29 April 2024
Kolkata, India

The end of the teaching semester in Hong Kong was an especially busy time, and escaping the first possible moment at a very early Saturday morning to Myanmar hardly made things feel easier- within that last twenty-four hours, moving out of my apartment (of six years!) on top of my academic responsibilities made for a rather harried start to ‘the vacation’. And, indeed, Myanmar is hardly a conventional vacation idea right now, given the sanctions, skirmishes, bombings, and sweeping poverty over this once-prosperous country. But then one has to see for oneself! And indeed, while the state of things in the nation’s cultural heartland around Mandalay have deteriorated considerably since my last visit in 2022, sipping a seven-year-old French Viognier in the palatial surroundings of Yangon’s best French restaurant, barely steps away from the former prime minister’s mansion where she endured over a decade of house arrest, remains a very strange picture in my memory.

This has been a slightly unpredictable time professionally, and while there are exciting things on the horizon, there are frustrations, too. The music industry is an exciting and rapidly changing thing but it is also deeply precarious. And while one can often rely on the good sense and kindness of others, it is a worrying trend in Hong Kong that the artistic and institutional leadership is trending in a worryingly provincial direction. It compels me to wonder whether there’s more to do elsewhere, at least in terms of planning projects with reliable partners. More on this later, hopefully, with positive updates!

I’m back to Hong Kong already later this week and excited to start new things in Taipei with the Quatuor Arod and later this year with the world premiere of Otherhood (2022) with Iris Oja, Martti Anttila, and Anna Kuvaja– in both cases, just waiting for some dates. These are perhaps slightly smaller-scale things but maybe a thirty-minute song cycle incorporating the latest tech and a new quartet for one of the world’s best groups are very much worth some excitement. As for the past, searingly hot days in beautiful but weary Myanmar, it is a temporary reprieve and pleasure to be in civilisation, and to move on to the next challenges.