The Height of Foreign Mountains

While researching material for a history I am writing of my old school, St Thomas’s College, I found myself reading some speeches by Canon R.S. De Saram, who was Warden of the College during a very interesting period in our country’s history – the run-up to national independence and the years immediately following.

One of the principal causes of Lanka’s slow but inexorable reversion to barbarism is our national education policy, which despite much meddling with the details has retained the shape it assumed many years before Independence. Influenced by Sinhalese-Buddhist ‘nationalist’ imperatives and animated by a vengeful intent to destroy the power and privileges of the educated Anglophone elite, this policy was the work of C.W.W. Kannangara, who was appointed Minister of Education in the first democratically elected government of the country, taking office under British rule in 1931. His 1945 Education Bill, despite its laudable intent to extend free education to all Ceylonese, has been the source of a multitude of national woes.

Kannangara was chief guest at St Thomas’s on Prize Day, 1940, by which time his ideas concerning education and the nationalist demagoguery on which they were based were already matters of public controversy. De Saram, who fiercely opposed those ideas and values, was relatively gentle with Kannangara, to whom he addressed the following remarks:

[Yours] is a great and difficult task, for Education is a delicate matter; its problems vary with place and with the passage of time. In addition problems peculiar to Ceylon arise from our special conditions: problems connected with differences in language and religion. It is natural, therefore, that there should be criticism and that feeling should sometimes run high. This is in the main all to the good. It means that difficulties are being drawn into the open and being faced. It will however be unfortunate if the amount of criticism should cause us to forget the real progress that has been made. There are undoubtedly many things needing improvement in our educational system; but there are also, it is right to remember, a good many things about it that are excellent.

Again, it would be a pity if criticism should be allowed to degenerate into mere acrimony between those who differ on fundamental problems. Ill temper or partisanship will not solve our difficulties; nor the imposition by decree or otherwise of any one rigid system for all schools. On the contrary, toleration within limits of many varieties of educational practice is indicated by our varying conditions as the right and wise policy.

De Saram’s words fell, predictably, on deaf ears: the Minister’s own speech to the assembly indicated as much. Nothing daunted, the Warden tried again on Prize Day the following year. This time he spoke more frankly, for his principal auditor was the British governor, Sir Andrew Caldecott, an excellent administrator and a great friend of Ceylon. But the powers of the Governor of Ceylon were already waning by then, and there was little Caldecott could do but listen with approval.

That considerable uneasiness exists among schools like ours as to the trend of educational policy it is idle to try to conceal... To put it bluntly there is a feeling of hostility and lack of appreciation which is hard to understand. For we have but one object – to serve our country by providing for its sons the education that will best fit them for its service; and we are always eager and ready to cooperate in any policy which will secure that end. If our cooperation were frankly sought it would be freely given. In any case, whether policy be hostile to us or not we stand firm in the knowledge that we have a service to render to the country which is understood and appreciated by a very great number of people, and we shall continue to render it whatever comes...

Education in Ceylon is at this moment at a most interesting and, in some ways, a critical stage. On the one hand there is the already fully-awakened pride in our national life and heritage. On the other there is the solid fact that external forces, cultural, political and commercial, are affecting us and must affect us increasingly as the years go by... We can attempt to turn all our attention to one or other of these facts. Or we can attempt a synthesis... That this is the only sound course must be clear to every sensible person...

We [at St Thomas’s] have for long recognized how important it is that all boys should have a competent knowledge of Sinhalese and Tamil... As two Ministers of State who were our chief guests on two separate occasions have in their addresses laid great stress on the danger of neglecting our own heritage in the pursuit of knowledge of other countries and other cultures, I feel it is fair to say that we have taken this advice some twenty years or more before it was offered, and that ample place has been found in our syllabus for many years for a study of our own country, its history and languages, and to repudiate the suggestion, if it were implied, that we stood in any special need of this warning. To the query by one of these speakers as to what was the use of knowing the height of Mount Everest when we did not know the height of our own mountains we reply that knowing the height of our own mountains perfectly well, we regard it as of great importance to know that of Mt Everest as otherwise we might think our own the highest in the world. Similarly in the realms of intellect and of the spirit. There are eminences reached by the human intellect and the human spirit of which every cultured man should be aware: ‘What do they know of Ceylon who only Ceylon know?’

In 1945, three years before Independence, Kannangara’s famous (or infamous) Free Education Bill was passed in Parliament. In 1951, the government demanded that all private schools strictly follow the officially mandated syllabus and accept government oversight and control. Those that did not would be expelled from the national grant-in-aid system, depriving them of funds that would allow them to continue to function. Despite initial resistance, nearly all bowed to what they saw as the inevitable.

One school, at least, held out. De Saram, still Warden at St Thomas’s, refused to accept the government’s demands. Though STC already suffered from a heavy burden of debt (originally incurred in rebuilding the College at Mt Lavinia after being forced to move from Mutwal in 1918), De Saram accepted the crippling financial consequences in order to remain independent – that is, to continue to conduct classes in English for those to whom it was their mother-tongue, to teach subjects outside the syllabuses set by nationalist ideologues in the Department of Education, and to continue to offer boys from Christian families an education guided by Anglican religious and moral principles.

*

Reggie de Saram retired as Warden of St Thomas’s the year I was born. When I was in the senior forms at STC in the late Seventies the consequences of his great decision were still evident. The beautiful Neoclassical senior classroom block did not have a single window without at least one broken pane; the forms inside those classrooms were still Edwardian wrought-iron, with the names of Ceylonese notables of an earlier era carved into their jakwood tops; they were, in fact, so rubbled with illicit carving that you had to put an exercise-book under the sheet of paper you wished to write on, or your pencil would soon make a hole in it. The College grounds were drab and dusty, with only a minimum of funds spent on their upkeep; the equipment for cricket and other sporting and extracurricular activities was hard-worn and patched-together, as were the hymnals in the Chapel and even the choristers’ and servers’ cassocks. At least a third of the staff were of pensionable age, some of them physically decrepit, but continuing to serve, on exiguous salaries, for love of the school.

Somehow we managed, and I would not change the education I received at St Thomas’s during those terrible lean years (which lasted decades) for any other, however well-furnished and privileged. In spite of the poverty and disrepair all about us, neither I nor my contemporaries doubted for one moment that we were at the best school in the world.

St Thomas’s does a lot better these days, now that national education policy (if it can still be called that) has become more liberal, and old alumni with deep pockets have helped the school pay off its debts and re-equip itself to the highest standards. Sometimes, visiting the College on research trips these days, I look about me and feel almost like an imposter. New buildings and evidence of modern technology everywhere I look, old buildings and grounds all spick and span, the Chapel once again robed in full High Church glory – STC now looks as grand as she deserves to. Her grandeur was, of necessity, somewhat occulted in my own day.

That was the fruit of De Saram’s great decision – the sacrifice he caused us, willy-nilly, to make, for the good of the future. Despite the inconvenience and austerity it imposed upon us as schoolboys, I don’t believe any of us are or were the worse for it. Its wisdom, indeed, is now beyond question, for the College has retained its independence of spirit and action because of it, and continues to serve the country as it always has. Meanwhile, Kannangara’s education policy has proven to be a disastrous failure, whose consequences the country is suffering, as I write, in the shape of an attempted constitutional coup that may well succeed simply because too few Sri Lankans have sufficient education or understanding to understand the gravity of their loss. Pity the country whose citizens no longer know the height of foreign mountains – or, indeed, their own.

The End of History, Again

Identity and Belonging

An essay by Sanjana Hattotuwa

Does he make you think 
of Francis Fukuyama?

Someone for whom I have great respect has asked me to review an essay by Sanjana Hattotuwa that appeared in the Island on 29 September. I do so somewhat unwillingly. The kind of writing this essay represents is of little interest to me because I view historical processes (including, inter alia, all social and political processes) as being ultimately beyond human control. It is true that men and women, individually and in groups, can grasp and sometimes make use of these processes to further their own ends, but in doing so they unavoidably change both the process and its results. These changes and effects are not fully predictable by anyone and can have serious unforeseen consequences. Hence my deep conviction that sociopolitical activism is at best ambiguous in its effects, and at worst downright dangerous.

Readers of an optimistic, pragmatic or executive bent will surely contest this. What nonsense, they’ll say. Of course you can plan a course of action, carry it out and if all goes well you will see the results you expected to see. That’s exactly how people win wars, succeed in business, fly to the moon and do all the other great things they have done throughout history. Anyone who claims otherwise is surely deluded.

Yet it takes no more than a moment’s reflection to vindicate my thesis. Yes, indeed, we can predict the outcomes of processes – but only some of the outcomes. Whatever the process, there will always be unintended, unforeseen consequences attendant upon it. These can be problematic, negative, even fatal unless they are addressed by further action – that is, by more process. This may – may – offset the negative consequences of the first action, but it will produce further unforeseen outcomes that will then have to be addressed by more action, and so on. The people performing these actions may kid themselves that they’re controlling some process or the other, but any fool can see that the process is really controlling them.

Of course this does not mean we should give up studying history (or political science, or sociology); it is both our instinct and our duty to learn about the world we live in and how our words and deeds affect it. Our knowledge will always be imperfect, and we cannot help changing the things we study simply by the act of studying them, but we may yet learn something useful. The question, for me at least, is whether Mr Hattotuwa’s essay helps us in our understanding of the historical process.

Well, does it? The essay opens with a longish description of an LTTE child soldier fascinated by the workings of an ‘in-dash CD player’ fitted to a van in which the author was travelling in the course of his laudable fact-finding and peace-building activities during the Sri Lankan civil war. This was apparently intended to serve as an affective, human-interest-filled introduction to the rather cerebral think-piece that follows, but I’m sorry to say it failed to evoke in me any emotion whatsoever. Neither did it provide any logical point of ingress to the ideas and arguments contained in the essay.

The child soldier, says Mr Hattotuwa, reminded him of Francis Fukuyama, the turn-of-the-century political scientist who famously proclaimed that the fall of Communism and the worldwide success of the liberal-capitalist model of political economy had brought about the End of History. Prof. Fukuyama is hardly the first person I would think of if a teenager were to point a loaded gun at me, but I suppose Mr Hattotuwa may have been reminded of him by the potentially imminent end of his own history. Or maybe the kid just looked like Prof. Fukuyama. Never mind: it is with the ruminations of Professor End of History that the essay is really concerned.

Francis Fukuyama’s famous prediction was, of course, a washout. It failed for precisely the reasons I describe in my first paragraph above: the developments that brought about the supposed end of history also had other, unforeseen consequences, making sure that, Gorbachev and Walesa and the falling Wall notwithstanding, history still kept rolling along like Old Man River. This does not, however, appear to have dinted the good professor’s standing with Mr Hattotuwa, who writes that

Fukuyama’s central thesis is that populism’s rise and appeal at present is because of the indignity suffered by those in society who are rendered invisible by the dominant narratives undergirding the politics, practices and policies of the government.

Oh, nice. So the rise of populism isn’t due to any characteristic or tendency in the populists, or in the populus, themselves, but to the way they’re treated in ‘the dominant narratives’ of the State. Here we encounter the great Illusion of the Reformers, one that goes all the way back to Rousseau: humanity in a state of nature is perfect, and it is only society (or rather its engines, such as the State) that mar his perfection and turn him selfish, violent and anti-social. Reform society – as Communists, Socialists, Nazis, Islamic fanatics, Tamil Tigers, Sinhalese nationalists and zealots of all and every description are forever dying to do – and we shall all be transformed into angels. Yes, there it is – that doleful, superannuated hunk of philosophical horseflesh, the Perfectibility of Man, dragged out for yet another flogging, another hopeless totter round the track.

Well, I’m not buying it, especially not from a failed prophet like Francis Fukuyama. Yet this, I fear, is the meat – if you will pardon the expression – of Mr Hattotuwa’s essay:

Fukuyama suggests that the politics of the left has lost its way, focussing on ever smaller issues anchored to specific communities, giving way to right-wing politics that uses identity politics, including by appropriating the language of marginalization and outrage, to appeal to ever greater numbers. Fukuyama focussed on the deterioration of liberal democracies in the West, but his critique of polarization in political dialogue, lack of robust critique, the rise of emotion over reason, short-term fixes instead of long-term reform holds true even in Sri Lanka. 

Seriously, did we need a somewhat discredited Japanese-American political scientist to diagnose our ills for us? ‘Polarization in political dialogue, the rise of emotion over reason and short-term fixes in place of long-term reform’ have been staples of Sri Lankan politics since before Francis Fukuyama was born. Anyone who has struggled to follow the self-interested antics of the constituent groups and individual members of the Ceylon National Congress and its precursors during the early years of the twentieth century will have learnt more about polarization in political dialogue than he may well care to know. Polarization in Ceylon politics began the day the Jaffna Association rejected Ponnambalam Ramanathan’s attempts to create a non-communal basis for political activism in Colonial Ceylon; it has been the very basis of Lankan politics since the death of D.S. Senanayake, the last truly unifying figure in our country’s political history. As for the rule of emotion over reason, identity politics is simply the only demotic politics we have; such has been the case ever since the Sinhalese Buddhist revival of the late nineteenth century. Reasonable polities are concerned with issues such as the economy, national defence, law and order, public welfare, education and health; polities ruled by emotion get themselves all worked up over race, religion, language, caste and other issues in which government rightly has no place at all. As for ‘short-term fixes in place of long-term reform’, what else can you hope for from a political culture in which everyone is in it for what they can grab?

The problems of Sri Lanka are, no doubt about it, similar to those facing Western democracies today; but while the disease may be the same, the symptoms in our country are far more extreme than they have yet become in the West. Our patient is not nearly as strong, and the disease is much further advanced in its course.

The disease? I call it civilizational decline. In Sri Lanka, as in the West, it has been discernible – if only to hindisght – since about 1900 or so, and acquired real momentum after the Second World War came to an end. Barring calamitous climate change, however, the fall of Western civilization may yet be deferred for a generation or two, perhaps indefinitely; it is a high civilization, quite possibly the highest in human history, and it has far to fall. In Sri Lanka the collapse of civilization is already pretty well accomplished. People like Mr Hattotuwa and me are its relics.

I speak, of course, of the civilization imposed on us by our erstwhile masters the British. Our own high civilization has been dead these seven hundred years or more; barbaric successor kingdoms and foreign powers then fought over Lanka for half a millennium until at last, about twenty years after the establishment of British rule in the island, civilization returned – as a foreign product. It didn’t stay long: in less than a century it had begun to ebb away again. Much was already lost by the time colonial Ceylon gained independence in 1948; by 1972 the decline had become unstoppable. Today what little is left of the modern, democratic nation-state of Sri Lanka is running on the dregs of momentum acquired in the colonial past. Very soon that will be gone, and we shall have returned to the conditions of oriental despotism punctuated by periods of bloody anarchy that were the only political reality the people of Lanka knew from the death of Nissanka Malla of Polonnaruwa in the thirteenth century to the adoption of the Colebrooke-Cameron mission report by the British colonial authorities in 1833.

History, of course, never ends. Yet it is hard to see any great change being accomplished in Sri Lanka without a revolution so comprehensive that it destroys not only the present order and its institutions but also our national myths and superstitious fictions. It might even have to be a world revolution, for these days not even an island is an island. And revolution alone will not suffice: a century or so of rebuilding – or else occupation by yet another foreign power – will have to follow before any kind of civilization returns to our beautiful, unhappy motherland.

I am selfish enough to hope the revolution doesn’t come to pass in my time. As for occupation by a foreign power, well, my Oriental-language skills have always been rather poor. Much as I would like to see a return to civilized life in Lanka, I don’t see any hope of it for generations to come. Certainly it will not be brought about through ‘constitutional reform to address issues around identity and dignity that were drivers of violent conflict’, as Mr Hattotuwa suggests. For constitutional reform to work, people have to take constitutions seriously. And only civilized people can do that. 

The Tigers’ Captive Tells His Tale

A Long Watch: War, Captivity and Return in Sri Lanka
by Cdre Ajith Boyagoda
as told to Sunila Galappatti
2016, London, Hurst


On the night of 19 September 1994, in shallow water off the Kalpitiya Peninsula, the Sri Lanka Navy patrol vessel Sagarawardene was attacked and sunk by the Sea Tigers, the naval commando arm of the infamous Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Most of those aboard were killed in the attack or drowned in the aftermath. Among the survivors was the captain of the vessel, Ajith Boyagoda. Rescued by the Tigers, he would spend the following eight years as their prisoner.

In A Long Watch, Commodore Boyagoda tells the story of his captivity, release and return, assisted by the author and ‘dramaturge’ Sunila Galappatti. I am not fond of war stories, and must confess that it was only Ms Galappatti’s involvement that persuaded me to pick up this book at all; I know her socially and was keen to find out what kind of a writer she is. It is a pleasure to report that A Long Watch is lucidly and elegantly written, and has been edited and proofread by people who actually knew what they were doing.

Ms Galappatti has seen to it that Cdre Boyagoda’s story is told in British rather than Sri Lankan English – so British, in fact, that every instance of a South Asian coinage such as mammoty is loquaciously defined in the endnotes. I, for one, am not complaining. What a delight to find a book written in English by Sri Lankans that is, for once, unsullied by barbarous grammar, obstacle-course punctuation, florid capitalization and the shameless fondling of battered ornaments. Better even that this, here is a first-person narrative wholly free of sentimentality, pomposity and cliche. It won’t win any style awards, but A Long Watch is a pleasure to read. I was particularly impressed by the unobtrusiveness of Ms Galappatti’s skill: although it is obvious from internal evidence that it was she who did the actual writing, it is Cdre Boyagoda’s voice, and his alone, that we hear in our mind’s ear as we read.

It is, given the context in which we encounter it, a remarkable voice: judicious and temperate, full of worldly experience and psychological insight, devoid of belligerence or animosity. You wait in vain for the note of resentment, the flash of anger towards the Tigers or those on Boyagoda’s own side who accused him of cowardice and treachery. After a while, its non-appearance begins to make you suspicious. Surely the commander of a naval vessel involved in combat operations cannot be as saintly a fellow as this?

From the moment of his capture, the Commodore seems to do just about everything right. He surrenders to the Tigers like a gentlemen. He doesn’t make trouble, or try to escape when an opportunity (of sorts) presents itself. He accepts the various pains and deprivations of his confinement stoically, insisting that he and his fellow prisoners were, for the most part, well treated. Even when his group of captives is briefly delivered into the hands of a vengeful and sadistic custodian, his account passes lightly over the cruelties they endure and focuses instead on the ways they find to cope with and make the best of the situation. Selflessly, he acts as counsellor and confessor to his fellow captives and as their advocate with the Tigers and the Red Cross inspectors who come to visit. He takes part in Prisoners vs. Tigers cricket matches, enjoys visits from his captors’ children, attends social gatherings in the jungle. Most remarkable of all, he shows no sign of resentment against a Sri Lankan government and military establishment that abandoned him and his fellows to the mercy of the LTTE, making no effort at all to contact them or secure their safety – far less their release – until it became politically advantageous to do so. Instead, throughout the narrative, he takes pains to emphasize the common humanity of the prisoners and their captors, and more broadly that of Sinhalese and Tamils.

All this is laudable indeed, but it sounds rather too good to be true. The Commodore speaks often of the anguish, frustration and despair of imprisonment; did they never drive him to rage, to curse, to rattle his chains? This reader, for one, found it impossible to believe that they did not.

I do not suppose this lack of candour is intentional. The trouble, rather, is that Ajith Boyagoda has told his story many, many times, to a great many different interrogators and audiences. As stories always do, it has improved with the telling. In the Commodore’s mind, over the many years that have passed since his release, the older man has gradually replaced the younger in remembered captivity; the experience and wisdom of sixty years or more now inform the thoughts, words and deeds of the imprisoned forty-year-old naval officer.

To note this is not necessarily to slight Cdre Boyagoda; such are the ways of human nature. The fault, if there is one, lies with his amanuensis. It is hard to believe that Sunila Galappatti did not notice the implausibility of the character she was helping create on the page. If it is so evident to the reader – and more than one reviewer has commented upon it – it must have been equally obvious to her. But perhaps the ‘dramaturge’ sees objective truth as lying somehow beyond her remit: she may have conceived her task as simply that of a midwife, whose job is to deliver the baby and not to count the fingers. Or perhaps she is a good Postmodernist and rejects the very concept of objective truth. Or maybe the Commodore just wanted his story told like that, and wouldn’t let her change a word.

I think the last explanation somewhat unlikely. There are passages in the book that would probably have benefited from a more decisive input by the Commodore – the bit, for instance, where a naval officer with decades of seafaring experience defines the bows of a ship as ‘a platform near the front’, or the unnecessarily laboured technical paragraph about LTTE mortar pellets that ends with the hilarious coinage ‘ball razor’ – and which seem to indicate that Ms Galappatti had as much control over the text as she wanted. If so, it’s a shame she wasn’t a little harder on her subject, that she didn’t ask more probing questions, hang him over the edge a few times; the dramaturgical relationship might have suffered, but the result would have been a more honest, more credible book.

Still, the one that did emerge isn’t at all bad. I wouldn’t go as far as Michael Ondaatje, who apparently thinks it is ‘the best book to come out of the Sri Lankan war’. It certainly isn’t that, but it’s pretty good, and I recommend it heartily. Just don’t go believing everything that you read in it.

Gene Editing Made Simple

A Crack in Creation

by Jennifer A. Doudna

& Samuel H. Sternberg

If you’re looking for a simple explanation of how CRISPR and other forms of gene editing work, what they are capable of and what they aren’t, you’ll find it here, and straight from the horse’s mouth at that. There’s also a great deal of discussion about the social, ethical and evolutionary issues involved with manipulation of the human germline. I found that part of the book rather boring, I’m afraid, having heard it all before. Anyone paying attention has heard it all by now.

Indeed, if you really have been paying attention, you may notice a yawning gap in this book. This concerns another CRISPR pioneer, Feng Zhang, whose work at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT was also critical to the development of CRISPR gene editing, but whom Doudna and her colleagues apparently regard as competitors for recognition. Of course, that kind of thing is hardly unknown among academics.

The writing is lucid and works hard to meet the reader more than halfway, but it is also generic, slick and affectless. I recognized many of the tricks American professional authors employ: my guess is that a ghostly hack was present in addition to the two scientists identified as co-authors.

Not So New, Really

The Silk Roads

A New History of the World

by Peter Frankopan

The fourth star is awarded grudgingly. Mr Frankopan’s subject is so interesting that it would take real effort to to produce a dull book about it. This he has not done, but I think he could have made much more of his material.

His thesis – that Central Asia, the crossroads of the world, is also the place of origin of many of the peoples, events and movements that have shaped history – is one it would be hard to rebut. The author makes his case by giving us the history of the world as a series of transactions between far-flung peoples, transactions that profoundly affect the individuals and cultures that participate in them. This is all quite convincing, but unfortunately Mr Frankopan’s perspective remains very much a Western one, and after we reach the twentieth century (the history of which occupies about half of this thick, square volume) the focus shifts across the Atlantic and the tale becomes mostly about American foreign policy in relation to the Old World rather than about changes taking place in that world itself. In the end we are left with the impression that it is the West, even in decline, that really matters – at least to the author.

There needed to be a lot more Silk Road in this book: a lot more Central Asia, a lot more about the cultures that grew up there and what life was like in the lands that lay along these major international trade routes. Instead, we get far too much about how life changed for Europeans due to the influence of such trade, and far too much about US foreign policy in the twentieth century – a period long after Central Asia had ceased to be any kind of omphalos at all, except perhaps to the energy industry. The author’s account of the history of Iran during this period is valuable; the rest is just the old familiar tale of Cold War woe.

And here we come to the biggest problem of all. To be complete, Mr Frankopan’s thesis must describe and account for the decline and fall of the Russian (later Soviet) Empire in parallel to the decline of the West, especially since he has given us such a lot about the rise of Russia in his book; yet the Bolshevik revolution and the later collapse of the USSR are subjects he barely touches. This, to my mind, is a huge, almost fatal flaw in the work.

Other gaps in the account yawn nearly as wide. This is a ‘history of the world’ that tells us hardly anything about Africa or Latin America; what little there is treats of these continents as mere playgrounds of Western culture. In truth, Mr Frankopan’s supposed rejection of ‘Eurocentricism’ is entirely cosmetic; this is just another history of the West written by a Western historian, though with a slightly different skew than usual.

Taken as such, it’s a three-star read at best. The prose, for instance, is pedestrian. The extra star is awarded merely for the plethora of incidental detail presented by the author – if we get any idea of life on and athwart the Silk Roads from his book, it is through these fragments. Sadly, they weren’t nearly enough to satisfy this reader.

Something Extraordinary

The Art of the Violin

The Midori Violin Studio Project

On the evening of 17 March at the Lionel Wendt Theatre, under the auspices of the Chamber Music Society of Colombo and before an invited audience of its patrons, the great Midori and some of her protégés gave an exhibition of classical violin music of a quality and virtuosity never before heard in this country, and unlikely, in my opinion, ever to be heard again. I was privileged to be a member of that audience, and I found the performance breathtaking. I also got to hear some pieces of music I had never expected to see played live, simply because no-one in our part of the world is physically capable of playing them.

That Midori Goto (who is known professionally only by her first name) should have chosen to perform in Sri Lanka at all seems implausible at first blush. This is a woman who stands in the front rank of classical violinists; her performances and recordings are normally supported by the world’s most celebrated orchestras, and she is one of the few performers ever to have recorded a version of Saint-Saëns’s formidable First Violin Concerto. At the time of writing she holds the Jascha Heifetz Chair at the University of Southern California’s Thornton Music School and an honorary professorship at the Beijing Conservatory, as well as guest professorships at Shanghai and in her native city of Osaka, Japan. For some time, she was also a humanitas professor at Oxford. Classic FM magazine has named her one of the world’s top twenty-five violinists.

How did humble Sri Lanka manage to attract a musician so grand? Part of the answer, as I heard from CMSC concertmaster Lakshman Joseph de Saram, is that he and Midori were once students together at Juilliard Pre-College in New York. Midori also collaborated for some time with an accomplished pianist of Sri Lankan origin, Rohan de Silva, and he, assisted by another highly regarded Sri Lanka-born American pianist, Sujeeva Hapugalle, helped arrange her visit. But of course, personal acquaintance is not nearly enough, of itself, to alter the schedule of one of the world’s top concert violinists; the lady had her own reasons.

Midori, as I have recently learnt, is the founder and chief executive of a USC-backed charity or ‘community engagement project’ aimed at bringing great Western classical music to people who, through poverty, disability or similar disadvantages, might otherwise never hear it. She achieves this in the simplest possible way: by going and playing to them herself. Much of her work is conducted in Asia: Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Laos, Mongolia, Myanmar and Nepal have all been beneficiaries of the project. Sri Lanka was, you might say, due a visit.

That she and her studio members ended up at the Lionel Wendt, playing to a Colombo audience all dressed to the nines, was, in a way, incidental. This wasn’t the gig they really came to play. Over the previous few days, the maestra and her studio had already performed several times – at the Victoria Home for Incurables at Rajagiriya, the Deaf & Blind School and the MJF Special Needs School in Ratmalana, and at a home for the aged run by the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Roman Catholic religious order, in Colombo. The audiences for these shows comprised only the inmates and staff of the said institutions. Apart from a few CMSC members, no outsiders were present.

I don’t suppose many of those listeners were aficionados of classical music, or had any idea who Midori was, but I was assured that they enjoyed the music all the same. I am fully prepared to believe it. I have been a regular at Chamber Music Society recitals for several years now, but though I can tell Bach from Mozart and Vivaldi from Beethoven I wouldn’t call myself knowledgeable about what people call classical music. Nevertheless, I found myself perfectly able to engage with the music played at the ’Wendt that Saturday night. How could I doubt that the institutional residents and students who heard Midori and her group play earlier in their visit were any less delighted than I?

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The audience, comprising long-term patrons and sponsors of the Chamber Music Society, were in their seats well before curtain time and had settled down nicely by the time the first performers entered stage right. These were Jiyoung Park, the first of a long parade of soloists, and Jiayi Shi, the pianist who was to perform their accompanying music. The young lady who helped Ms Shi with her sheet music would later be identified as Yue Qian, another of Midori’s violin students.

Ms Park gave us Hindemith’s Sonata in E flat Major, a work written in 1918. Like many of the other players we heard that evening, she is currently at USC Thornton, studying for her doctorate under Prof. Goto (Midori’s academic alter ego) while carving out a concert career for herself. Her interpretation of the Hindemith lived up to the composer’s own tempo instructions for the first movement: frisch, or, in English, ‘fresh’. Ms Park’s tone was like good Chablis: a little thin, with a touch of acid, but vivid and invigorating just the same.

Next in the programme was Chausson’s Poéme, performed by Mei Ching Huang, a seasoned orchestral player (her credits include the Philadelphia Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic and the San Diego Symphony) for whom the piece was barely an appetizer. Poéme is, of course, popular with audiences for its moody rises and falls, but I found myself less captivated by it than by Ms Huang’s second offering, Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz in a transcription by Nathan Milstein that made the famous work sound more diabolical than ever. A New York Times critic once wrote that Milstein’s transcription ‘pared down’ Liszt’s music, with ‘repetitions eliminated, harmonies altered, leaving only Mephisto, the violinist, executing sweeps and pluckings that composed a frightening concordance of instrumental daring.’ That describes Ms Huang’s performance pretty well, too, and I need only add that her cherry-red stiletto heels made Mephisto seem even more devilish than usual. This old man’s breath was well and truly taken away.

A change of mood was provided by the next soloist, Yabing Tan, who played Fritz Kreisler’s arrangement of Dvořák’s Songs My Mother Taught Me. Its soft, rather sentimental melody was well served by the performance, though Ms Tan herself appeared rather fierce, perhaps due to the various electronic bleats and tweets now being given off by barbarians in the audience. By this time, however, I had become utterly charmed by Jiayi Shi’s piano-playing. I learnt later that Ms Shi is Midori’s own principal collaborator, working with the maestra on her concert and recital schedules as well as in her work with violin students. The versatility she demonstrated on this night was staggering, but what was still more impressive was the musicality and sensitivity of expression she brought to every piece. Although she never upstaged a soloist, there were moments when my ear, of its own volition, found itself attending more to the piano than the violin.

The first part of the programme came to a climax with the appearance of Midori herself. She had chosen to perform the Sonata in B Minor for Violin & Piano by Ottorino Respighi, an intense, harmonically tricky composition in three movements that takes about twenty-five minutes to play. I had never heard it before and I fear the attention it demanded from me as a first-time listener was stolen instead by the sound and sight of Midori. In contrast to the elegantly gowned soloists who had appeared so far, she was dressed down, in a printed smock and nondescript pants, her long hair secured by a simple slide. Her comportment, too, was in marked contrast to the soloists’, for in place of their formal, almost hieratic decorum Midori danced – bobbing and weaving like a bantamweight prizefighter, attacking her priceless three hundred-year-old fiddle with exuberant slashes and stabs of her bow. The sound she generated from the instrument was huge: ripe and round and luxuriant, intrinsically laced with drama. Twenty-five minutes went past in what seemed like four or five, and I am afraid you will have to press somebody else for a detailed critique of the performance for it was, I confess, too fiery a draught for my inexperienced head.

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After a short interval – a necessary respite post Respighi – the programme continued with the Melody from Orfeo ed Euridice in a violin and piano transcription by Fritz Kreisler. The piece featured the first male soloist of the evening, James McFadden Talbot. Gluck’s lovely, plaintive melody did its usual work, but Talbot’s performance seemed somehow constrained, more correct than heartfelt.

This piece by an eighteenth-century composer of operas was followed, quite appropriately, by a work from a living composer perhaps best known for his Grammy- and Oscar-winning movie scores: the Sonata for Violin & Piano by John Corigliani. It seemed to me not to have worn especially well since its debut in 1964; its Phrygian seconds and jazzy rhythms no longer seem as audacious as they must have done half a century ago. The soloist was Chang He, a chamber music and violin tutor at the Beijing Conservatory with a particular interest in modern music.

Perhaps I would have enjoyed this piece a little better if someone a few rows behind me had not found it necessary to search inside an apparently labyrinthine plastic bag in search of, I don’t know, a nose-bone or a loincloth or something. The crackling plastic effectively drowned out the musicians and appeared to go on for hours. How bizarre that a member of an invited audience should behave so boorishly; even by Colombo’s ankle-high standards of public considerateness, it was a bit much.

Massenet’s familiar Meditation Thaïs came next, featuring Moni Simeonov on violin. A former doctoral student under Midori, Mr Simeonov has now gained considerable eminence in his own right. The Meditation, in its original form, is a piece for solo violin and small orchestra that even features a vocal chorus, though most of us know it better in stripped-down form for violin and piano, or just piano. For Mr Simeonov it was just the amuse-bouche before the feast; although he made the yearning melody work its customary magic, it was with the next piece that he really showed his mettle.

This was Ravel’s Tzigane, a rhapsodic, at times delirious affair originally written for solo violin and piano. Tzigane used to be in Midori’s own concert repertoire – I don’t know if it still is – but Mr Simeonov’s approach was, to my ear, less aggressively busy than his mentor’s. It was emphatic enough for all that; this is a piece that demands the skills of a virtuoso, but Mr Simeonov was not only equal to the challenge, he had enough technical headroom left over to make the music affecting as well as dazzling. Politically-correct killjoys might decry the unconscious Orientalism of this soi-disant ‘gypsy’ composition, but for this audience member at least, Tzigane offered the evening’s most perfect combination of music, musician and moment.

But we were not yet done with Moni Simeonov, who then led his fellow-protégés in a dazzling performance of Andrew Norman’s Gran Turismo, a breathless gallop for eight violins that revives the old concerto da camera trick of passing themes and musical fragments back and forth among the players – but these are postmodernist fragments, all squalling glissandi and crashing dissonances. Historically connected with USC Thornton, Norman’s piece is inspired by, among other things, the video game of the same name, and it is, indeed, a sort of musical car race in which the slightest misjudgement or hesitation would bring disaster. Gran Turismo was first performed in 2004, and I doubt that any audience member at the ’Wendt had heard it before, even on record. When it was over there was an audible release of breath before the applause began.

Another brief interval followed – so brief, in fact, that the audience weren’t allowed to leave their seats. The programme had already run well over time. But there was one more work to be presented – a finale in which Midori and her group were joined by members of the CMSC on violins, violas and basses. The piece was Vivaldi’s Concerto in B Minor for Four Violins – an obvious bonbon to placate an audience whose patience had been tested, for well over two hours at that point, by some very challenging music. The four violinists were Ms Huang, an award-winning Midori ex-student named Strauss Shi, the CMSC’s own Ursula Nelius and Concertmaster de Saram. Midori herself took the stage as a supporting player. The whole thing had the air of a family knees-up at Christmastime – an effect enhanced by the decision of the Society players (LJdeS and Ms Nelius excepted) to dress down as Midori had done. I must confess to being rather displeased by the effect this created on stage; the contrast between the elegant formality of the soloists and the come-as-you-are motley of the Society players seemed to imply a social as well as a musical distinction between them and Midori’s people. Whose idea this was I do not know – whether the Society members decided on their own, whether Midori requested it, or whether the dry cleaner simply failed to get to the theatre on time – but it definitely shouldn’t have happened. As for the Vivaldi itself, it was pretty good, and the Society players held their own well enough, but by now my ears were too saturated with music to pay close attention. We had been in our seats for nearly three hours.

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Afterwards my friends and I retired to the home of one of us, where a coming-of-age birthday party was in progress. Isolating ourselves from the celebrations and their thumping soundtrack, we talked late into the night about what we had heard. Each of us had responded differently to particular pieces, but all were in agreement that we had just been to one of the best ‘classical’ concerts of our lives. I must add that none of us are really regular concertgoers, so this isn’t as momentous a verdict as it would be if it came from the music correspondent of the New York Times. All the same, we’re a critical crew, and the fact that we were all equally impressed must be worth something.

As I said before, I’m no expert on this kind of music, so I shan’t be indulging in any kind of artistic or critical reflection here. I wrote this review mainly to express how grateful I am – to Midori and the charity work that brought her to Sri Lanka, to the brilliant young musicians who performed for us, to Lakshman Joseph de Saram and the CMSC, and to the sponsors of the Society who met one-third of the costs of Midori’s visit (the rest was funded by her charity) and made it possible for me, personally, to hear all this great music.

Of course, the most important beneficiaries of the initiative were not at the Lionel Wendt that evening; but then, they’d gotten to hear the music before we did. It was for them, not us, that Midori came to play, and they didn’t even have to leave home to hear her. Lucky them. But lucky us, too.

Nawala

11 April 2018