So, on Wednesday night we played this little concert for Dichpong. In some ways it was a miraculous thing, although I did fall to the nadir of my conducting career by actually conducting an excerpt from "Cats" in public. I suppose that, after Wagner, Mahler et al, this too can be considered historic.
The concert was miraculous in the way that in the end about sixty volunteer musicians and a choir of almost a dozen ended up on that stage somehow or other, and performed with deep feeling; a lot of tears were shed that night. At the end, we handed Dichpong's mother all the money we had raised from the concert (it came to about 20,000 baht or so) and, in an extremely touching gesture, she donated the funds to the Bangkok Opera Foundation. I think that the old cliché of their not being a dry eye in the house was probably, in this case, no more than the truth.
I do think about death a lot more these days. I've written quite a bit in this blog about seeing more and more dead people in dreams. Though I did have a brush with death last year, I don't really feel any more that I've one foot in the grave, and yet ...
Miss the kid a lot. We put a chair out for him in the viola section in case he wanted to come down and play.
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