the skills of the in-house omeleteer to whip something up right before our sleep-crusted eyes. Most reported a full eight hours of sleep, but a few bolted upright at 3 or 4am, ready to walk the dog, make the coffee, and head off to work – on another coast that was far, far away.
While some of the players took a morning On The Town, Chinary gave a presentation for the students of the Royal University of Fine Arts, focusing on his latest composition Rain of Tears that was premiered by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra just last month. He spoke in Cambodian (which was then translated phrase by phrase into English by Sophy Him, a composer from RUFA – a strange experience, since we all know that Chinary speaks fluently in both languages), telling of the piece’s genesis. It was inspired by a prophetic dream that Chinary had just ten days before the infamous Christmas tsunami, but the composition also reflected the watery disaster that happened in America soon after. The senseless deaths caused by Hurricane Katrina joined the Asian tragedy to generate what has become the third panel of the trilogy which was begun by Oracle and Aura, the featured repertoire for this tour. He then played a concert recording of the new work, and it proved to be as powerful and awe inspiring as the events which precipitated it.
A Question & Answer session followed, which focused on the composer’s relationship with Western & Eastern music. Dr. Ung revealed that his basic philosophy has changed, and that his oft quoted aesthetic, “If the West is Blue and the East is Yellow, then my music is Green” has evolved. Now he feels that the two styles must coexist rather than blend completely. The resulting music should not be a ‘melting pot’, but instead, a ‘salad’ in which separate qualities can still be distinguished. One of the Southwest musicians wondered if the performers should be conversant in Asian styles to play his music, and the answer was that acquaintance and not mastery was enough to adequately perform the music.
What followed was an extraordinary session where the RUFA students & faculty joined with Chinary to perform some of Cambodia’s most ancient and sacred music. The piece that was commissioned for Southwest Chamber Music by former Board President Sue Bienkowski and her husband Wang Chung Lee is Dr. Ung’s Aura, which deals with the Enlightenment of Buddha.In this 45 minute work, Chinary has quoted from the ancient melody “Sathukar” which dates back to the Angkor period of Cambodian history almost a thousand years ago. It has long been embedded deep within the Royal court music, a complex weave of many related melodies whose warp and weft are rhythmically punctuated by drum & cymbal, but the composer has ‘excavated’ in from it’s original context and presented it in a very modern setting. In order to introduce the young Cambodian musicians to their ancient heritage, he planned to conduct them in singing the work, accompanied by the traditional pin peat ensemble of xylophones, gong circles, hand cymbals, a double headed drum and shawm-like reed instrument.
The irony was that Chinary had sent the music to the Royal University of Fine Arts several months ago, and the students were to have already learned it, so that the performance would take only a short rehearsal. But there had been a misunderstanding, and the musicians saw it for the very first time that very morning, just a few minutes before the scheduled performance. So Chinary literally taught it to them, both conducting and singing. The image was very powerful, and was the absolute essence of this historic tour: here was an internationally recognized American composer of Cambodian birth literally teaching his country its own past. And prophetically, using Cambodia’s past in his own modern music which points towards the future just as any living tradition should, even as the pin peat music of the past once did. The Cambodian students who performed the piece would hear it in its original form, and then hear it the following night re-embedded - but this time within an ensemble of Western instruments in a completely modern context.
After lunch, another exchange took place: the same Cambodian students now performed Western music for Southwest’s players in a format known as the ‘Master Class’. Each local student had prepared an excerpt of a work from the standard Western repertoire and, after performing it, benefited from comments by the appropriate ‘Master’. The afternoon session began with RUFA’s flute professor playing Mozart and Poulenc, during which Larry Kaplan gave both musical and technical tips on how to improve the performance. The joy of a good Master Class is that one can actually hear the difference after the suggestions are applied, a most satisfying transformation for student, teacher and audience alike. After the Professor had her turn, a few of her students went through the same process, much to their delight.The lucky student violinist who performed had not one but two teachers, and it was fascinating to watch how both Lorenz and Lisa approached their student from different but completely complimentary points of view. Peter Jacobson applied charm, logic, technique and philosophy to his cellist, with much appreciated and satisfying results. Sopranos Elissa & Kathleen were treated to a small chorus of singers who began by singing a traditional melody, but then a young tenor volunteered a Korean folk song, and then the famed Japanese song “Sakura”. This time, the tips were clearly visual as the teachers altered the singer’s posture, breathing and facial expression to enhance his sound. Basic techniques, but sadly, he had never had a proper lesson, as that art form is very new to Cambodia. One must remember that when Chinary Ung had been a clarinet at the very same Royal University some forty years earlier, he was playing the only clarinet in the entire country!
Wednesday, November 29
“Walking through jello….” is how bassist Tom Peters described his journey through the mile-long airport mall in Singapore, in search of a meal and a massage (yes, both are available + rooms with showers & beds to be hired by the 6-hour block). Normally, Tom is a man with both feet firmly grounded, but there’s nothing like 23 hours of travel to erase any sense of reality - having been engulfed in darkness as we chased the sun’s shadow for 14 1/2 hours straight from LA to Taipei before our first plane change, and being served far too many breakfasts by stunning stewardesses, our minds anesthetized by (count’em) 80 different movies in at least 5 languages & nationalities instantly available on personal remote-controlled seat-back monitors. But if those feet need a helping hand, why not visit MY FOOT Reflexology while waiting for (gulp) another 3.5 hours until the next plane du jour, or a full body 30 minute massage (only $20, folks) as did Chinary & Susan Ung, and the aforementioned bass player.
Yes, wading through Jetlag Jello with (sorry, Mr. Frost) hours to go before we sleep, and yet another airline. The switch from Singapore Airlines to Silk Air meant not only new stewardess uniforms & nationalities, but actual aerial scenery: as we soared Northward towards Cambodia, those on the left side of the plane were treated to a magnificent towering cumulous sunset that would have made Max Parrish blush – why even those SoCal pollution oranges paled in comparison. Upon arriving in Phnom Penh soon after, the smell of woodsmoke in the Cambodian air solved the mystery of those amazing sherbet clouds, with the atmosphere so sweet & thick it must have had calories. What a delightful surprise to find a grand military welcome, complete with red carpet, flashing lights & bright white uniforms – but why are they facing the wrong way…? Oops! turns out they were there to greet the Sri Lankan Prime Minister.
A shortish trip through immigration put us in the capable hands of Chinary’s sister Helen, and a semi-ancient tour bus which battled its way through 6pm drive-time traffic, deftly avoiding the countless scooters carrying anywhere from one to four (!) people. The final arrival at Hotel La Parranda on Mao Tse Toung Boulevard marked a personal best for most of us: the grand total? 35 hours of travel, door to door. Some headed straight for bed, some didn’t dare since it was only 8:15pm, and some (being musicians) headed for the bar at the 5-star fancy-schmantzy InterContinental across the street, only to find that the ‘local’ Tiger beer was a few notches below Coors. But what fun to arrive in your hotel room after 35 grueling hours, only to find that there was no electricity in the rooms. WHAT? Turns out that just as one must slide a special key card into the door to enter most 21st century hotels, La Parranda has an intriguing doorkey slot into which you must slide the key fob – or else, no lights. The trick is, it’s inside the darkened room, and with no bell boy and no experience…suffice it to say that the 3rd floor hallway was filled with very tired, very confused American travelers. Sweet dreams!
# posted by Southwest Chamber Music @ 6:30 AM 
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Hey everyone, I'm new! ..... just made my profile. Everyone says I need to share
something so I Just thought I'd let you know a place where I made an extra $800 last month!
Click here to find out more!
Be sure to check out my new page. :)
something so I Just thought I'd let you know a place where I made an extra $800 last month!
Click here to find out more!
Be sure to check out my new page. :)
Hey everyone, I'm new! ..... just made my profile. Everyone says I need to share
something so I Just thought I'd let you know a place where I made an extra $800 last month!
Click here to find out more!
Be sure to check out my new page. :)
something so I Just thought I'd let you know a place where I made an extra $800 last month!
Click here to find out more!
Be sure to check out my new page. :)
What a thrill to read your adventures. I feel like we are there with you! Wonderful descriptions-- I have given the site address to many friends. This is an incredible adventure you are on--musical and cultural. Verbal flowers to all the players from back home! We love you all--from Kathy and Rick and friends
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