For the last two days we have been staying in a five star hotel in downtown Bangkok. It has been quite luxurious, and the breakfast had the most diverse assortment of foods you could imagine from oatmeal to fried rice, eggs and fruit etc etc. Yesterday we played at Mahidol University. They had a huge and very selective music conservatory. The hall had great acoustics, but the orchestra was a bit skittish since we arrived about 15 minutes before the doors were opened, and we were scrambling to get to our soundcheck. This was due to the most amazingly bad Bangkok traffic. I think it took us two hours to travel from one end of Bangkok to the other.
One things Bangkok has to offer is inexpensive good massages. But you have to be sure to got to the right kind of place or you will end up with a suprise happy ending you had not intended.
I went to the Asian Herbal Massage place and had an orange oil massage. The woman was quite good, if a little forceful. at the end she practically bent me in half over myself to stretch out my back, and this didn’t feel so good.
One of the things I have been feeling lately is that it is unbelievably hard to tour with a concerto. With chamber music or even a solo recital, I can handle the stress of travel and multiple performances and manage to sound good most of the time too. Touring with a concerto is much harder, probably because the pressure and necessity to be totally accurate and excellent is much more with a concerto.
Tomorrow I will have concert three with the piece, here at Assumption University outside of Bangkok. The venue is a gorgeous cathedral with amazing stained glass windows, a large pond and water fountain outside, and a six second delay. With such an echo, the tempos all need to be a little bit more slow, or the whole thing will become mud.
What I love most about the space is that it is heavily air conditioned, which means that I might make some headway in the constant battle with the humidity and the affects that it has on my cello. With strings one inch off of the fingerboard, even with forehead grease, the fast passages can be challenging to facilitate. This place does not have power outages, so with the air conditioning running constantly I may be able to get the 90 percent humidity down to an all time tour low of 50 percent!!!
After tomorrow I will be home free and almost to the beach and swimming snorkeling!
I hope to have my best performance yet tomorrow. So far i had a very passionate intense performance, with less accuracy than I would like, and a more scared performance with more accuracy but less passion. If I can be accurate and passionate tomorrow I will feel like I have accomplished what i have set out to do.
Hopefully my intestines will settle down soon!…………..time for more curry.