sunday is almost over again... it's always around this time when i'll realise how much i've slacked and how much time i could have used to do something productive. about the only productive things i did were to practise piano and go for guzheng lesson. mr. chek's fingers are shorter than mine! didn't believe him until he told me to play a wide chord from xue shan chun xiao and i realised he had to stretch to the max whereas i still could reach even wider than that. wow... surprised. he said perhaps people with long fingers have less power and used the analogy of short sticks being more powerful weapons than long ones (assuming you hold both at exactly the end... just like fingers are joined to the palm at the end) hmmm... what a mind boggling hypothesis... i can think of people like liszt and weber with long but powerful fingers... =( maybe it's just me. but mr. chek also said i shouldn't worry too much about power yet cos if i tried to exert too much force, not only will it be harder to play the fast passages smoothly, i may also injure my fingers. so i'm delaying practising guzheng until thursday after piano recital. than my fingers can break for all i care.

finished about 75% of the two gamelan commentaries... but i need to listen to the extracts again cos i didn't take down lots of details and i tend to be unable to make any head or tail out of what i scribble down during lesson. hahaha. need to study for chem test... can sorta predict i'll fail the test cos i've always been doing badly for the organic tests. but no harm trying to pass for once.

went to the dvorak cello concert yesterday. WOW!!!!! wang jian is GOOD!!!!! even from AA seats in circle three where i had to either lean over the railing or sit hunchbacked and squint through the tiny space between the railing and the "wall"... (or watever you call it) i really enjoyed the concert. for the brahms double concerto i sat in circle three too... and it was fraught with lots of intonation problems while gerald said from circle two it sounded alright. but dvorak yesterday was only a teeny bit short of perfect intonation. only his higher pitched trills sounded a little out (can't blame him... getting a nice tone on high notes is already quite hard rite).

one thing i must complain about is of cos the killer passage played by souptel. perhaps his fingers are too fat to be in total control of his violin... i.e. one small little movement makes him sound totally out... or perhaps like gerald said he vibrato too much. hello... you're the principal violin, everybody claps for you to just walk out and make the oboe play A... can't you just practise a bit harder and make sure the intonation is okay?! and to be out when playing with such a good cellist makes him sound even worse. bleah. another thing making the concert a bit less pleasant was lan shui's conducting. i feel that he's too overly dramatic... for more experienced conductors, super dramatic actions are reserved for places which they are really required. in lan shui's case, almost the whole concert was filled with such actions. not only is it unnecessary, it is what's affecting the precision of the orchestra. the orchestra is usually quite rhythmically challenged not because they cannot count or what, i believe it's because they all intepret lan shui's conducting differently and come in not in unison. often when guest conductors (especially the more well-known ones) conduct an SSO concert, we get pleasant surprises and say, "hmm... SSO can actually play together!"

but overall, the concert was mesmerising... the academic festival overture was okay... except for (guess what?) intonation problems again. and other than intonation problems (yet again!), the sibelius was enchanting. i can see what miss ching means when she says whenever you play for people you must touch them, or change their perspectives...