Trinidad & Tobago Guardian
Port-of-Spain, Trinidad & Tobago, W.I. - The fourth annual Birdsong benefit concert was appropriately held in the Lord Kitchener auditorium at NAPA on June 22. As an icon of T&T’s musical patrimony, Kitch would surely have approved of the proceedings: Compositions inspired by pan; a new generation of musicians shaped and nurtured by some of our extant maestros and the sheer ebullience that goes with vibrant, live performance.
Despite its status as premier performance venue, neither NAPA itself or Kitch’s auditorium is audience- or performer-friendly. The opening segment was performed by the Birdsong Steel Orchestra, augmented by a brass and woodwind section composed of students and faculty, positioned at the back of a cavernous stage, too far from the audience to establish the kind of intimate rapport necessary for a sizzling collaboration.
....it is necessary to point out that the whole Birdsong project struggles along woefully underfunded, while ridiculous sums of money go unaccounted for or are wasted on ineffective cosmetic exercises. The faculty of gifted and experienced musician/tutors are no longer state-funded, making a mockery of what all who have experienced Birdsong realise is precisely the kind of community educational programme T&T so desperately needs.
What a shame not a single government minister, MP, official from the Ministry of Education or Culture official saw fit to attend this concert and discover a ready-made answer to so many of the problems they seem committed to compounding rather than solving.
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