stolen colours

Retrospective blogging seems to happen on Fridays, because I’m too tired to do much else, and because I’ve got a backlog of bloggables throughout the week.

On Tuesday I attended a piano recital by V. Khor with QY at Republic Polytechnic. The main draw for me were the Joe Hisaishi and Ryuichi Sakamoto pieces he would be playing, as well as piano intepretations of Radiohead songs transcribed by Chris O’Riley. The pianist himself reminds me of a certain surgeon that I can’t place a name to, but this is neither a positive nor negative comment.

The first song was an impressive modern piece, the imaginatively named Sonata for Piano by Erkki-Sven Tuur. V. Khor is known for his versatility and technical prowess, as the emcee informed us. I was awed by his performance.

And then it went downhill when he took out Sakamoto and Hisaishi score books and started playing from them, with an assistant to help turn the pages. After each song he’d pause, nod at the audience, then flip the pages to the next song. I felt like we were witnessing a practice session, especially since he didn’t seem to be very familiar with the songs and could have used more emotion in bringing them across to the audience. Perhaps QY and I didn’t really like his intepretations because we loved the originals. But well, I wasn’t moved. Neither were some other audience members who snoozed quietly. I wondered what the whole point of that segment was.

A short intermission ensued. I noted that the average age of the audience was my age, i.e. middle-aged people and pre-adolescents averaged out.

The second half of the recital was dedicated to Chris O’Riley’s transcriptions of Radiohead’s songs, which was better prepared than the pre-intermission segment. These he played from a landscape-oriented scorebook with rather cool illustrations, which is available on Amazon. There is a second book by O’Riley, which wasn’t used in this performance. Judging from the song lists, my favouritest Radiohead songs don’t happen to be O’Riley’s.

Samples are available on the Amazon pages. The transcribed songs hold traces of the original melodies, while the arrangement is beefed up Rachmaninoff-style and influenced by other composers whose names the emcee glibly rattled off. i.e. if you’re a Radiohead fan and you want to play these pieces, make sure you can play Rachmaninoff first. I can’t. So I’ll stick to trying to like In Rainbows for the present.

Okay, I’m crapping off-tangent. Sorry.

QY wasn’t impressed or moved. Though she hasn’t heard Radiohead before, music should move the listener regardless of the absence of presence of prior exposure. Myself, I rather liked the first two pieces, Black Star and Subterranean Homesick Alien; especially the former, which started out quietly pensive and built up nicely. The last song, You was the closest in arrangement to a rock anthem, but it was unfortunately marred by not being able to keep up with the rhythm, and hitting strange notes.

And so QY and I left. QY’s msn nick still says “disappointed” till today. Me, I have taken out my Radiohead songs to listen to and am hoping that they will come to Singapore soon, but not too soon. Not before 19 April, thank you.