Taking the Auspices

It's been a time of dire omens. Before Thaïs opened, a moth the size of canary hovered over the coffee machine. There was also a dream about lions, bears, and tigers. Then there was the discovery of the ancient cat dance, reproduced below,.

According to ailurochoreographic expert Richard Henderson, Despite the co-performer's sub-continental accent, I thought I detected elements of both sub-Saharan African and (especially) Polynesian influence in different strata of the performance. Given the very early separation of the African and Polynesian populations in the eastward drift (via the sub-continent, of course), this would seem to suggest a very early origin for the dance. Further (expensive) research is clearly required. It's so nice to be taken seriously for a change.

While Waiting for a Detailed Report

The THAIS production was by all accounts a highly successful one, though the first night began so late that I've decided to give a free DVD of the second night to anyone who missed the last act....

Still very very exhausted from it, so I'll report later....

My final days in Olomouc

What can one say about the final competition, which involved 3,500 singers, 117 choirs, 12 judges from 5 different countries, and climaxed each night in an orgy of raw beef and Slivovic?

I'm so busy putting on THAIS right now that I can barely keep my eyes open at night. So, all the reports about everything are coming after the 25th.

Meanwhile, I leave you with a picture of a rainbow, to show that I still have hope....

Nabucco

It was a few days after getting to Olomouc that I learned there would only be one rehearsal for "Nabucco." And when I got to that rehearsal I discovered that my preconceptions, based on a video of the 2004 premiere of this production, were all wrong. That video had been extremely slow, so I thought, I have to speed this opera up! After about 10 minutes of rehearsal, the concertmaster says to me, "But maestro, we are used to a faster tempo." It seemed that in five years, the opera had been getting faster and faster and faster ... Well, then the leading lady was "indisposed" and didn't make it to the rehearsal at all. Despite these problems, and the inevitable first half hour of caginess and mistrust, it turned out to be great working with the Czechs and eventually they responded brilliantly. The day after the rehearsal was spent trying to figure out what to do if the leading lady never recovered. On the morning of the performance, she was up, though, so about 3 hours before the show, I sat in the intendant's office lstening to their proposal for a cleverly cut version of the opera in which the leading lady was no longer leading, and the opera was actually about the OTHER soprano.... it seemed to make sense. I mean, Nabucco's plot isn't very logical to start off with.

The performance as it turned out was packed ... standing room only ... and we got standing ovations and a lot of curtain calls, so I suppose it must have made sense to the audience....

Olomouc Diary (ctd)

Food, food, food, food, food! The founder of the festival, Jiri Klimes, is amazingly hospitable and every day we are treated to extraordinary, rich, rare central European viands. Two nights ago, the local Philharmonic had a big concert with Anna Maria Popescu, a Canadian soprano I had already heard many good things about. Since there are only a small number of restaurants in Olomouc, we ran into each other after the show; since there is only one top hotel there, we also ran into each other at breakfast. Now, I'm hoping she'll do a master class in Thailand ... I am sure she would do really well here with the young singers ... she has the kind of charisma that can really inspire.

And here's a fine photograph of what they eat here ... raw beef with a raw egg on top, to be mixed by the diner with raw onions and assorted condiments ... yum! I was always a bit afraid of steak tartare, but this was so good I had it almost every night!

The Slovenes hit the streets

After their victory, the Slovenian men's chorus ran out into the street and began, as it were, making a nuisance of themselves ... much to everyone's delight.

On a Tub of Lard

Did you think the expression "tub of lard" was merely a perjorative to use against the very corpulent?

I've actually seen a tub of lard being served at a dinner table for the first time in my life, and it was here in the village of (I can't remember its name but it was spelled 'Unpronounceable') ... and it was actually served as any accompaniment to bread. No, this is not a land of cholesterol counters.

Their hospitality is, however, amazing. Absolutely amazing. And it was a very pretty tub....

The hospitality of these Czechs ... yes, it is truly beyond belief. Unless it is a plot to clog my arteries. In 2 days I will face the Moravian National Opera; the next 48 hours consists of me trying to solve all the problems back in Bangkok, making sure I don't have an Alzheimer's moment during Nabucco by attempting to commit the score to memory if possible, and of course, ingesting endless tubs of lard. So, I am multitasking right now; playing a video of the Moravian Opera's production of Nabucco which I get to take over on Thursday, sending instructions to Thailand about the sets and costumes for THAIS, and of course, anticipating with salivating jaws the next lard installment.

They are constantly making fun of my trying to order a "mini-porci" of every dish....

Those Wild and Wacky Slovenes

In Bratislava, the opera was showing Haydn's "L'isola deshabitata", one of this rare Esterhazy period operas. I wish I had been able to see it.

I didn't realize that the Slovenians were so musical until I sat on a five-judge panel listening to choirs from all these Eastern European countries (plus China). Slovenian choirs ran off with best of show both in the kiddie and the grownup categories and it was entirely unanimous. The Slovakians, the host country, didn't do quite as well.

The only thing that worried me a bit was when I invited one of their choirs to Thailand, they said, "Isn't it violent there?" The PR people of our government still have their work cut out for them it seems.



So now here am I in Olomouc. having departed Slovakia and slept through the change to another country (my hosts said to me, "Do not worry, there is no border.") Unlike in Bratislava, I encountered no communist-era architectural monstrosities on entering the city (in Bratislava these Stalinist blocks of concrete have been repainted in bright colors hide their origins).

My hosts' hospitality is almost mythlike. Yesterday I was taken out to two successive dinners in two countries, each one huger than the last (the mini-portion suggested by the restaurant turned out to be twice as vast as I expected!) and saw the central square of Olomouc in the middle of the night. I was even shown the prison, which I have to walk past on my way to the opera house from the hotel.

I guess I know what will happen to me if I fail. I can't imagine that Czech prisons would serve dinner twice a day....

Hostel - 2009

You haven't lived until you've been trapped in a Chinese restaurant in Slovakia with 4 drunk music professors who only speak Czech (or Slovak) ... with broken German the only common language ... while 10,000 miles away, everything you've ever lived for is being torn apart....

Yes! I'm in a bizarre mediaeval hotel where access to the internet is obtained by getting a giant key from the front desk and a sign on the wall reminds you that a closed-circuit camera is watching your every move. There is no room service, but the bacon tastes divine ... so you know what happens to those missing tourists.

However, I heard some of the choirs who are going to compete tomorrow. They're just great -- particular the Slovenes. St. Petersburg is no slouch either. Singapore didn't show -- they're scared of the swine flu. Swine flu? In Bratislava? Well, it seems there is one case ... in the next country over. Well, we know how cautious they are in Singapore.

Got into Vienna this morning. Went straight to Slovakia. Tomorrow, Czechia. That's 3 countries in just about 30 hours. Of course, the Emperor Joseph II didn't know it was three countries; he thought it was just all him.

The above pic is with some of the professors, pre-drunken orgy :) I will reveal more tomorrow, but now jetlag is getting to me.....

Davy Jones' Locker

Thailand has a new kind of sunken treasure, after a surfeit of Ming dynasty trading ships that happen to sink on dry land conveniently within a few feet of fake antique shops.

I'm referring of course to the recent discovery of containers, a couple of decades old, that may or may not contain the victims of human trafficking, the missing protesters from the 1992 military crackdown, or "toxic waste." Rumors are rampant.

In many ways it would be good to find the 1992 bodies. 1992 is a gaping wound in our society and though finding bodies would not solve anything, it would bring a sense of closure to many lives.

There are more skeletons in closets ... from Thaksin's so-called drug war, in which it was widely believed that people were being extrajudicially bumped off. It seems that prosecutions have now begun.

Once again, I think we all need closure.

The Mysterious Purukhanda Strikes Again!

Well, there he goes again, this time treading the most dangerous ground of all ... for this time Purukhanda has tackled the one member of the "red team" whose arguments are entirely logical and who seems, uncynically and passionately, to really believe in the cause. Purukhanda has decided to have a longer intro to the rap this time, allowing the contrast between Mr. J's statements and reality to really sink in before actually proceeding to a virtuoso re-arrangement of J's words to produce complex melodies in the Isaan "mode". Never has so great an amount of intellectual ingenuity been lavished on a work of such little consequence ... or is it so little? Again, there's profound philosophy behind the satire.

Clash of the Pirates

So, the day I saw Star Trek, I read in the paper that the Patpong software pirates were clashing with Thai police who were trying to confiscate their wares.

I have to admit that I'm not suffering from nightmares over Paramount's failure to extract a few more miserable pennies from the third world. However, if a miserable artist such as myself is being hideously exploited, that's different. I see by checking the bit torrent websites that you can download a copy of my novel, Vampire Junction, for free. Each time that happens, I lose about a dollar. If all the dollars I lost were stacked end to end and turned into a noodle, I could probably eat my way to about Soi 12. I just can't get that upset about it. I mean, these people are reading my book. And while we all do this for the money ... no question ... is it really what we do it for?

Perhaps the Thai government should do for pirated movies what it has done for AIDS drugs; simply declare that, as an impoverished special case country, our people simply cannot get their Hollywood fix at Hollywood prices, and the copyrights be damned. Of course, that would be a very improper thing indeed. Joking aside, though, why not tax the illegal DVDs, put the money in a general fund, and distribute it to the owners according to some weighting formula, just as ASCAP distributes composer royalties for radio and TV? A 20 baht tax -- or 50, maybe, since the police would lose their protection money -- and a few underpaid government workers to determine the weighting system and skim a bit off the top, and the artists would probably get as much money as they would have had they been screwed by the real studios in the normal course of events.

Did see the (non-pirated) Star Trek at the Emporium. To my amazement, the luxury seats were sold out and I had to sit with the peons. Still, it was worth it.