15th April 2007
Last night I sang as part of the International Festival Chorus in the Forbidden City Concert Hall. For me, this is a huge privilege. I love to sing, but I’m not in the same class as many of the chorus members who are brilliant amateurs and professionals – practically the entire alto section seems to be made up of music teachers from the international schools.
We sang Off, Off, Offenbach, a wild and whacky arrangement by Gerard Lecointe of tunes by Jaques Offenbach (including the Can-Can) with a fantastic percussion ensemble, Les Percussions Claviers de Lyon, who are four rather gorgeous French men and a woman.
The choir is a treat from all sorts of points of view. It works like a well-oiled machine: practice parts and translation files are distributed in MP3 format; committee members coordinate funding, sponsorship, publicity, rehearsal rooms and guest musicians – Emma Kirkby will be singing in the Bach B Minor Mass in October. But without one man, Nick Smith, none of it would happen. Nick Smith studied music at Cambridge but he has lived in Beijing since 1995, and has devoted all his considerable energy and passion to working as a conductor with musicians from China and all over the world, and to introducing western music to Chinese audiences. The IFC is truly international, and many of its most active and talented members are Chinese. Its concerts always almost fill the 1400-plus seats of the concert hall.
But one of the things I love best about singing with the choir has nothing whatsoever to do with music. It has to do with places. For the past few days, we’ve been rehearsing at the Forbidden City Concert Hall, which means driving in the early evening around the huge red walls of the former imperial palace alongside the moat. In the evening, with few tourists around, the gigantic red gates of the palace and the open square in front of them are as imposing as they have been for centuries.
Yesterday morning a friend and I arrived early for the dress rehearsal. The Forbidden City Concert Hall is set in Zhongshan Park, right next to the Forbidden City, and we walked among the willows, lilac and tulips in brilliant sunshine for half an hour before the rehearsal.
Earlier rehearsals had taken place in the Beijing Youth Palace, a former imperial household behind Coal Hill. In the fifties the communist authorities designated it as a centre for talented children to come and practice music, which means that its ornate rooms and roofs have been left largely untouched, and it has a wonderfully shabby feel to it. There is no better thing in Beijing than to wander around its courtyards in the evening, when almost everyone else has gone home and these magnificent buildings are just sitting brooding over all they’ve seen in the dark. As a final surreal touch, there is a children’s playground that must have been built in the fifties because it has such a Russian look to it. Its theme is pure space race, and in the evening its vertiginous slides and constructions in the shape of rockets and stars stand out against the night sky.