Five musical eighteens and a royal haircut

The word piano quintet has the same effect on me, an avid amateur pianist, as the exhaust of an F16 does on a heat-seeking missile. In the Bangkok Post of Friday, August 16, I read that the Piano Quintet 18 would perform the following Sunday at the Goethe Institute.

One of my favorites was to be played there: Robert Schumann's piano quintet. But what did the 18 refer to? What 18?? It was revealed at the end of the advertisement: each member of the quintet is 18 years old (!) Not only are all five young Thai musicians, they are all exactly 18 years old. All of this is of course completely irrelevant from a musical point of view, but it is also highly remarkable and interesting.

Enough reasons for me to travel straight to Bangkok on the Sunday in question and enter the almost sold-out auditorium of the Goethe Institute at seven o'clock. We were presented with a very varied programme, with parts of string quartets by Borodin and Mendelssohn, violin duets by Wieniawski and Suntraporn/Sakkan Sarasap, a piece for violin and piano by Tchaikovsky and a ballad for piano solo by Chopin. Finally, Schumann's conscious piano quintet.

I admired the programmatic flexibility of the group: apparently they play not only piano quintets, but also all other pieces that are possible for all conceivable combinations of these five, including all string quartets, all piano trios, all sonatas for violin and piano, cello and piano, etc. Even all solo works for piano, violin and cello are eligible. In this way you cover about three quarters of all chamber music. Very smart of them!

Still, I think they would do well to concentrate on piano quartets and quintets. But I don't want to criticize them about it, because it was also their debut and I assume that they will further refine and concentrate their choice of repertoire in the future.

The musical enjoyment was no less. The music was brought to us in a mix of musical eagerness and nervousness appropriate to a debut, in which small imperfections and sloppiness could easily be forgiven. I should also note here that the stiff acoustics of the hall did not exactly help them.

In the program booklet I read that three of the five musicians already started music lessons when they were four years old: the pianist Natnaree Suwanpotipra, the violinist Sakkan Sarasap and the cellist Arnik Vephasayanant. The other two, the violinist Runn Charksmithanont and the violist Titipong Pureepongpeera, started somewhat later, at the age of seven and eleven respectively. When you are eighteen you are no longer a child prodigy, but still a very young musician.

Schumann's piano quintet dates from late 1842 and is best known for its second movement, In modo d'una Marcia, a funeral march with a heartbreaking theme with sharp dissonances (minor seconds). The funeral march is interrupted by a wild passage in which the piano seems to be at war with the strings, and a tender, lyrical interlude in which everything settles into resignation and harmony. Wonderful!

But we also hear the romantic genius of Robert Schumann in the other three movements of the quintet, even when he writes a fugue, as in the last movement. I admit: I've heard better performances, but what these five young Thais played made me grateful and hopeful nonetheless.

Barber

The next morning I went to the hairdresser in my hotel for a long overdue haircut. Helpless, because without glasses, I sat in front of the mirror musing a little about the mechanism of music: confronting the listener with sharp dissonances so that he yearns for their resolution in the harmonious harmony, and that again and again, until the final chord (always a consonant!).

Suddenly I was confronted with a dissonance of a completely different order: not a musical one, but a cognitive one. Cognitive dissonance arises when you are confronted with facts that are at odds with your beliefs or with what you know so far.

My gaze wandered above the mirror, to an old photograph that hung there and on which I recognized with a shock the young King Bhumiphol and his mother, the Queen Mother. The shock came from seeing what was happening there: she was very concentrated and trying to cut his hair!

What now?? It is not conceivable that there is a question of frugality or insufficient confidence in the cutting art of the Thai figaros! What then? What is going on there?

I tried to fathom it and suddenly I thought I knew it.

“I know why she cut his hair”, I said to my hairdresser. She looked at me expectantly. “Because nobody else can touch the King!” She smiled and nodded affirmatively. Dissonantly resolved, my world view was correct again.

Much trimmed and in perfect harmony I paid, gave her a hefty tip, took a picture of this touching picture and accepted the journey back to Jomtien.