Comments
Share this article
Print
Email
If Zubin Mehta is here, can frenzy be far behind? Talk to the ladies of the Mehli Mehta Foundation, the organisation named in honour of Zubin’s father, and they will tell you stories of the frantic calls from friends, friends of friends, and acquaintances, begging for tickets, any tickets for any show. The tickets aren’t priced low by Indian standards, going from the low of Rs1,000 to a high of Rs5,000.
Admittedly the soloists coming with him are some of the most revered names in music: people like Daniel Barenboim, Pinkus Zukerman, and the tenor Placido Domingo. But Mehta has used his persuasive charm and his long-standing friendships many times to bring musicians of this calibre to India earlier. The frenzy for seats is repeated every time, and if you want to know why, the answer is clear: it’s a question of shortages. When, for example, India had a paucity of cars, people would pull all kinds of strings and pay heavy premiums to get a car of their choice. Now that cars are available in profusion, it’s the car makers who get frantic and chase likely customers with special offers.
Suppose the situation with musical events was different? Suppose instead of getting the world’s best once in two or three years, music lovers had a choice of great concerts happening the year round. People would then pick and choose what they wanted to hear and when. This happens in the great cities of the world such as London and New York, but on a recent visit, I found that it happened in Singapore too.
Singapore?! The culturally arid city, the place without a soul? Maybe that was many years ago, and possibly to overcome that undeserved tag, the Singapore National Arts Council pulls out all the stops, particularly in the arts festival that they have been organising now for 22 years. This year’s festival ran for four weeks in May and June and featured 1,800 artists from 27 countries. There were 25 major productions and as many as 400 free performances, exhibitions and special events. Not just that; the Council now commissions special works (there were seven this year) and also co-commissions with international collaborators (three in this festival). What this does is give a chance for Singapore artists to work on unusual projects which then get showcased internationally. In the last seven years, 20 of the newly commissioned works have toured 30 cities all over the world.
What astonished me was the adventurous nature of a lot of the programming. The London Sinfonietta performed avant garde music of the 20th and 21st century for two evenings. When you go to concerts in the highly developed musical capitals of the West, the general trend is to programme one modern work just before the interval and then continue with a major classical piece familiar to everyone in the audience. But here there was no such thing: all the works were modern, some were quite esoteric and difficult, and yet the concert hall was almost always full. Other concerts included a German recorder (flute) quartet playing cutting-edge crossover music, and the Singapore festival orchestra giving an unusual performance of the Lord Of The Rings symphony.
As you’d expect, there was a lot of theatre and quite a bit of modern dance. There was also dance drama — of our own Ratan Thiyam’s Chorus Repertory Theatre of Manipur. Innovative, edgy expressions could also be seen in dance works such as the Japanese group Nibroll’s No Direction, choreographer Edward Clug’s The Architecture Of Silence, and Radio And Juliet, both performed by the Slovene National Theatre Ballet. The Korean Dance Theatre’s Ah Q was impressive, though more in concept than execution.
The incredible thing is that all this experimentation is being done at all. And Singapore seems to have cultivated an audience for it too — this impresses me much more than the fact that The Singapore Arts Council seems to find funds for the projects. After all, it is a rich country and must have rich sponsors too. The important thing to note is that they are enlightened too. When will that happen here?