Wanting Everything In The World Asia Tour, Singapore
The Star Theatre, The Star Performing Arts Centre/Last Saturday
Holding a concert on the strength of one album is a risky proposition. The stakes are even higher when there is one hit song that everybody is there for.
In the case of Harbin-born, Vancouver-based singer-songwriter Qu Wanting, that song is Wo De Ge Sheng Li (You Exist In My Song).
About halfway through this concert, someone yelled out the title and she shot back in response: “Not yet.” Not surprisingly, she saved it for the encore and it was the final number of the night.
It is a ballad that showcases her emotive pipes as it starts in her warm lower register and builds to a big chorus: “You exist, in the deepest recesses of my mind/In my dreams, in my heart, in my song.”
Last Saturday, it capped a two-hour show, quite a feat given that she has released only that lone album, Everything In The World (2012). It means that she sang every single track on it, not counting the demo version of You Exist In My Song.
There are very few albums that deserve to be aired live in their entirety. Certainly, Qu’s record is not one of them.
More than half of her album is in English and her Mandarin accent seemed more noticeable at the show than on disc. Some of the English lyrics also seemed ungrammatical – “Redundancy catches me up” in Shell – or too familiar in their sentiment – “I’m crazy over you, do you feel the same way too” from new song More Than A Friend.
Among the English material, Drenched, featured in the romantic drama Love In The Buff (2012), was a standout. Qu played the piano as she performed the slow-burn number about passion and desire.
To her credit, she is a strong singer and distinctive enough to leave her stamp on even Teresa Teng’s well-worn classic ballad, I Only Care About You, which was among the covers she performed along with Coldplay’s Fix You.
Many of her own songs fall into a mid-tempo groove, not exactly the kind of material to get a crowd’s adrenaline pumping. To get her fans going, she ramped up the tempo and energy of some songs, including opening English track Jar Of Love and Mei You Shen Me Bu Tong (Not That Different).
Still, she remarked more than once that the 1,200-strong audience was really quiet and said: “You guys are so quiet I can hear every single mistake I make”.
Perhaps a smaller venue than the 5,000- capacity The Star Theatre would have worked better. As it was, the crowd filled up only the front half of the stall section. Even the stage seemed a little oversized though Qu, dressed in a black and silvery outfit and sporting bare feet, did her best to cover it.
There was much to like about her debut disc, from the lovely timbre of her voice to the emotional pull of ballads such as You Exist In My Song.
But it is probably too ambitious for her, at this point and on such a stage, to be Wanting Everything In The World.
(ST)