Tuesday, 15 December 2009

What a relief!

I woke up this morning thinking that it was Wednesday, but it's only Tuesday! There's a lot to be done before we can leave Shanghai, and we'll need every day we've got. I just got back from this morning's errand — getting a set of passport sized photos made. (When we leave Shanghai, we don't go home right away, we're going to Laos and Cambodia for a week of traveling first, and each of those countries requires you to present passport photos to get the visa that you get at the airport on entry.) Such a simple thing, you'd think, getting a set of passport photos made. I went onto the shanghaiexpat.com web site I've grown to rely on when seeking advice, and found there that many of the Shanghai subway stations have little bright orange booths that are just for the purpose of making sets of ID photos. Then I remembered seeing one right at our own local subway stop, so I set off there. Ordinarily this would be the end of the story, or actually, this is where there would have been no story. But this is China after all. I tried pressing all manner of buttons in the little orange booth but it seemed to be dead. It turned out that power to the booth has been cut temporarily, because there is a construction project in the station. But I was lucky. The station porter saw me attempting to make the booth work, and he found the station security guard — who speaks a few words of halting English — to explain to me about the power cut. It also turned out that there was a working booth very nearby, and his powers of explanation and mine of understanding him were just equal to the task of him conveying to me just where it was and how I could get there. The second booth was actually nicer than the first, or was supposed to have been. It promised to have a mode where it would present its interface in English. No such luck, at least I couldn't coax it into that mode, no matter what I tried. Still, the interface showed helpful pictures at each point where you had to make choices, and I believe I ended up with exactly what I needed — a set of four passport sized photos. All in all, a good morning.

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I wouldn't say that Sunday evening's concert was a disappointment exactly, but it was uneven. Shaham, of course, played beautifully. It was the Sejong ensemble who were good in some things, not so good in others. As my violinist friend put it, there did not appear to be "a Latin bone" present on the stage, so it's perhaps understandable that they really didn't seem to "get" the Golijov piece, which begins with a tango movement full of anxiety and segues into a very subdued slow movement. The Mendelssohn octet was better, with Shaham taking the starring role of the first first violin. But the best performances by far came in the Haydn violin concerto. This is an early work of Haydn's from the 1760's. We tend to think of Haydn as one of those who reacted against baroque music and struggled to invent what would become the classical style. This work is not in that vein, and looks backward rather than forward. The violin soloist is set against a simple string ensemble plus keyboard continuo. Much as I enjoyed hearing this, it was somewhat jarring that the continuo part was played on an electronic piano using its "harpsichord button." One supposes that a real harpsichord was simply not obtainable in Shanghai for the occasion.