《我要唱下去》22 August 2009 Roadshow at Jurong Point, Melben Seafood Dinner and Clark Quay Desserts with VIPs

《我要唱下去》22 August 2009 Roadshow at Jurong Point:

Been wanting to upload these photos since last Saturday but my uploader refused to cooperate so I had to spend several days to upload them by batches. Sorry for the delay but here it goes:

As usual for most outdoor events, I would arrive early to recon the area and I was there before the majority of the crowd had gathered. I saw Andrew aka Spicymac along with a number of others already standing in front of the stage but I did not approach. I went for my lunch at Coffee Bean instead and took a leisurely one reading newspapers before the event started promptly at 2pm.
This was the host for the Roadshow. I have never seen him before but he was alright.
The guest performers who were supposed to help the audience participants with the songs, from left - Carrie Yeo, Diya Tan, Shawn Tok, Jarod Lee and Teresa Tseng.
The position where I had been occupying was a little obstructed by the decorative plants on the ledge so poor Carrie in this photograph was blocked but you could still see her smile.
The host warmed up the stage by trying to crack some jokes and converse with the guest performers and I believe this was Shawn's turn to answer the questions from the host.
Teresa Tseng was trying to help one of the audience participants who seemed a little too nervous to be remembering her song lyrics well.
So Teresa tried again, redoubling her efforts and bending forward because the audience participant was so timid that she was barely audible in the noisy Jurong Point atrium.
Diya was encouraging one of the audience participants to choose his categories - apparently, the audience participants followed the same gameshow format - pick a category and choose one of the two songs behind that category to attempt to remember the lyrics after the guest performer has sung.
Shawn's turn in trying to help the audience participant.
Diya was singing her way to the designated portion before the audience participant must continue - sometimes it's just a phrase of three words whilst others can be as long as fourteen words.
The audience participant was trying very hard to assist the audience participant while the rest looked and cheered him on.
Carrie's turn to try and sing her portions while the audience participant was listening intently.
Teresa's turn to help another audience participant who also had some trouble remembering the lyrics but the overall roadshow was fun to watch most of the time.
Shawn's turn again and it was a very difficult song so Shawn was really trying very hard to make sure the audience participant could pick up from where he had left off from.
Jarod's turn to help the audience participant - who turned out to be Andrew aka Spicymac. The latter suddenly had a memory lapse and he took quite some time to remember and decide the lyrics portion he was supposed to remember.
Jarod was singing his portion again so that the audience participant could somehow remember the next line.
Diya was doing her signature marching steps again while the audience participant was trying to catch the song in tune.
Teresa seemed to be particularly "lucky" because the audience participants kept picking the categories in which she was the designated singer for those songs so she had to appear again and again to sing. Thankfully, she was well-prepared.
Shawn was trying to help a rather bored looking audience participant with his song.
I experimented with my camera to zoom in further but the pixels were not cooperating so I left the remaining pictures with their original settings except for this shot with Teresa and another audience participant who was looking for clues from the enthusiastic audience who were trying to help as well.

I tried to contact some of the more professional photographers on the Internet who had higher quality photos of the events but they wanted to be paid for the use of the photos but I did not have a budget for such photos on such a short notice. If my blog readers are interested, you can try to search Flickr for more roadshow pictures.

The roadshow ended at around 3pm and I left the place for another appointment. Catch the actual gameshow every Tuesday at 8pm if you are interested to sing how members of the public vied to crack their memories to remember their way to a grand prize of SGD$500,000.

Melben Seafood Dinner and Clark Quay Desserts with VIPs:

Yes, the waiting time was long but we were used to it so we entertained ourselves with jokes, chitchat interspersed with feedings of peanuts.
Strangely, it was the vegetables dish that was served up first.
The buns are deliciously spongy, oily on the outside but soft on the inside. One of my favorite side dishes when I dined there.
The Changed Man complained that the quality of these supposed yam sticks were not as good as they should have been but I was not too choosy as I was really hungry by then so I gobbled them down anyway.
The Married Soldier's wife was the main organizer so she ordered two types of crab dishes - this one being the butter crab.
The other crab dish being the soup-based crab. Both tasted heavenly with their huge pincers with incredulously succulent crab meat within. The pincers were already crushed before serving for easy access to the meat within. Yummy.
The aftermath of our Melben gathering with the VIPs - we were so full that we had to sacrifice the soup which was really tasty after all.
We proceeded to Clark Quay because someone suggested trying out a dessert restaurant there with wine-laced fruits and waffles. I was too full of dinner so I ordered a double chocolate mudcake and iced lemon tea while the other VIPs ordered some apple strudels, waffles with wine-soaked pears and some other drinks unidentifiable in the semi-darkness because we sat outside the restaurant along the main streets inside Clark Quay to watch the crowd move by. The place was choked with party-goers once the clock hit 11pm - sizzling people with sizzling outfits but it was really not suitable for anyone below 18 years old because the place would be smelling of alcohol and cigarette smoke as the night gets darker.

We adjourned for home after desserts as some of us had work to do the following morning.

Time to crash. Am really exhausted this week... Zzz....

Campus Reunion Concert 2009 @ Raffles Hotel Jubilee Hall

Alright, I just got home from the above-mentioned event and I'll need to sleep soon because I have to wake up early tomorrow.

It was a good concert and I enjoyed myself. I will blog more about the details of the concert tomorrow when I come back. ^__^

Updated:

I met up my concert partner at Raffles City Starbucks at around 6.00pm for a slow dinner. I shall just appropriately nicknamed her as a patroness of local music. We went over to The Soup Spoon for a nice dinner of mushroom and pumpkin soup with nam (it's some sort of Indian-styled bread very similar to roti prata) and spent a good hour over there before we strolled along The Raffles Hotel Shopping Arcade to work off dinner before the concert.

Both of us finally entered Jubilee Hall at around 7.50pm and the singing portion of the concert opened up with Yiyuan of Campus Superstar Season 1 leading with a Cantonese song by Jacky Cheung. The concert ended with three encore songs at around 11.10pm but we did not stay for the signing of the posters because the patroness was tired and wanted to go home early. She was not the kind of people who wanted to be photographed so I did not really get to meet the Campus Superstars performers after the concert.

I believe a handful of the Campus Superstars performers are still interested to know how their concert fare through my eyes and I even received an sms wanting to know when I would be posting my concert review. So here it is:

I won't be doing a detailed performance commentaries for each of the performers during the concert, not because I did not have my notebook or my headphones, but because these are actually Campus Sueprstars graduates and thus have moved beyond the competition commentaries. Moreover, by staging a public ticketed concert, the review would be based on a different format as appropriately matched against their new statuses as young singers and performers of Singapore.

Quality of performances:
Overall, the quality had definitely improved since the last time these CSS seniors had stood onstage. Notably, Geraldine, Yiyuan, Keely, Agnes and Joanna had improved in terms of stability of singing and performance vibrancy.

Geraldine had markedly soothed into her rocker image with very solid control of the stage mood and momentum of the rock songs she had fielded.

I was duly impressed by the amount of suitable emoting done by Yiyuan for both his sentimental and rock songs.

I liked the breakthroughs made by Keely when she fielded her very sensual performance during the third item as well as her duet with Zijie.

Agnes improved considerably in terms of her techniques and stability in singing. Her strong commitment onstage to entertain the audience was also noted.

Joanna was impressive in her English song when I heard her singing mature smoothly into a nearly country-styled singing.

The rest of the performers had also some improvements made since I last saw them.

Zijie was doing much better with his falsetto skills.

Choon Keat was slightly more confident sounding whenever he was singing.

Huixian was able to commandeer beautifully high notes for her Japanese song.

Guohao was finally enjoying himself onstage, singing his heart out.

Javin could not be commented because he opted himself out from the concert due to some throat lesions but he bravely participated in two of the group songs despite his condition and I would like to compliment him on his dedication as well.

There were a few obvious hiccups though:

a) Group songs were not fully rehearsed, ending up with some performers missing their parts more than often

b) Some songs' keys were obviously too low for some performers, who inadvertently could not reach those notes at all.

c) Most of the performers did not rehearse their stage movements so whenever there was an interlude during the songs, they would fidget uncomfortably, shifting their legs, not knowing where to stand and look.

Concert Management:

Unfortunately, both the patroness of local music and I have fewer good things to say about the overall management of the concert. I understand that GW agency is the organizer of this concert but I would still comment about concert management because it was still a component in the overall enjoyment of the Campus Reunion Concert 2009.

a) Emcees - I personally do not like the emcees to speak behind the curtains because it seemed rather impolite to merely use voice alone to address the audience when even a few seconds' worth of appearance onstage to announce the next performance would have seem more polite and sincere.

b) Exit Strategies of Performers - Strangely, none of the organizers seemed to realize that most of the performers had trouble knowing when and how to exit the performing stage. I thought this issue should have been resolved during the full-dress on-site rehearsals and not reveal such an obvious weakness during concert day itself.

c) Sequencing of Performances - Twice, the performers had mistook their performances sequences, exiting and re-entering the stages awkwardly. I was wondering if there was actually a Program Manager who was supposed to remind and cue them.

d) Background Music - Both the patroness of local music and I agreed that the background music was too loud that it drowned out the performers' singing more than four times. It would be much better if there was a volume tester during the full-dress on-site rehearsals to make sure that such volumes were coordinated to give optimal entertainment.

e) Giving away of posters - What was intended for members of the audience who wanted autographed posters turned out to be a dangerous exercise as the performers hurled over 50 rolled posters into the audience. It seemed that there was no plan in hurling those posters and most performers were literally rocketing posters which landed like throwing spears and javelins, pummeling members of the audience who did not notice those flying posters. I personally blocked two incoming posters from hitting the patroness of local music but a senior member of the audience was hit right on the face because she was too old to react. If someone was badly hurt from this exercise, it would definitely blemish the concert and the organizers.

I understand that GW agency has had organized quite a number of local and regional events so it definitely had some experience behind it. If the organizers could work on the above-mentioned points further, I am sure the next Campus Reunion Concert would be even more successful and enjoyable.

That's all for the concert review. I look forward to the next concert. ^__^

Photo Extracts from Vivocity and Marina Bay Countdown Parties 2009

First blog post of 2009. Happy New Year 2009 to everyone of you out there!!!

The previous year was quite a bad year of disasters - terrorists attacks, natural calamities, economic mess and casualties of good people. Let's hope this new year will usher in a better year for everyone.

I did not go for the countdown parties yesterday night because I was quite put off by the crowd squeeze of such mega-events so I took some time away instead. Nevetheless, I had managed to extract some of the more interesting and beautiful pictures from two of the largest countdown parties in Singapore to share with my blog readers who may or may not have attended or wanted some sort of photographic souvenirs but could not capture those ideal shots last night.

The following three pictures were contributed by a friendly Facebook user, x[t] who kindly gave permission for me to publish these very valuable closeup shots of MediaCorp celebrities who were onstage during the VivoCity Countdown Party. Once again, thank you to x[t] who probably went there hours ahead to secure such a position for these shots.

For those familiar with Project and Campus Superstars, from the left - Teresa Tseng (CSS 1), Diya Tan (PSS 2), Carrie Yeo (PSS 2), Keely Wee (CSS 2) and Shawn Tok (CSS 2).
For those familiar with MediaCorp acting and hosting celebrities, from the left - Rui En, Felicia Chin, Jeanette Aw, Dasmond Koh, Zhong Qin, Christopher Lee and Dai Tian Yang.
This was probably taken moments before the final countdown begins and we can see the ladies were waiting while Shawn Tok was himself onstage to the puzzled look by Sugi (PSS 1).
The ladies enjoying themselves when the stage fireworks came into play. Teresa, Carrie, Keely and an unknown celebrity having fun celebrating.

The following fireworks photographs were extracted from the official photography competition at the main website of Marina Bay Countdown Party 2009. Kudos to the hardworking photographers who captured such extraordinary shots of the fireworks this year.
An explosion of orange and green fireworks which look like a giant windmill turning on three pillars of red.
Red and purple - royal colours lighting up the beautiful night skyline of Singapore at the Marina Bay area.
Looks like sunflowers in the night skies with fireflies hovering atop of those flowers. The 10,000 bluish spheres were visible on the surface of Singapore river.

That's all for now. Have a great holiday and year ahead! ^__^

More Photos from Today's Health & Wellness Expo 2008,Teresa's Performance of Yu San at Ngee Ann Poly

Commentary on Singing For Samuel on 《恋人未满》:

Before anyone of you click the video below, please take note that the video was recorded with sporadic sudden volume bursts so don't put your ears too close to the speakers or earpieces or you may suffer a few shocks like I did when I first listened to it.


Samuel, since I have promised you that I will comment on this song so that you can improve, so here it goes:

Given the audio quality of the recording, I can only comment on what I could hear amidst the background music and static. The following is what I found out:

1) Male's starting part was too weak. There was no clear input of variation in the singing of the lyrics. Male sounds like reading the lyrics rather than singing them.

2) Female's starting part was quite clear. However, her endnotes are not very clean as if the lines just run-on to the next line without a specific break.

3) Female's second part was over-done with the endnotes. This time, she breaks the endnotes too hard, sounding as if she was chomping on the last word of each line of the lyrics. Control of endnotes and end lyrics is very important.

4) Harmonization is not good because both male and female are not communicating enough to decide on which key to rest on. Hence, the parts sounded uncompatible to blend into the song.

5) I admire the courage of both singers to jump enthusiastically into the crescendo part of the song. That is the spirit - keep that burning. However, control is the key word. Singing high and singing with control are two ends of the singing skill spectrum. To prevent screaming into the mics during crescendo portions of songs, allocation of enough breath and awareness of when to stop should be made known to oneself first.

6) When the song is supposed to fade after reaching its peak/finale, one's singing volume and emotions must adjust accordingly. By the end song, I could not really hear that difference. If a male singer is to participate in this song, he should know when to sustain his part because I find the male's voice disappearing for extended time with no reason when he should be following through with the female for some parts of the song.

That's all, Samuel. Hope my commentary can help you improve somehow. Have fun learning!

More Photos from Today's Health & Wellness Expo 2008:

As I was saying in my previous post, before I started reporting on Teresa's performance, I was hanging around the abovementioned exhibition and I must say it was very interesting. Full of stalls selling and promoting and introducing new healthcare products, giving free health tests and checks. A pity I did not have much time there but I did manage to take a few shots of a couple of performances onstage then.
This is Dongfang Billy, a famous and popular artiste amongst the middle-aged populace of Singapore and similarly so in a number of countries. He is a cancer survivor, and he now works even harder to entertain, after dancing with Death itself before. He is seen here demonstrating some healthcare food and is later going to distribute those food to the audience. I did not eat because I don't want unfamiliar food to interrupt my report on Teresa's performance then.
This is him promoting some powerful blender that he is the spokesperson for. He said it could spin 30,000 times a minute and he uses it liberally to make all his healthcare food onsite. I must say his cooking skills are very well-honed. Precise and decisively confident.
This is the first time I hear Billy sing live onstage. His singing skills are not on par with the various Superstars but considering his multiple skills in hosting, cooking, entertaining, it will do.
The is the end part of his song. He ends it with a rather amusing pose but at least he is enjoying himself onstage. I remembered Billy before he was diagnosed of cancer was quite a hot-tempered celebrity, now he is a much more humble and better artiste.
This is the immediate yoga performance before Teresa started singing. I could not remember the name of the yoga centre but I remembered what this yoga instructor said "Yoga is not about the postures, not about the time you spent doing it, but it's about connecting yourself with your body, having time being yourself." How true, I am not a yoga person but most of the time, many people aren't even aware of themselves, just busying away from activity to activity. No wonder they don't enjoy themselves much.

Teresa's Performance of Yu San at Ngee Ann Polytechnic 18 January 2008:



(Video source: Ada from TFC and matsufuyu , 18 January 2008)

Teresa Tseng at Health & Wellness Expo 27 Jan 2008 Photographs and Report

I arrived at the Singapore Expo Hall 6B around 11.30am and I was browsing the various stalls and eventually settling down at the stage area to watch DongFa Billy giving a talk about healthcare and demonstrating how to cook healthy food using some powerful blender, which he is currently promoting. Photographs of those will be up in a separate blog post.

Teresa appeared onstage at around 12.50pm, 20 minutes later than the scheduled time because there was some delay on programme schedule. I'll do the commentary, photo-by-photo and the final performance commentary at the end of this blog post.

Teresa interacting with the emcee on the stage before her performance of the three songs. I am very pleased with her because she has learnt to put her hands behind her back (the posture is more respectful to the emcee and presentable onstage). She's a very fast learner.
Notice Teresa is always facing the emcee and looking at her directly in the eye, this is actually very polite of her because she is not distracted by the audience and concentrates on answering the emcee's questions. An example of good emcee interaction skills.
Teresa started her first song 飞行部落 by F.I.R The crew was nice enough to add those special moving lights for effects. Good thing because it warmed up the stage. Bad thing because it screwed up the lighting of my pictures. Hahaha.
Yes, Teresa was actually dancing abit for this song because it was necessary according to the genre of the song. Big mega-watt smile and much smoother gesticulation makes the song enjoyable. The downside was that the song's background music was a little too loud. I was tempted to go to the sound crew and requested them to tone it down abit but I decided against it. Taking the photos was much more important.
More gesticulation and gentle swaying. Teresa's movements were not so large as her previous renditions of the same song and that was because she had another studio appointment after the expo performance. I suppose it was wise to conserve some energy to make sure she could optimize all her celebrity appointments.
Teresa did not speak during the song interval because the music was simply too loud but I suppose she did what she could keeping the beat and posing for the photographers who were standing on her right hand side downstage.

Could not capture her facial expression. But I think she was smiling to the photograpers snapping away. As usual, many were whipping out their camera phones after hearing how good she sounded live onstage. From age 8 to age 80, nobody flinched at the audience area because they were really captivated by her crystal-clear singing. I was moving around because I wanted to capture Teresa from as many angles as possible.
Teresa is preparing for her second song 月牙湾 by F.I.R again. This is currently one of the most difficult songs on the Mandarin pop market and requires alot of pre-performance preparation. Teresa did not underestimate the song either and hence the concentration in the semi-dark interval.
Teresa is now tackling the song, which attracted even more people to the audience area because they all knew it was a difficult song to sing live onstage.
Teresa remembers to move around onstage. I caught her in motion in this photograph, which makes it look as if she was skipping from point to point. Hahaha..She was actually walking from right to left.

The challenge of the song was to be able to reach and sustain the falsetto at the chorus portion in style and Teresa did not disappoint. Pitch-perfect, hitting the necessary notes without breaking a sweat. A quick look around the audience area showed nods of approval and admiration. She is one impressive singer indeed.
Towards the end of the second song, Teresa was nice enough to pose for me. Teresa had already noticed me around but I did not wave back because I did not want to distract her from the difficult songs onstage and I also did not want to give away my position to the people there. There was actually a camera pointing in my direction, which made waving way too obvious.
Teresa is now singing her third and final song 随爱而飞 by Cass Phang. It's not an easy song either and required a decent build-up to sound convincing. A good choice of song because most of the audience are middle-aged, which makes the song very familiar to the listeners.
I could not resist taking a shot of the two projector screens beside the stage because the images, though blurred, were large. This one shows Teresa connecting with the song at hand.
Teresa continues to remember to sing to the audience (not at the audience), which is actually a key to sustainable performances. As I said, she is a fast learner since her nascent days during Campus Superstar Season 1. For those who are not familiar with Teresa, she was the Female Champion For Campus Superstar 2006, out of a total of 4,000 contestants.

She looks great in her outfit today - white silken top, with a semi-transparent lace front, well-tailored jeans and in one of those rare occasions, let her long hair down. The emcee was full of praise about how beautiful and slender Teresa looked onstage.
After the thumbs-up I quietly gave Teresa after the second performance, I signalled to Teresa again seconds after this shot was taken. The reason: I felt that Teresa was facing the right hand side audience more often and was a little neglecting the left hand side audience. Using military handsigns, I managed to communicate to her discreetly from downstage. She looked puzzled for a second, gave it a three-second thought, and started facing the right hand side audience as advised.
Although the hand signal was given in the middle of the third song, Teresa was apt enough to make a decision onstage and followed accordingly. Let me say this a third time for emphasis sake: She is a fast learner.
Of course, as she reallocates her facing time onstage, I continued taking photographs, moving from angle to angle to try and get some decent shots from my lousy camera phone. Hahaha.

A new shot of Teresa from the right hand side as she faces the left hand side audience. Way to go, girl!
Gesticulation continues on during the song and it is important because it is stage performance, not studio recording session so both audio and visual entertainment are equally important.
The photographers love Teresa because she looks good onstage, anywhere and gives stellar performances everytime. Evidence? See that guy? He whipped out his massive camera and started snapping like crazy, holding steadily all the way until the end of Teresa's third song.
After the end of all three songs, the emcee refused to let Teresa go offstage and caught her on to ask Teresa more about her personal life, on how she manages to juggle schoolwork, personal life and celebrity life. Teresa answered gracefully and kept up the sense of humour from the emcee. Another point for the girl for quick thinking and interactive ability!
The final photograph before I went off as the emcee continued a few more questions on what sort of Chinese New Year goodies Teresa likes. The answer: She does not eat Chinese New Year goodies. Hahaha. Why did I go off? Because the emcee was pointing at Teresa's mother, whom I must greet out of courtesy and ettiquette since I already know her.

It was only a quick chat with Mdm Tseng because Teresa was about to go offstage. Here's what was exchanged:

曾夫人~~
嗨！
好久不见了！近来还好吗？

还好还好！
近日只跟Thomas联络，没机会和您联络聊聊。

嗯，年底公司比较忙，所以都在忙着。

我明白。

今天只有你一个人吗？其它人呢？

哦，我先到场，所以没看到。他们可能还在后头。

(Teresa started going offstage towards us.)

好了，我们得走了，她还得到电台那儿去录影呢。新年快乐！

曾夫人，新年快乐！

(Teresa is now within two metres of us but is heavily surrounded by the expo security and MediaCorp personnel who was accompanying her)

Without wanting to appear in public, I gave a quick wave to the girl who smiled before vanishing into the audience who was surging up to have a closer look at our Teresa, giving me the perfect cover. Thus, there was no time for exclusive photographs because from there onwards, Teresa was quickly escorted out of the hall and into the transport whilst I had to rush off to another part of the island again.

Note To Teresa herself:

咏霖，

今天唱得好！尤其是《月牙湾》，看来下了不少功夫。

记得我曾跟你提的：要均衡地分配面对观众的时间。

彭羚的《随爱而飞》开头有点抢拍，要注意喔！

保重，摄影完后，好好修息吧！

That's it. End the report.