//The World Came to Me (2)//

 

Immediately I froze when I noticed the cover of the oldest program booklet. The concert was French cellist Edgar Moreau playing Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 1 with Hong Kong Sinfonietta in April 2014.

 

PROGRAM

Stephen Yip  / Ink. Colour
Shostakovich / Cello Concerto No 1 in E-flat, Op 107
Prokofiev / Symphony No 7 in C-sharp minor, Op 131

Video of the event posted by Hong Kong Sinfonietta.

Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 1 meant a lot to me as it started my music journey. My cello teacher used to show me all sorts of music videos on his iPad, and then asked me about my thoughts. To be honest, he got so much fun out of this “game” that sometimes I felt like his lab rat! Anyway, one day some years ago as he was flipping through different videos on his iPad as usual, I stopped him. “Wait! Who is this guy?! He is so cool. His style is so much like mine!” I tried to note down the cellist’s name in my head. Then when I got home, I searched for his videos. And then I saw a video of him playing Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 1 (https://youtu.be/RKVU6TzM8gg). I couldn’t take my eyes off the video and I could feel my blood boiling in my veins.

I had never heard of a composer named Dmitri Shostakovich before. (Yeah, that tells you how little I knew about music back then and probably still now.) I spent many nights searching for videos of this concerto played by different cellists. And after watching countless of videos, I still thought this guy was the coolest.

Anyway, coming back to this concert booklet, I got very excited when I spotted a poster of this upcoming concert in the subway station. It would be the first time I watched a live performance of this concerto. I still remember Teacher teasing me, “You are going to this concert just to confirm this concerto is your destiny, aren’t you?” I enjoyed the concert very much that night. Since I have watched the video of this concerto so many times already, I could fully immerse in the piece as the young cellist was playing on stage. (A side note: In 2019, 5 years after this concert, I got to see this young cellist and the cool guy playing together at a music festival. Quite an interesting sight!)

During concerts I usually made notes either on a palm sized notepad or on a page of the program booklet. Afterwards, I would spend most of my next meeting with Teacher discussing these observations and questions I had. Often these questions were kind of dumb such as “Why is the Oboe being used to tune the orchestra?”, “How come they keep the lights on at one venue but off at another venue?”, “How come the cellists in the orchestra sit in the middle this time?”,etc.

And yes. This concert did confirm my belief at the time that Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 1 was my destiny. But more unexpectedly, the experience from that night opened the pandora box for me. “What else is out there?”

//The World Came to Me (1)//

Last week I noticed it was getting harder and harder to place my cello practice book back onto the shelf. I had to push the book really hard into the stack which got me thinking, “Hmm… Maybe it’s time to do some housecleaning.” The bulk of this space was actually taken up by all the program booklets from the concerts or art shows that I attended locally. “Let’s take the pile out and see what we got here.”

I started sorting them chronologically by event dates and then grouped them by year. Interestingly, the largest number of booklets collected were between 2014 and 2016. Then the number decreased drastically since 2017. Turned out there was a good reason behind this, but that’s another story to tell. So let’s check out what we had in the year 2014 pile.