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Spirals (feat. King Deco) - Sound Remedy & Illenium+ Gabriel’s Oboe - The Faroe Islands Philharmonic, sol. Henrik Chaim Goldschmidt
Ten measures to midnight. The opera of tires on their stage of asphalt pauses for an interlude, white noise beneath the chit-chatting audience. A siren downtown initiates a futile solo, weaving through brass taxis and woodwind sedans. Following a hardly suspenseful fermata, the melody recedes from mezzoforte to pianissimo, andante to adagio. Seoul invites her citizens to rest, conducts a dulcet lullaby with a swish of dainty fingers. The cast has retired to the green room, popping bottles of champagne and congratulating each other for their magnificent show of talent, feigning modesty in the shower of compliments that follow.
For the orchestra in the pit, the show goes on. They play several etudes and symphonies into the night, all strung together loosely, awkwardly. Before the theatre empties, the first and second violins take their departure, trailed closely thereafter by the horn section, the violas, and all but one cello, who later slinks away amongst the clarinets and percussion. When the audience withdraws entirely, the remaining strings pack their cases, as well as the four timpanies and entirety of the flutes. The piccolo, too, exits the stage, though with a cheerful, drunken solo that fails to stay in the correct key. It earns a giggle, nonetheless. Just short of a hundred measures later, only a handful of clarinets, a duo of alto saxophones, and one contrabassoon remain. The chosen pieces are odd, hollow, incomplete without the full pit, but this is how the program will proceed until morning, ‘til the cast returns, rejuvenated and embellished in elaborate stage makeup and extravagant costumes.
Upstage, surrounded by cold, empty seats and sheltered beneath the shadows of the remaining members of the pit, sits a lonely oboe. He has been quiet all night, preferring to allow his much more seasoned colleagues to carry each intricate piece, even as the orchestra dwindled down through the night. Twilight is at its peak when the oboe takes up his reticent solo, a collection of notes in legato, with the occasional stress between measures. When a stray shower falls over the very last of Seoul’s orchestra and the reeds flee, the oboe remains, tending to his quiet solo amidst the constant hiss of water hitting the stage floor. The oboe will endure the night, serenading no audience aside from his own ears, and he will steadily retreat when morning arrives, carrying in tow the rest of the orchestra and decorated cast. For now, however, this hour is his, and his alone.
Sparks of gold flash before his eyes and nearly kiss the tip of his nose as he suspends his curious toy between slender fingers. Crouched under a bus shelter, he sits with a thin box of sparklers and a pack of matches to his side, wide eyes luminous with varying shades of red, green, and yellow. He had bought them on a whim, with the very last of his cash, along with a cheap piece of melon-flavoured bread he had scarfed down in fifteen seconds. In spite of the rain, he’d chosen to test the sparklers, just to see if they truly were as enchanting as the pictures made them out to be. He was not disappointed.
He begins to twirl the illuminated stick this way and that, pretending to write his name between wide flicks of his wrist, and quickly loses himself to the enthralling crackle and glow of the toy in hand. So spellbound does he become that he fails to notice, at first, how a handful of sparks fly just a few feet too far, landing mere inches away from a stranger’s feet. As soon as he snaps out of his trance, Kyungsoo stares with enormous eyes brimming with guilt and unease, terrified now that the stranger–-a petite lady with hair dark as the evening sky and eyes deep as the cosmos--will surely be displeased and beat him to an unrecognisable pulp. Or, at the very least, call the police and confiscate his new toys.
The oboe’s solo comes to a screeching halt, a poorly executed sforzando that assaults the ears. A reed cracks. A key snags. The music is abruptly suspended, an extended caesura between two measures, inviting silence to fester and cloy in the very air they breathe.
