The performance at the Library@Esplanade last Saturday (4th July) was another successful outing for Guitaresque. The crowd was appreciative (and i think the 40 odd chairs were filled, plus quite a number of people standing around too) and we played alright. While it certainly wasn't one of our best performance - in any sense of the word, and I believe the players themselves will agree - I felt the overall flow was smooth and given the limitations we'd faced, it has to be considered a success.
One bugbear this time though was the fact that the library staff did not seem to know much about the sound (miking) setup and their equipment. Possibly because the "right" people weren't around, we ended helping ourselves to the chairs, the mic stands, the mics, the wires, and possibly every other thing that we needed from the store room. We also had to do the mic testing (using the master control and all) ourselves, which resulted in a complete wastage of our 1hour supposed sound-test time. In the end, we did not play a single note in the sound test, and as there was another programme planned for 2-3pm time slot, we simply had to start playing "cold" at 315pm (the previous programme went overtime a bit) So considering all that, I believe we did reasonably well.
Some of our supportive friends in the audience gave us helpful feedback, regarding which songs they felt we did particularly well, and which ones they thought we were "smoking" our way through (trust a guitarist to know when another's bluffing eh? =P ). Rather surprisingly, La Tierra was mentioned as one of our better songs, by more than 1 in the group of friends who came to listen to us. I think credit has to be given to the compositional skills on Francis Kleynjans, who has managed to write a piece which is sophisticated, interesting and extremely 'guitaristic'. *if you play the guitar, you'd know what I mean by guitaristic, ya?* Clair de Lune was also mentioned as a song which came through rather well.
On the flip side - and not too surprisingly - Carnaval was picked as a song which sounded a little messy and under-rehearsed. I guess when your fingers are feeling cold and stiff, playing fast running scales and arppeggios aren't the best idea in the concert. Still, looking at the fact that we played this song as a "one-off" competition piece a couple of years back, and now are able to just play it as one-of-many in a 1 hour gig, I think there's reason to be positive about the group's progress.
That said, there's obviously much room for improvement, and the quartet should come back stronger and more prepared in September, when we perform in the Singapore Art Museum for our annual show-piece - Guitaresque Expressions.
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