Music

July 08
Vladimir Viardo Concert
Yesterday, one of the students gave Jackson - another foreign teacher - a concert ticket, because they couldn't go and didn't want to waste the ticket. Well, Jackson had to work, so he gave the concert ticket to Egor, a Russian English teacher at the school. Egor had already seen Vladimir - a Russian American pianist - play in Xi'An, so he generously gave the ticket to me.

So, I went home, got changed and went to the Wuxi concert hall for 7:30. The first half hour was taken up by a woman dressed in something that could be used as a little mermaid costume doing some kind of presentation and handing a big plastic posterboard to three guys who looked like they put on whatever was closest to the bed before showing up. Anyway, after that was over, they spent ten minutes explaining "the rules", not that anyone obeyed them. Finally, Viardo came out in a three piece suit with tails, and begun to play, bless his heart.

He was quite amazing. Lots of energy, passion, and he played everything the whole evening from memory. The program included Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Brahms, Liszt and Tchaikovsky, including many pieces made familiar by The Nutcracker and Fantasia, though played refreshingly. One problem - and this is very typical of the logic, or lack thereof, I face everyday - they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars getting this guy to come to China from America to do a series all across the country - then they give him a Baldwin piano - the cheapest posssible piano in China just about, and expect him to endorse it. The sound from the piano was terrible and the thing was so out of tune, they had a guy dicking with it all throughout the performance.

Not that the audience would have noticed, though. You'd think that for 480 yuan a ticket, they'd at least dress well, but they didn't. I would have been happy with work clothes. There were at least 100 children there trying desperately to not sit still, and I don't blame them, piano is boring when you're four. And every adult was beep booping on their cellphones the whole time. There were a few times I think Viardo missed a beat because the concert hall was filled with the sound of Beethoven's 9th from a mobile. Poor guy. Or maybe that was just his piano sounding out of tune.

They call Wuxi a "cultural desert" because it's so devoid of any arts, music or history. This is evident in the one concert hall we have. For a population of 5 million, Wuxi has a concert hall smaller than the Riverrun Centre in Guelph - a city with a mere 100,000 people. And the Wuxi Concert Hall wasn't even full.

I was fortunate enough, however, to have one of the students with me, who happens to be a piano teacher, so we had a good discussion about Viardo's talent. It's just too bad he wasn't fully appreciated. But, it was enjoyable nonetheless.


11:19 PM