Heartstring Concert with Rynten Okazaki 岡崎倫典

August 08, 2011

Heartstring Concert with Rynten Okazaki 岡崎倫典

Today is the wettest day I had experienced for a year, though this type of torrential rain is not uncommon in Malaysia. When I reached the lab, my shoes were totally drenched and my quarter-leggings were soaked up to my thigh.

Two weeks ago, the downpour in Seoul was really really bad - they say it was the worst rainfall in 100 years - and the mudslides and floods killed many people in Seoul and the rural areas. And my friend told me Jeju got hit really bad by the typhoon yesterday. So I guess Busan is still relatively safe for now... in fact the weekend was really good despite the typhoon warning...

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Yesterday I attended a guitar concert "Heartstring Concert with Rynten Okazaki 岡崎倫典". Normally I wouldn't attend these kind of concert but since it was held at the Busan Youth Cultural Hall, which is just a stone's throw away from my dormitory and my friend was bugging me so much to go, I decided to give it a try. And it seems that Rynten Okazaki is quite a famous guitarist and composer, even composing songs for some anime such as My Neighbour Totoro (となりのトトロ).

Okazaki's guitar style is "fingerstyle", which means playing the rhythm (plucking) as well as the background simultaneously. The music he composes are romantic style, which I imagine myself lying in a wide green field looking at the blue sky while fat, white, fluffy clouds float past my head. Or lying on a bed doing my facial with the CD player on.

During the intervals in between each song, he would introduce the song by speaking about his inspirations. I could gather bits and pieces from the little Korean I could understand from his interpreter. Okazaki draws his inspiration from places he visits and surrounding things, such as his hometown Hiroshima, his pet black cat which had 5 wives and 40 kittens, Lake Titicaca in Latin America, his daughter, etc. Most of the time he played his own compositions, and for a while he played other guitar classics such as Eagles "Hotel California", Eric Clapton "Change the World", Simon & Garfunkel's "Scarborough Fair" & "Mrs Robinson", Teresa Teng's "我只在乎你". He also played the Winter Sonata theme song during encore, which I loveeeeeeeeee so much! Felt like buying his CD but it was too expensive (~20,000won)... it is difficult to find his songs on Youtube, most of them are covers by the Korean boy genius Sungha Jung. Enjoy~ :-)