The Imagined is a new album of piano music by Alice Ping Yee Ho played by Christina Petrowska Quilico. There are four works. The first is Pictures from an Imagined Exhibitiion which riffs off pictures by Hong Kong ink master Wesley Tongson and Christina Petrowska Quilico herself. There are four movements. “Free Strokes” is kind of minimalist with arpeggios and repeated figures. It sounds weird to say it but it sounds “watery”. “Distant Drums” is similar in some ways but faster and with some much darker passages. “Mystical Mountains” by contrast is slower and darker with a kind of doom-laden quality. Finally “Dancing Colours” is bright and playful with, I think, some modal elements. It’s all quite virtuosic with occasional distinctly “non-western” touches.
The Imagined
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I’m not the biggest fan of stand up comedy and Andrew Silverwood’s Love thy Neighbour didn’t change that. Like all stand up shows (IMO) it spends far too much time trying to shock without actually being particularly shocking. Maybe in the context of a rowdy comedy club that can work but with a typically polite Fringe audience it seems forced. Offering breath mints as communion wafers is mildly funny and shenanigans about a shared olive tree have their moments.
Justin Hay’s My Own Private Shakespeare is the perfect antidote to an overdose of goofy comedy at the Fringe. It’s directed by Mona Zaidi and written and performed by Hay. The starting point is Hay’s annus horribilis (to quote her late majesty) of 2024 which featured, within two months, the death of his (extremely problematic) father, a messy break up and divorce and a brain tumour. The story moves forwards and backwards in time fleshing out each narrative thread and illustrating/illuminating each narrative twist with a scene from one of Shakespeare’s tragedies. It’s deceptively simple but beautifully constructed and very well performed.
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