Singaporean concert-going behavior
OK, so this wasn’t a full-fledged orchestral orgy, but it was a Suzuki graduation concert in the Jubilee Hall, a concert venue in the Raffles Hotel, so very upscale. All audience members had paid $15 to get in the door, which is kind of a lot to pay to see a bunch of kids playing music we’d all heard MANY times before. (Although some of the advanced kids were excellent, and the little ones were as usual intensely cute, which is worth quite a lot in itself.)
The kids showed up for the dress rehearsal earlier in the day. Concert dress is specified in Singapore (as elsewhere in the Suzuki world) as white shirts, black pants or skirts, white socks, black shoes. Some parents showed a somewhat elastic understanding of this dress code; red bow ties on the boys’ white shirts, and in the case of the little girls, huge, shiny floating sparkly dresses with flounces and lace, accented by pink hair bows. Some of the bigger girls wore all-white ensembles (although they complained privately that making them dress in white was like dressing them for a funeral), and one girl showed up in regulation garb except for thigh-high black boots. Suzuki meets Manga.
The concert MC began proceedings by asking everyone to turn their phones to silent mode if they couldn’t manage to turn them off. The parents were well-behaved, by and large, but there was an amazing amount of conversation during the pieces the kids played. One egregious example was a family seated behind me; the concert began with some of the older kids playing Pachelbel’s Canon, which is not in the Suzuki corpus, and I wanted to hear how they did; but an old lady behind me was on her cellphone, not bothering to lower her voice, despite her adult daughter’s desperate shushing: “Yadda yadda yadda, play very slow lah!” Mostly Mandarin but enough English to keep me listening to her. Oh dear. Well, she finally hung up when the next piece started, but then someone else started chatting. And in fact, the shushing daughter kept up a running commentary to her sister for the entire remainder of the concert, at full volume, but with her hand over her mouth as if that would block the sound.
Maybe they’re used to rock concerts instead; the idea of actually listening to the performers didn’t seem to occur to them. Nor did whispering.