From Halle to Hallé

The Hallé Orchestra are in town, performing two concerts in two days in two different venues with two different repertoire. We've helped a fair bit, so great that they've been chosen to open this year's Beijing Music Festival. 
A concert of two halves: Strauss and Tchaikovsky in part one, with the amazing Maxim Vengerov on violin; Dvorak and Elgar in the part two, plus soprano Sumi Jo performing excerpts from Verdi's Rigoletto and Offenbach's Tales of Hoffman. She was a hoot. Came on in Cinderella dresses, played the marionette (conductor Sir Mark Elder had to 'wind her up') and played to the crowd. To be honest, she all but sidelined the orchestra, but it was fun.
The Hallé are, I think, the oldest orchestra in the UK. For some reason, I've never really wondered why they are so called. Just looked it up: he was a German called Karl Halle, who settled in Britain in 1848, changed him name to Charles Hallé, and started an orchestra in Manchester.

MFH Revisited

A much-anticipated box of CDs arrived by post today, containing a compilation of music Andrew and I made 30 years ago. Grandly titled MFH 1979-85, it's a (cough) 'Best Of', released on the never-more-appropriately-named Forced Nostalgia label. Nice to see it finally out. 

The music dates back to Sussex University days, where we doodled on neanderthal electronic gadgets and the occasional proper instrument, literally in our bedrooms, and which we then released ourselves on a cassette label (YHR). As such, it's probably for experimental music and cassette-culture enthusiasts only, minor pieces of sound from an altogether innocent era. 

In any case, it's come out well. Nice sleeve (thanks Gary), clear, no-hiss sound (thanks Roberto) and the whole process smoothly managed (thanks Fre). See reviews & ordering info at Boomkat and Norman Records. 

I'm wondering what Andrew would have made of it. I think he'd be proud. I hope it sells like hotcakes.

The Lamb Laid Low on Broadway

Laid low all day with food poisoning from yesterday. I'd reluctantly eaten Starbucks's last sandwich which, along with two dry muffins and a sad scone, had probably been sitting in its counter all holiday week. Bad move. 

However, I did manage to install all my records & CDs in our new home. How much longer can I keep this up?  

Coincidentally, the new issue of Record Collector arrived today, but no solace there. "I used to be an avid collector", said alt-musician/producer Jim O'Rourke, "but put a halt on it about five or six years ago. It reached a point of saturation and the idea of transporting that much weight when I moved around the world seemed ridiculous." These days he lives in Shinjuku, Tokyo, one of the best places in the world to buy collectable vinyl and CDs, so I think it's safe to say he's not kicked the habit. 

A surprising thing that came out of the article was his obsession with Genesis's The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. "My love for this record cannot be contained. I know every word, every note of every instrument. I listened to this record every night all through grade school and still listen to it every chance I get". Briefly - roughly when it came out (in 1975) - it was my favourite record too, and I still love it. 

Gan de Hao

Liz received her Chinese exam result today. She not only passed, but got 48 out of 54 which, aside from being a strange marking system, is a fantastic result! All that hard work has paid off. Very proud of her.

Getting into China

Got through a couple of books while on hols, both China-related, both very different. 

Kate Teltscher's The High Road to China is about the British (or rather the East India Company's) obsessive urge to trade with China in the 1770s, which at that time was pretty much shut off to the world, trade in & out limited to Canton. So they tried another way, via Tibet, with the influence of the Panchen Lama. It didn't work, but it's a fascinating read. George Bogle, the young leader of the delegation, strikes a sympathetic character.

Simon Napier-Bell's I'm Going to Take You to Lunch is an altogether lighter affair, recounting the pop manager's successful attempt to bring Wham! to China in 1985, the first western pop group ever to play there (if one discounts Jean Michel Jarre in 1981). In all he made 17 trips to Beijing to convince the authorities that Wham! were what the people needed. Of course it was just a big publicity stunt to make them huge elsewhere, and ironically they split up shortly after.

There's a kind of conclusion you could draw from the two: the West's desperation to get into China, and China not being that bothered.  

Off the Beaten Track

"Normally 2-3 hours, today double that", was the answer to our question of how long it would take to go to the Dragon Back Rice Terraces - the problem of going anywhere in China during National Day holidays... But no matter, we were quite happy with more cycling off the beaten track. The girls did really well on their little hired bikes, bouncing off the stones, steering around chickens and dogs, and avoiding collisions with the occasional moped or plunging into rivers. 
We had lunch in Luna (fantastic warm pear, walnut & stilton salad) and then visited Big Banyan Tree, which is - funnily enough - a big Banyan tree, 1,400 years old, as wide as it is tall.

Lolling on the Li

Another rafting experience, but this time on slightly bigger, motor-powered rafts, and on the much bigger Li River which eventually empties out into the South China Sea near Hong Kong. The karst hills here are amazing, rising almost vertically, covered in trees and bushes. The whole landscape looks quite unreal. 
After an hour and a half upriver and half an hour back down again, we wandered the streets of Xingping, a small, dusty one-street (OK, two) town from which the boats depart - and it's from here that one can see the panorama depicted on the back of the 20RMB note. Today it's the 1st of October, National Day, so there were firecrackers, the occasional wedding party and a fair few people around but somehow it still projected an aura of sleepiness with old men playing cards behind crumbling doorways and dogs flaked out in the midday sun.